Category — Search Marketing

I just read an interesting post on Search Engine Land that got me thinking Its titled, Local Search, A Solved Consumer Problem. It takes an interesting perspective on local search, but Mr. Berk is right, from a consumer standpoint, local search is largely solved. But writing a blog post on that, is like writing a blog post announcing that email had taken over snail mail. Local search has been solved ever since the Yellow Pages first began to evolve 40 years ago.

If I want to find “Cantina Restaurant in Saratoga Springs” and I type in “Cantina Restaurant in Saratoga Springs” well, lets just say that Google isn’t in its infancy. When you search for the business you are looking for, you can be pretty damn sure that you will find the name address and phone number in Google (or Bing!) Thats not the issue, and there shouldn’t be a professional related to local search that finds this information enlightening. The issue in local search is finding information about local places, the businesses there, things happening, and what people are talking about. In other words, what are people talking about, what are they doing, and where are they doing it?

The golden triangle (coined from Fred Wilson) is in the answer to the who what where and why questions. If I already know where I want to go, the business I am seeking shouldn’t have to pay or jump through some elaborate hoop to get my business - they’ve already earned it. That problem doesn’t need to be solved. What is interesting to me, and what alot of people I know are working on, is how do I find out what is going on and where to go when I want to try something NEW, or find something I didn’t already know about. If I’m a local business and I’m having to spend time, money and effort reaching the people who already know about me and are looking for me, I’m in trouble. I want to reach the people who know about me but aren’t thinking about me, or the people who are thinking about what I offer but don’t know about me. In other words, I want to reach the consumers that AREN’T actively searching for me (obviously I still want to do business with those seeking me, but that should be inherently solved, and as Matthew pointed out generally has been solved).

There are a lot of potential solutions to this problem coming out. Foursquare,  Loopt, and others let me know where my friends are right now, maybe someplace I love, maybe someplace I’ve never been, but Gary’s there so I might want to check it out. UpNext, and Buzzd are all telling me what is happening near where I am based on my location - right now. Thrillist, FlavorPill, etc tell me where to go this weekend. There are lots of options out there, but there is no ubiquitous brand to seek out when looking for who, what and where locally. That problem is still yet to be solved.

Declaring a problem to be solved is often a silly thing, especially if it is not the incredible invention you just patented that solved said problem. Most of the time, the real innovations don’t solve a problem we even knew we had, they leap right over the prognosticators and create something nobody else even thought of. I didn’t know I had a search problem before I found Google, and that problem is solved (well Bing maybe doesn’t think so). There will always be better ways to organize information, and right now Google is the gatekeeper of information. Google created the solution to organize information, and make it easy to find when I am looking for something specifically. What hasn’t been solved yet, is a way to deliver me what I’m looking for before I even think about what exactly it is I’m looking for. The solution to that problem would be something worth writing about. What you don’t know might not be able to hurt you, but it could be really cool.

Maybe that Tarot Card lady outside my apartment is on to something

In the beginning of July, my company decided to hire an SEO consultant to help us with a few problems we are having getting some of our content indexed. Since we launched a new version of our sites, we went from over 15k people a month to under 6k. Thats a big problem.

So we did the natural thing, started addressing the problem and after a good amount of frustration we got help. We spoke to a bunch of the best names in the industry, and chose a young company out started by a few people with varying degrees of experience in the SEO industry, but they were aggressive, defensive of the skills and passionate about what they could deliver.

We recieved an unbelieveably thorough site audit, which we were ecstatic about. Dozens of little tweaks, major architecture issues and some rather obvious stuff that we just needed a fresh set of eyes to notice. We implemented almost all the recommended changes, along with some other tweaks we unconvered as I began to implement them. They were a huge help and awesome to work with.

The thing is, I know SEO. I’ve been doing it for 3 years. I’ve been quietly attending conferences and workshops since 2005, I’ve built a company around getting found online, I know how to do this - successfully. (search “providence restaurants” - thats all me) But when crafting an entire Content Management System, from scratch there is so much to do. So much to keep in mind, and so many hundreds of little things that can screw up your rankings, or take you off the map completely.

We came off the map. We had some high profile rankings in the top 3 of Google, lots of traffic, only to fall out of the top 100.

Crawling back is an art. Crafting a site that the engines can dig is like making an elaborate painting. There is a proven technique to make the right brush strokes. There are certain types of paint and canvas that are better than others, but when its all said in done, you have to make the strokes, on the canvas, with the paint and bring it all together into something beautiful.

There is no secret forumula, it isn’t witchcraft but its certainly not a science. You have to do all the little things right, through some magic and hope in there, and wait for the bots. Its kind of like the invasion of Zion, only you want a nice picnic waiting for them.

So I am going on an actual vacation for the first time in over a year. Which I am understandably excited about. However, its amazingly difficult to find information about what I want online. And since I would like to be able to know whats happening when I get there, the paper stuff I can pick up on arrival just doesn’t do the trick.

I am heading to Sanibel Island, and these are my options for websites:

• http://www.sanibelisland.com/
• http://www.sanibel-captiva.org/
• http://www.sanibelflorida.com/

Those are all completely useless, they were built in 2002 or 2003, they have no updated information and who knows when they were last updated. I looked to Yelp, http://www.yelp.com/c/sanibel-fl/restaurants - nothing particularly useful they only have 5 restaurants reviewed. But hidden in one of the comments was the mention of a blog: this one - http://www.sanibelcaptivadaily.com/category/restaurants/ and finally I found something. Not particularly good, because there is a lot of local jargon type stuff I don’t really care about as a visitor, but its nice to know that the local residents have a strong sense of civic pride.

My point here is that its awfully difficult to find good local information about remote or even not so remote places. Basically if its not a major city or a randomly enlightened small town there is no info about that town online. I’m not talking population and basic business listings with maps, but valuable content on where to go and what to do while I’m there.  Good local content is hard to find, and thats a problem I have with the internet. At least with searching on the internet. There is no resource for up to date information on small interesting localities. And even if there was, could you find it? (I am having more and more issues with Google just doing a bad job of indexing good information vs favoriting really old static pages, but thats another post)

Tripadvisor is great for reading about things to do and hotels (and “adventures”), Yelp is great for reviews on restaurants and shops - but all of those are resources for things that happened in the past. Even the reviews from last week won’t tell me whats happening next weekend. If I hear about an event on one site, I then have to head over to Yelp to find out if the place its being held is legit. The world needs a steady resource for local information, activities, restaurants, shops and things to do. And I want a calendar around those things and of course I want to know what other people’s experiences were like.

Fortunately I know of a resource like this, its just a matter of getting to all these great places in the world.

There seems to be an interesting problem developing that most of the major SEO firms, organizations and analysts are missing - difficulty of inclusion. Its the term I’m giving to the amount of steps, and relative difficulty that it takes to get your business listed on major search engines and in local directories.

I’m going to outline some of the problems small businesses face, although not complete, but this is what I’m working on trying to fix every day.

• Local Business Databases - We have tried and used several different data providers. (ALL of the big ones) and unless you are using an extremely complicated importing script and combining every single database you can muster you are going to have an embarrasingly incomplete database. Yelp does a very good job including everything it can, but it still isn’t perfect. And thats just my problem as a publisher. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses missing from all these databases, and that means they aren’t getting found online. At all. If I am opening a new business, or I have a business thats been around for years, I have to first make sure that I am being included in these data lists before I can even start to think about optimizing my listings. The folks at getlisted.org are doing a cool thing, but I’ve yet to come across anyone who is using it (and our company doesn’t get updates from getlisted and we have 900k businesses listed across our network - why is that ?) The small business world needs a uniquitous listing solution across all possible local listings - an openID for small businesses if you will.
• Learning - I am Joe the Plumber, I have a fleet of trucks, I have insurance on those trucks, I have 12 employees, I have workers compensation insurance, I have tools, I have angry customers, I have happy customers, My boiler just broke and my kids want new tricycles. I have a ridiculous amount of stuff going on in my life and I just found out when you search for plumbers in MyTown my competition gets 80% of the phone calls. WTF? What do I do now? I could spend a few hours scowering the internet and reading blogs about how to set up my LBC listing on Google and in Yahoo, and submit to GetListed. (there are alot of great resources out there) But if I don’t know these blogs, its gonna take me a couple hours just to find them, then its gonna take some time to find the article I need. It could take just a few minutes, but if I’m still using my hotmail account I probably don’t know what a blog even really is. And I have a long way to go if I don’t know what a blog is. Quick reality check for all you local search bloggers, the average small business owner still doesn’t have a website, heard about twitter on cnn, reads the local newspaper and is 47. Sure my generation has grown up with basic knowlege of the internet but if the internet is a foreign world to you, how are you going to succeed in it. You won’t make a very good French diplomat if you can’t speak French We need easier tools, and better knowledge bases for small business owners. Again, more ubiquity
• Depth vs Breadth - I want to be listed first in google, first in yahoo and on every local search directory that is applicable. In the yellow pages world, all I have to do is spend more money and buy the biggest add. Boom, more business than I can handle.  In the Google world, there is soo much more that needs to be done to succeed. You need quality relevant content, you need links, you need a good domain name, you need all of these other factors, many of which you can’t just buy. And thats just Google. There are whole lists compiled of what to do for each search engine. I can spend many days and go down the checklist for just one. There is so much to do.
• Options - If you give a person 12 options they’re more likely to pick none. There are too many places to advertise, there are too many places to start. First you have to pick one, and then you get going. There needs to be a uniquitous place to start, a local search center. Getlisted again is that idea, but they aren’t executing and how can they if noone esle is observing this problem (or atleast thinking about solving it).

Lastly, I as a consumer find it so frustrating when I can’t find the business I am looking for. I want their phone number, I want their menu, do they sell what I want and can I trust them? If i’m a restaurant in NYC I better be damn sure I’m monitoring my Yelp reviews and encouraging my patrons to “give me some love” But if I’m in Maine or North Carolina, where do I start? That problem exists and at some point we are going to have to solve it. Google is just going to scour the internet, or use a third party data set. Yelp just compiles data sets. But if the business I want isn’t in that data set, im screwed. We need local people to ensure data accuracy and completion. Otherwise businesses will fall through the cracks and that obviously hurts the business involved, but it also hurts us consumers. Because if the little shop that sells the computer bag I want is 2 miles away but It doesn’t come up in google for that term, and nothing else does, I’m not going to buy the bag I want - from anyone.

I find google maps local business search to be utterly useless. Time and again, I enter a local business term and I find nothing that is usefull to me. For example, this afternoon I wanted to cruise into Greenwich, CT and do some work in a nice locally owned coffee shop (ie NOT starbucks). A quick Google resulted in this:  http://bit.ly/19UmsA, the first 10 listings in google were totally useless to me, none of them even deserved a click. So I went with the Local Maps. Also useless; I had heard of a place I was trying to find and it wasn’t there.

Alas, I was forced to use Yelp. I like Yelp, its a great service but I never use it.  Here is the search results I got in yelp: http://bit.ly/Cyd5D. Great results, I found the business I was looking for and there were about a dozen additional businesses that were in Yelp’s data compared to Google’s. Here is another good example of why Marty Himmelstein doesn’t know what he is talking about when he says SEO doesn’t matter.  As good a job as Yelp has done with SEO, they should be showing up in this search term. Apparently Google didn’t think they content on Yelp directly related to my search was important enough. Great SEO would have placed the most relevant results in front of me on the top of the first page. Great SEO wouldn’t need me to type in a website directly becuase it would deliver them to me when I ask.

For all you local search businesses out there, keep going. Google isn’t doing local well and unless they decide to focus on it (please dont, please, please!) they aren’t going to. Matt Cutts, if you read this don’t get any ideas

The lesson from this is: SEO is absolutely priceless. And if you aren’t doing it, or you are harping against its value you will be riding a sinking ship into the horizon.

What are your experiences with Google Maps Local (as a consumer)?

There has been a lot of chatter about local business data recently in the local blogosphere. (Here and here ) I’m in the business of local business data and I agree it sucks. I spent this week at Search Marketing Expo attending sessions from some of the best in the business and the search engines themselves. And what I realized is that everyone is just trying to create a technology that will eliminate personal interaction and direct updates.

There is no one size fits all anwer to the local data question. How do local businesses represent themselves online. Well first you need to educate them on why they should be online. (here’s a good resource for education) If they know they need to be online chances are, they don’t know where to start. They don’t know where to start. Some have ideas, some have misgivings and some are misguided. One of the biggest problems I find is that there were people that came to them in 2003 and told them they were the next big thing. Small businesses paid up and never heard from these guys again. They are weary and rightfully so. Today there are about a hundred local search options out there, thousands if you incorporate all the offline media they could be buying.

The real query that hasn’t been indexed is how do you gain trust, build a really SOLID local business database and make money while doing this all. Not an easy question. Automation is nice, but you aren’t going to get a bar owner to self-service, not in 2009, maybe not in 2012 - maybe not for along time. The issue is time and ROI and trust. Small businesses don’t want to waste their money on advertising, but they know they need to advertise so they are willing to do that. What they really don’t want to waste is their time.

So if you are venturing into the local search space, you need to recognize one thing. These guys are busy and they are afraid to try new things. If there is one thing thats on our side though, its the fact that they can’t keep justifying increasing print rates with declining circulation and escalating printing costs. So they are going to have to try new things. Alot of companies charge for customer support, so why can’t you? Because you don’t have it.

No algorithm will ever replace handshakes and personal contacts. Walk your prospective clients through your product, educate them on why its valuable and you’ve got a client. Give them a self service portal that injects their business into a Live Nation infested noise fest, they’ll never take action.

Moral being, talk to your customers.  Be there for them. The web is strange enough for these old tymers don’t be a full voicemail box and an anonymous email. Be a person, don’t forget - they’re people too.

Now everyone I know seems to have seen a Sonic commercial at least once in their life. But how many of those people have actually seen a Sonic Restaurant? Chances are you have seen a Sonic commercial and live no where near a Sonic. Now I’m not the media planner for Sonic and I don’t know who is, or why exactly they buy so much advertising in the Northeast, even though they don’t have any locations here, but I’m going to attempt to breakdown the Sonic Commercial and what its doing on my TV.

On hypothesis I have is that Sonic is using this as marketing hype. It gets people talking. “Man do I want to go to Sonic, just to try it!” I’ve heard this after seeing a Sonic ad, and it has a good point. Its positive spin, its an interesting angle. But is that really their plan?

It could be but I don’t believe so. I believe that Sonic is a victim of mass media, a lack of targeting and a 20th century mentality of media buying. 

This post is inspired by this post from Darren Herman, and from a question my mother asked me - “Are you going to have those dancing mortgage commercials on your websites now?” No Mom, websites with those commercials are dumb. And I didn’t mean dumb as in bad or in a colloquial manner, I meant they are not thinking about their audience and what people want to look at. 

In our most recent meeting with investors I used this line to focus a slide in my presentation:

Targeted Visitors are more Valuable to our Advertisers

This is a key focus of our business, the level of targeting we are able to provide to our advertisers. And its not just an ability to determine who is on a given page at a given time with some fancy algorithm, its just that the vast majority of our traffic comes through a search for the information on our page. Combined with very low bounce rates on our landing pages, our content keeps our visitors online and adds value to our advertisers. People come to our site searching for our advertisers - we just connect them.  Its not rocket science, but it seems to be missing elsewhere. 

Give people what they want, and they will respond positively to ads relating to what they want. Thats my motto online, and thats what we’ve been seeing happen.

* For more on the Sonic commercials see these links (don’t miss the comments)

http://adage.com/garfield/post?article_id=119271

http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2008/10/good-question-why-does-sonic-advertise-on-tv-when-theres-no-sonic-near-me.html

Has anyone heard Yahoo!’s new radio spot? (Here’s their release from a few weeks ago)

Its kind of good/ really desparate. I’ve heard some statistics (mostly from ad reps) that radio is the #1 place for URL recall, but more importantly, why am I going to change something that I am perfectly happy with because of a radio spot. Microsoft tried bribing users and that didn’t work, so what makes Yahoo! think this will work.  

As someone who spends quite a bit of their time learning and studying search engines and their results, its interesting to note that Yahoo really does deliver lower quality results in general. It sometimes shows websites that haven’t been updated in months/years and often brings you to sites that are just overloading themselves with keywords, gaming the system. Google is by no means perfect, and I think Yahoo could make itself better if it focused, but for now they seem lost - as their ads imply you will be on Google.

I was doing some late night number crunching and data research and I came across some interesting points. A few I touched on earlier in the week, but I’ve had some more time to address some of these and I wanted to talk about them. There are huge numbers involved here, and some interesting theories that I haven’t quite finalized in my head. Maybe these thoughts will help clear that up.

Check out this post form Conde Nast in February talking about the Yellow Pages. It is fairly amusing considering how just about anyone you ask in the Northeast will admit that they don’t care much for print advertising. (We hear this all the time) Note the comment:

If Nielsen can’t get TV viewership right after all of these years, how on earth can the Yellow Pages Association know how many times anyone “references” the Yellow Pages?

Thats exactly the point, you can’t track how people use the yellow pages, you can’t see which people read your ad, or how many times people read it and took action, or no action. There is no data to support their continued use.(or even to figure out why people aren’t using them anymore)

However, people still need to find stuff; restaurants, clothes, hotels, doctors, lawyers, whatever… simply now people are turning to the web for a quicker, easier search experience. And search is dominating the web these days. Google is raking it in, Yahoo and Microsoft are scrambling to get a bigger piece, and startups like Cuil and Mahalo are trying to get break into the scene. But however they’re gonna find it, people are going to use search, more specifically local search.

Local search will soon be the king of search, as the economy tightens, people are traveling less and are generally more concerned with whats happening in their community. (and thus more willing to spend their x dollars locally) A particularly powerful quote from A new report by Borrell Associates (which I referenced in an earlier post):

“Local online advertising,” defined as search, “local banners,” and video (classifieds are also in there), would reach $12.6 billion in 2008, with “local search” contributing roughly $5 billion to that total.

Those are big numbers, and there are big players already in and entering the local search market. But there are a lot of nuances in local, people are different, politics matter and most often they have no idea who Marc Andreesen is, they don’t care who backed your startup, they dont care about the fancy rails technology your site runs on. They want results and they want to talk to a person.

There is no concrete answer to the question of who will succeed in local search, there are many verticals and plenty of niches to tackle, but there is certainly going to be a battle over it in 2009. And I didn’t even touch on mobile, which Google’s Eric Schmidt thinks will one day be more profitable than anything else they do. Thats a scary thought.

Will the general population move towards mobile search, are we still two or three years away? Or will local search dominate 2009? I know there are other much hotter topics, but seriously if you are reading this you probably aren’t Joe Cleveland. (Ok, easy)

Local is good, and it is a significant part of the entire advertising market. Some estimates say that up to 54% of all adverterising is local, or locally based. In our increasingly localized and connected world, the power of local search, local content, and locally based interaction are unquestionably becoming key components of the advertising arena. Agencies and Local SMB’s are both very increasingly using local based targeting, or local search as an element of their campaigns. According to a new eMarketer Report, In 2008 Internet Yellow Page advertising is expected to reach $1.2 Billion in ad spending. Measurable to say the least.

Local content is largely becoming focused on user generated content; topix.com, outside.in, and others are focusing on creating a platform for people to share their reactions and feelings on locally relevant issues. The number of review sites (the likes of Yelp, BooRah, etc) seem to be doubling by the minute. While it is no question that people are extremely interestedin sharing their content locally, again how are these companies going to monetize this revenue?

Today, I saved $800 on a minor bumper repair to my car because I was researching some competition, checked out Topix, and found a video ad for a bumper repair place promising to save me hundreds. Well they did, and I had a long conversation with the owner of the business. He has totally abondoned anything in print, he created the video himself, and is advertising locally online to spread the word. Only purchasing a few text ads pointing to his website, he has designed his own viral campaign. Here’s the video:

This is how local advertising is going to be monetized. Simply, I was looking for something local, I found it and completely unintentionally I found something that I needed. Video can become a power tool in one’s local arsenal, and is quickly becoming sought after. I am now endeared to topix (they do have a ton of comments from nearly any city you visit), and I literally saved over 800 bucks to fix my rediculously expensive bumper. Local at its finest.

So listen up advertisers, agencies, publishers: here is the lesson - keep it local, keep it relevant and make the relationship meaningful. While there is no question in my mind (and many others’) that print YP’s and newspapers are no longer a useful advertising outlet and that online local search is the place to be, if you can make the ad meaningful, important, relevant - you can make money. This is nothing new, it seems rather simple, but to truly monetize a local site you can’t rely on CPM’s from exchanges or Honda, Verizon and others (a recent Borrell report estimates the relative CPMs for IYP is $3.65 vs. $9.29 for print YP) . It’s gotta be local, because that way I (the user) can convert that page view into a handshake. And isn’t that what local is really all about?

I think so, and I can’t imagine why any business out there will over look the power of a handshake and a friendly smile.