Posts Tagged ‘SEO’
Google Maps - Local Results
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, Small Businesses
A Local Search Marketing firm “Big Local” has been taking advantage of a relatively new Google Maps feature, listing local businesses and their website addresses next to a pinned map of the area.
Going back to January, here is a post from Search Engine Land about Google Local Maps, and their use of review sites to furnish the top 10, A-J listings. I wonder how Big Local did this?
Targeted Traffic, Bounces and Your Dollars
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, advertising, analytics, marketing, measurement
Today’s post comes after a hectic week, many miles of travel and a post by Seth Godin (Silly Traffic).
His post talks about a 75% bounce rate and the value of doing the best you can with the other 25% of the people who actually stay on your site. While I agree that maximizing conversions with the bulk of your traffic is important, a believe that in this day of niche and segmentation you shouldn’t be operating (and probably won’t be for long) a website that turns away 3 quarters of your potential traffic.
We run online city guides. Naturally we target our SEO and our paid links to reach people searching for what our content is all about. For the keyword “Restaurants in Providence, RI” our bounce rate for organic clicks is 8.3% (according to Google Analytics) and our PPC bounce rate for that keyword is even lower - 4.4%. I know those are really good numbers, and we do have entry keywords that bounce 40-50% of potential traffic (sitewide the bounce rate is 38%), but our top 20 keywords all have bounce rates under 12%.
My explanation of this is targeting. While some websites might have hundreds of thousands of pages and millions of products - tons of information, our sites have specific, segmented content that is designed to reach people searching for exactly what we offer. I don’t think any lightbulbs are going off in anyone’s head here, and I’m certainly not the first person/website to target specific traffic, but what are people doing with a website that turns away 75% of your traffic?!?
If you have a site about golden retrievers, and you target your SEO keywords and placement towards anyone searching for dogs, you are missing out on your core audience - golden retriever lovers. I feel like this is right up Seth’s alley, and was I very surprised to read his last post. He brings up excellent points in the second half of his post, but he seemed to contradict himself a bit.
75% of all unfocused visitors leave within 3 seconds.
He then says that “unfocused” could mean a digg link or even a Google search, but that 75% is ok.
The beautiful thing I’ve found about the internet is that you can get people to your site, targeted, focused people, by optimizing your site for certain keywords - in other words, focused traffic. Well I’m quite sure that more than 75% of people searching for “Siberian Buddhist Colonies” would bounce if they came across my site, but why would they come across my site looking for that.
They most likely wouldn’t and if our team is doing our job, they won’t. We want targeted traffic on our sites. People searching for the information our advertisers are paying to have found. So perhaps Godin’s point is overall correct, that you need focused traffic to succeed, but suggesting that it is wise not to worry about a 75% bounce rate is contradicting the whole point of search engines - to find what we are looking for.
We have succeed by building targeted and focused traffic on our sites, and by keeping our visitors on our site longer to maximize potential exposure to our advertisers. Ultimately in our space (my thoughts), you need to build a website that gets focused traffic, maintains a low bounce rate (<20%) and retains these visitors for an extended visit session with quality related content.
Our advertisers’ success is driven around our ability to provide them with targeted leads, and focused traffic. But if 75% of our traffic left in 3 seconds, our advertisers would not be far behind.
Local Search Content Syndication
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, Syndication, advertising, revenue models, sharing applications
How do large search networks gain their local insight into the real world? Syndication of content from various internet providers, yellowpages, superpages, ultrapages, all kinds of pages. But mostly, out of date pages. Businesses that no longer exist, phone numbers that are no longer valid and addresses that have changed.
How can I the local consumer place my trust in these large companies having up to date, local information on what I am looking for? That is an excellent question, and one that I as a local business man, believe is a question that these jumbo portals don’t have the right answer to.
Smaller, local search companies can monetize their wealth of small business information by expanding paid syndication through these larger outlets. Building a better database of small and local businesses is what these local companies do, and is exactly what they can do for these larger national and international portals.
In these new days of local search, and local information, more and more small business are transitioning their marketing and their budgets online. As this market grows, more information will be available online, and search engines in particular will hold a lot of power over this information. So how can the consumer get the best information infront of them as quickly as possible? Rely on locally based portals who actually operate in the cities they represent.
If there were a way to capitalize on the huge power and reach of these large portals, by incorporating the value of this local information together in a Search Engine Friendly site, giving searching consumers quick and easy access to up to date, accurate and relevant information, this new model would be very valuable indeed.
Now if only I knew someone who could code like a champion…
