localsearchlistings

Google Local Error

2010-01-01T09:59:00.001-06:00

Happy New Year. 2010 and definately welcomed inside this household.

The New Year is here and - I am totally guilty of not blogging enough - so that's my resolution (at least one of them). Blog more than once every 3 months : ).

So I'm trying to upload a file for a client in Google Local Business Listings and I'm getting a crazy source code error in the get details sections. I'm not sure if it's something I uploaded that caused this.

I sent a shout out to Google so we'll see what they say.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps/thread?tid=0dbcbf2d1e1cdbfc&hl=en

Interview with David Carberry

2009-09-17T18:15:00.000-05:00

Nice Interview piece posted today.

Forgot to Blog this article from SES

2009-09-11T23:32:00.003-05:00

SES San Jose panel – Small Voices, Big Impact, Social Media for the Little Guy
Moderating the panel is Stoney deGeyter President of Pole Position Marketing and Search Engine Guide Contributor

First up is Jennifer Evans Laycock from Sitelogic and Search Engine Guide Editor
Jennifer’s presentation is about Social Media Conversations for the little Guy – Jennifer states that it’s not social marketing but truly a conversation that is happening. She is focuses on how small businesses need to integrate social media into business and the tools for Social Media for Business

How you can meet your customer’s needs? Businesses should stop running to the Bleeding Edge and try not to jump in head first in on a new tool. If you are a small business you have a smaller segment and you need to use proven tools. If you jump to an upstart social media site that might disappear, it’s a waste of time, and you have wasted your time and money. Don’t put time and effort into something that is a flash in the pan

Social conversations are essential for the recession – it’s a great place to research their buying decisions and have conversations with their consumers online. Both businesses and consumers are tightening their belts; the consumers are worried about price and offers. Advertisers and consumers are now coming together and meeting in the middle.

“Now is the time to connect like you’ve never done before.”
Jennifer brings up 3 tools that are essential for small business
Flickr - Small Businesses should be using Flickr. “It’s not just posting pictures, it’s community and images speak a universal language. A business can get the passion out and have an emotional connection. If you make cakes or are a tourism company. Find a topic and share photos. The drawback is the do not follow protocol so you won’t have link juice but you can drive traffic.

Twitter – Laycock explains a little the best way to use it and creates an analogy to Post-It-Notes and you get to decide what Post-It Note you want up. Essentially creating a listening board.

You can set up ways to only want to read posts about “me or my company or a recently released product. It’s a great way to evaluate what the buzz is. Twitter has great tools. If you want to do a blog pitch you should use twitter to connect as a starting point to start the conversation. Retweeting – it’s the best way to get a message out to many. It gets retweeted by someone. It’s as easy as just cut and paste – you share it with your network and then it goes viral to thousands or even tens of thousands.

It’s a great place to ask a question – Take the pulse of the community. Twitter is its own news outlet to send news. She cited an example of a news station in Ohio that has every member of their staff on Twitter. The benefit they get the majority of breaking news in Columbus because of the community they have created.

Jennifer finishes up by displaying a pyramid that shows the importance of the Social Media tools and the hierarchy of those tools.

Up next Billie Jo Waara from Lawrence and Schiller and she has several questions that she asks businesses. How are you measuring social media? Are you measuring your digital dialog? What is your goal – why are you jumping in? Once you determine these questions, then you can find the specific metric you want to achieve.

She had several slides defining goals
I want more fans - (Brand Awareness)
Positive Opinions – (Sentiment)
Increase Traffic – (Engagement)
Increase Sales – (Conversion)

Once you decide your measurement what’s the starting point. A business can set the bar for friends and followers on day one after you have decided you want to have a goal of social popularity.

Billie Jo’s favorite tools are:
Social mention.com businesses can determine how many times San Jose was mentioned or how many times your brand or services are being mentioned you can engagement statistic
Twitrratr is listening and responding to what people are saying and is a tool that you can mine data out. Compete.com has a free area and subscriber area “Don’t live in a vacuum,” look at the competitive marketplace. Look at comparison site traffic

Also you can set up a sales funnel in Google – and look at the conversion point to determine the sale.

To determine the value of the conversation use Tweetstat or twitter counter
Next you need to execute your social media plan and after determining the starting points and the final goal and evaluate – radon6 is a great tool that has a lot of data – trender has stats on Google analytics and you can pull the conversations and a sample of that report.
To close out her presentation she stated, “document what you have done along the way – the information will disappear if you use free tools.”

Next up Ron Jones from Symetri Internet Marketing
Ron discusses the true methodology of Social Media
Social Media is the tool for conversations to happen and provide feedback for responses and voting. There is a shift in control from the institution to the consumer. The traditional rules don’t apply any more – you come in the back door and listen to the conversation and chime in and sometimes you might lead the conversation.

There are 3 steps to Social Media
1) Listening: is understanding the conversation engaging the audience and then measuring. Listening is crucial and is the foundation you want to find key influencers, who is leading the conversation. Listen to customers and prospects and what are people saying about the company (positive- negative – general) It’s free R&D for your company.
Ron brings up Urban Spoon and Yelp is another social media tool where people vote – location based tools that are essential for small business. Yelp provides a great tool for businesses.
Listening is also reputation management.
Ron had a client with disgruntle customers and found negative comments on twitter. The client reached out and turned the customer into an advocate and they offered to fix the problem. Ron Notes, “Be careful how you reach them – calling might be too big brother.”

2) Engage – the community
He noted Will it Blend? – It is a viral campaign and it demonstrates the product of the Blenders they have. They had 7 million views and sales grew 500%

3) Measure – It’s about sales awareness – use tools like Scoutlab –Trackur make tweaks on the campaign

For every 10 tweets you offer – you earn the right to plug yourself. Be consistent – Be committed and do it regularly

Maryland Retailers Association and Local Roll Call Form Strategic Partnership to Promote Local Online Marketing

2009-08-24T01:24:00.002-05:00

Annapolis and Baltimore, MD (PRWEB) August 23, 2009 -- The Maryland Retailers Association (MRA) and Local Roll Call, announced a multi-year strategic partnership designed to mutually benefit both organizations by better serving their merchant, and advertising communities in the Maryland Region. The agreement consists of several components in the areas of local search marketing, search engine optimization, Video Solutions, Social Networking and a branded MRA.org business portal.

"Our members will benefit from the services and experience Local Roll Call will provide," said Tom Saquella, President of the Maryland Retailers Association. "This partnership with Local Roll Call provides us with a great opportunity to further extend our message to Maryland's retail community through social media and provides our members additional online exposure on the www.LocalRollCall.com portal. Hardly a day goes by where there is not some mention in the trade press about how online marketing and social networks are changing the face of retailing."

"We are thrilled to be working closely with the Maryland Retailers Association to provide guidance to the members with our services and offerings and help grow our businesses," said David Carberry, president and founder, Local Roll Call. "The Maryland Retailers Association offers a strong community of Maryland businesses that can be utilizing a lot more the Internet has to offer. Working together, we can create more exposure for our properties, which in turn makes our directory more valuable to our users."

The Maryland Retailers Association will begin to roll out the initiatives outlined in the agreement this year. This will also include a testing phase that will take place over the next several months, with a plan to achieve full implementation by 2010.

David Carberry will be speaking at the Maryland Retailers Annual Conference in Ocean City Maryland next month, to discuss the partnership and do a morning workshop on social media marketing, local business listings, and pay per click strategies.

Further details of the agreement include:
Local Roll Call (www.localrollcall.com) will be providing the Maryland Retailers Association an online directory tool to manage and maintain their members data. This dashboard tool will allow Maryland Retailers Association members to modify not only their main listing, but will also include additional retail locations if desired.

The Maryland Retailers Association gets an exclusive association sponsorship of the Local Roll Call, Maryland section and updated monthly listings of their member's business locations.

Maryland Retailers Association members receive exclusive discount pricing from Local Roll Call.

Search Engine Strategies San Jose 09 Keynote

2009-08-12T09:47:00.002-05:00

The Search Engine Strategies convention kicked off yesterday in San Jose, and the Opening Keynote was Clay Shirky. Shirky gives an overview of his book “Here Comes Everybody,” and delves into the details of how Media has evolved over the years.

According to Shirky, “Group action just easier, people can come together share and get things done.” This change in user behavior has changed the landscape of communication. He went into an example about a promotion HSBC had for students. The program was a penalty free checking program, not forcing students to pay penalty fees. HSBC felt they had a great promotion, too great actually and they began to lose money. So HSBC pulled back the offer and gave the students 30 days to get out or fees would be in tact.

HSBC was not expecting Facebook and someone started the Great HSBC ripoff. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2371122959. Other students wrote about how to get your money out of the bank and get it to another bank. There were multiple media complaints and HSBC was getting negative publicity. Online protests were occurring and the group against HSBC kept growing.Then people organized to plan on going to London and have a protest in the Street at HSBC headquarters.
Needless to say HSBC pulled back and changed the policy because the customers were coordinated and not in an individual scramble.
Shirky states, “Facebook and other social media sites are sites of coordination not just information. That makes the Internet medium different, every URL is a latent community. You can put people in contact with one another. We are living in the largest expansion of expressive capability.”

He goes on to explain that Prior to now there were four great periods with media expansion; The Inventions of: Movable type and the printing press, The Telegraph/Phone, Recorded Media, harnessing of sending electronic waves through television and radio.

The major difference is that none of these could create groups. It produced the same message center to the edge. Communication was one to many, or one to one, and not many to many. Internet is the broadcast pattern of reaching large groups. It provides Organizations without organizations. That’s what HSBC ran into.

Computers and phones are symmetrical and give the option to the user, do you want to consume or share? Every time a new consumer is added to Facebook a new media producer is created, it’s one media to another without changing.

Technology does not cause the change, it’s not the shiny new tool that arrives and people just adopt it. Tools are shiny and new but are wasting assets…nothing can last forever. Internet access has been around 20 years but it has been the last five years that have had the greatest impact. We have new tools with apps and the social media networks but tools only change society when they society is motivated to make a change.

I'll be attending more sessions and posting updates - so stay tuned.

Papa John's Needs a Better Online Ingredient!

2009-07-28T18:39:00.001-05:00

If you have watched your television over the past few months, you have seen Papa John's Founder John Schnatter delivering his pizza's all over the country. In Papa John's latest press stunt they were in Chicago setting a world record for the world's highest pizza delivery at more than 1,300 feet. Schnatter planned on delivering more than 100 slices of pizza to the ledge at the Skydeck Chicago.

This is truly a great promotion. They have blended radio appearances, press releases, a well crafted television campaign, @PJsidekicks tweet their upcoming locations, and a great story that is on every Papa John's Box Top.
Papa John's is out and about, but they are missing a key online marketing ingredient... LOCAL MARKETING! Papa John's set up is similar to many existing companies that look for expanded growth in the food industry. They have corporate owned locations and franchised locations all across the country. When you try to take a national product and spread it across corporate budgets and then down to the franchise level some pieces get lost.

Today more than ever the complexities of the local space can also play a large role in how a company manages listings across all of their stores. Let's start off with the first piece.

Papa John's corporate headquarters is located in Louisville Kentucky. If you search for pizza delivery in Google you will see that Papa John's is nowhere to be found in the Google One Box. You can find Boombozz Pizza and their big rival Pizza Hut. Before @PJSidekicks writes another tweet they should jump onto Google and claim their free listing. Miriam Ellis posted a great article on "How to Claim Your Google Maps Listing". Adding your listing to Google Maps isn't that complex, especially utilizing a data file or bulk uploads. The complexity comes when the listing has already been claimed.

Franchisee's take pride in their stores and want to spread the word. Aside from Google having a "claim your listing" so does every other online directory out there. A franchisee might claim a listing on Yelp, Merchantcircle.com, Yellowpages.com, superpages.com and a slew of other locally driven sites. This adds to the complexity and the confusion of the brand. If a franchisee accidently adds a listing that says Papa John Pizza, or Papa John's of Maryland LLC. and then you multiply this mistake by hundreds of owners then you have a local oil spill to clean up! Papa John's needs to implement a top down system to ensure each franchisee is providing the correct corporate branding or let the franchisor take control.
In Papa John's case you can find
Papa John's Pizza
Papa John
Papa John's
Papa John S Pizza
Papa Johns
Papa John's Pizza
Papa John S

Keyword insertion and messaging are extremely important - of the over 3,000 listings for Papa John's only about one third are populated with keyword information. If someone is searching for a thin crust or specialty pizza Papa John's might not be found in the local directories.
Hours of operation, parking and credit cards accepted should all be listed direct from the Franchisee or the corporation. Too often Google is crawling a third party provider site and displaying wrong information.

Last on the list is tying the search campaign into their current promotional "papasroadtrip.com" campaign. At the time of writing this article I searched for keywords like "papa's camaro contest" and "papasroadtrip.com". They are displaying top organically, but it wouldn't hurt them to bid on promotional terms for extra emphasis on the campaign.
It doesn't look like Papa John Schnatter has made it to Baltimore but, if and when he does, he is more than welcome to visit my home and I'll do a little local marketing for a Papa's Thin Crust Hawaiian Pizza. Better online ingredients makes a better online search experience.

Also available on Search Engine Guide - http://www.searchengineguide.com/

Alan Rimm-Kaufman

2009-07-26T10:23:00.002-05:00

The Rimm-Kaufman Group was the name that kept me up at night. On several occasions, I presented to clients that were utilizing the services of RKG. They were happy with the fees and the services and we couldn't pry them away.

I was sorry to hear about the loss of Alan and his battle with leukemia. A good friend of mine has been going through that same struggle for the last few years.

During Alan's battle the team at RKG continued to rise, in the national search arena they were winning. RKG - Keep fighting the battle for Alan and much continued success.

My prayers go out to Alan's family we have lost a courageous fighter in the Search Industry.

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2009/07/20/alan-rimm-kaufman-tribute/

U.S. Justice Department is investigating Google

2009-06-25T00:31:00.001-05:00

The U.S. Justice Department is reportedly investigating Google's digital books settlement with publishers, which Google claims will make millions of volumes accessible to all but which has critics crying antitrust issues. Google's books project has run into opposition from a number of groups arguing that it gives the search engine company too much control over content with little oversight.

read more

Social Media - Maryland Style

2009-06-24T22:51:00.002-05:00

A few weeks ago I attended the Maryland Chamber of Commerce session on Social Media and Online Marketing with guest host Mario Armstrong from XM radio. The panel consisted of Greg Cangialosi, CEO of Blue Sky Factory, Matt Goddard, CEO of r2integrated and Leah Messina, CEO of Sinuate Media.

The panelists spoke about various topics such as; online tools, social marketing and challenges their clients face. Some good points were made throughout the session however, as most panels go, they were all intertwined and scattered. I have highlighted some of the main items that are beneficial to all businesses either as a refresher or as new information.

Communities

How are your customers currently buying items or services? Social media outlets such as Twitter don’t work for everyone or every business. Let’s take a business such as a local plumber or heating specialist. When do you need a plumber? Typically when something is wrong! Most people will more than likely pick up a phone book or do an online directory search. It’s doubtful that anyone will follow a plumber’s business on Twitter. On the other hand, if you are looking for a recommendation for a plumber, Twitter or Facebook might be the perfect place for you. According to Goddard, “Social media is really about reducing a risk by reaching out to like-minded peers. It’s our way of saying, how do I not make a bad decision?” We go get advice and it’s sitting inside these communities, we are getting the information when the conversation is happening and it’s all about reducing the risk. The social tools that exist are about streamlining the process.

LinkedIn.com has been around longer than Twitter and it isn’t getting as much hype. LinkedIn is a risk reduction and helps members make better decisions on how to build relationships. It’s Quality over Quantity. Your business should be tied to your area of expertise, local community or industry specialty. If you are a local business in a specific trade industry try to focus on what you do and important topics that are relevant.

The Clutter

There’s really no need to tweet about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich you just ate. According to Cangialosi , “THERE’S A LOT OF A LOT! “ There is no way we are paying attention to everything you have written. There is so much white noise that it is crucial for businesses to stay focused. Try to use important keywords or tags that can be searched for easily.
Blue Sky Factory leverages social media technology by using Hubspot. The Hubspot tool looks at web analytics and takes all the keywords you want to optimize and ranks the conversations that are really important. Blue Sky’s goal is to engage the community, cut through the clutter, and sharpen the focus.

Tools and Tracking

Messina recommended several different tools which keep a watchful eye on what people are saying about your product or who might be interested. Search.twitter.com – Twitter’s basic search toolGoogle alerts – a great way to have information pushed instead of searching with the other tools icerocket.com - a social and search tool radian6 - a monitoring source for your brand across the webChi.mp – helps steam line across multiple accountsDragon Search - social media calculator

One tool that was not mentioned was Twitter Analyzer, which is a tool that is fun to explore.

Rule of Thumb to Execute Social Media

Mario’s last question to the panel was, “How much time do you have for all of your social responsibilities? We all know that owning a dog can be free, but don’t you have to nurture it?”

Leah recommends before you update your Twitter account to spend 2 hours researching and compile a list of daily social media updates. Update once in the morning and at the end of the day. Leah typically puts aside 1 hour a day for updates.

Greg doesn’t use Twitter to update his Facebook account. The Twitter stream is primarily used for business and he separates his personal account from corporate account. He does his tweets in spurts. He recommends that your conversations grow into one on one dialog. You should pick and choose from one platform to another because it is not relevant between the two socials. Try not to use hash marks in your Facebook account – it may be Greek to many of your friends.

Final Words

Matt states, “The Internet is a buying engine – not a selling engine. You have to be a part of the buying process.” You can’t force the buying moment. Experiment with the tools available to you and evaluate the outcome.

Leah – “When you reach out you can tease out the most important people that are the influencers. They can help you be a bridge to the community. Be genuine and use it methodically.”

Greg – “The influencer in today’s social world has a very wide footprint so you need to be very authentic, transparent and methodical.” The long term strategy for social messaging is making sure your messaging is exact. What’s the right story to tell your audience; is it compelling and why?

Bounce Rates and What They Mean to Your Business

2009-06-01T08:44:00.004-05:00

In my past life at Advertising.com/Platform-A, I worked with large retailers and big businesses that watched their web analytics religiously. They looked at everything from conversions to keywords and in particular, the bounce rate. My assumption was that most businesses were keeping an eye on what is actually happening, if not daily, at least weekly on their website. But, in speaking with many small to mid-size companies, I discovered that really is not the case.

Your website, in its most basic format, is an intelligent interactive brochure for your business ,no matter how a potential customer found you. A semi-social networking conduit. As we all know, analytics is a key part to understanding what is happening with your business and having analytics connected is simple and easy. It astounds me that so many businesses are not looking at data that is right at their fingertips.

Let’s start with the home page. If a customer finds your website with a search engine query and they don’t stick around that’s an issue! This is called a “bounce” – Someone who visited your website and left for an undefined reason. You should try to determine WHY?
Bounce Rate measurement determines the visit quality. A high bounce rate generally indicates that an entrance page/home page may be not relevant to the visitor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

Is your site content useful enough to capture that visitor and keep them? If not, there could be multiple reasons why.
1.) Poor design - Your site may be poorly designed and not captivating or compelling enough to make them want to stay. You have limited time to get a visitor to take a walk through!
2.) Improper SEO – So a visitor got to your site by using a highly ranked keyword/phrase in a search engine and when they arrive they feel your site was not what they were looking for. Maybe your site messaging and content, title tags, and meta information are optimized with the wrong goal in mind. You need to eliminate the stranglers and focus the page content to hit those searchers meant to make a conversion.
3.) Paid Search – Change your paid search campaign to eliminate those 100% bounce rate terms. Obviously you don’t want to overspend and waste money in this economy. Focus on exact match and limit broad terms to improve overall bounce rate.

Bounce rates typically are not determined by length of time spent on the site with Google Analytics. So, if a site visit occurs and that visitor stays on the entry page for 10 minutes and does not go to any other part of the site; That technically is a bounce. Someone that might have come in and stayed on that page for 10 seconds and went to another page will not be categorized as a bounce. http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

Your business needs to determine why a bounce occurs, and evaluate that rate on a page by page basis and a keyword by keyword basis. You need to direct them from start to finish and provide an easy to use solution for why they entered your site in the first place.

You should also be mindful of the entry points that are driving traffic. If it is a social networking site or link then don’t worry about the bounce rate and be thankful that other sources are driving traffic. On the other hand, if you can determine the bounce is coming from a paid search campaign, especially in the content network, you should try to analyze whether that site should be part of your paid strategy.

Last but not least, if you are a business owner, CEO or CMO and you have marketing people on your staff be sure to set monthly site analytics review meeting! You can learn a lot about your business based on what is driving people to your website or in the case of the bounce rate scenario - what's driving them away.

Chimney Sweep - Crossing The Line

2009-05-07T12:13:00.007-05:00

Wow - I am completely shocked how businesses in today's "quick to the web world" can still cross the line. Don't they understand that everyone they do work for has the power to say the good, the bad and the ugly. This is what I would consider an ugly situation.

The other night I went to a friend's house and there was a chimney sweep that had just pulled off. My friend is selling her house so the inspection showed that she needed a little work done on her chimney. The Real Estate Agent Recommended A Chimney Sweep in Baltimore.

First off my friend was having a personal conversation regarding a family matter and the Chimney guy - said that he could give her relationship advice if she needed it (as if he were a friend). Then he proceeded to tell her his perception of her based on the clothes she had in her closet which he had previously relayed this information back to the Real Estate Agent on a prior occassion. Come on...can't you just do your job and wear an MP3 player and not get wrapped up in a customer's personal life.

The kicker was, after the services were performed the Chimney guy states, "I told your real estate agent that I would do this for you for free." My friend was curious - how can I get this for free? The Chimney Guy says "If you go out on a date with me."

I was blown away by this, but I imagine it happens. I'm sure it happens a lot less than it used to because now people speak out, and it's not the "Pass It On" game any more. Years ago you would call a friend and tell her/him the story and they told ten people and by the end of the story the chimney guy was doing more than the chimney. Viral marketing/reputation - was really exaggeration management.

Nowadays you can still have one bad seed exaggerating, let's say a direct competitor. In all fairness the web has become a pretty reliable source of information as long as reviewers police themselves. Reviews that direct competitors post are sometimes obvious, especially when those competitors will industry terms that a normal reviewer may not.

So back to the Chimney Guy, he is listed in most of the engines and directories including Angie's list and his reputation is now tarnished. The culprit was the owner of the company so in this case it wasn't a misdirected employee.

Mary Poppins would not have approved of this Chimney Guy's behavior.

Small Business Blogging

2009-05-06T16:42:00.001-05:00

Here is a great article on why small businesses need to be in touch with their customers. Check it out.

http://www.searchengineguide.com/mack-collier/small-businesses-can-no-longer-ignore-bl.php

Local Roll Call Launches

2009-04-29T20:35:00.005-05:00

localrollcall.com was officially launched on April 16th 2009 and we barely made it by the skin of our teeth. Scott Dance from the Baltimore Business Journal wrote an excellent article about our little start-up. Although we don't consider it a true start-up since we've proven this to be successful before.

Thanks to this article LRC saw traffic jump to over 900 visitors and over 6,000 page views worldwide. The U.S. saw the biggest traffic especially from you know where. This may seem like blip on the radar from any campaigns we had running at Advertising.com but it is a great jump start.

We are working out the bugs and beta-testing the site and we expect to be rolling out some new features in the next few weeks. Video and social media are definitely tops on that list.

If you haven't added your business to our free directory....please do so. Hopefully by the end of the year, we'll get 6,000 page views an hour.

Google Gathering Far and Wide - Why?

2009-04-14T00:16:00.007-05:00

We recently started working on a website from a business that has been a Baltimore institution since 1971.
This jeweler at one time had multiple locations but has since narrowed it's focus down to one location. That's it....just one.

If you take a look at Google local you would think they have stores all across Baltimore and Washington D.C. One would assume that proximity would help establish a better position within Google. In this case it's quite the contrary. The first listing is an outdated listing from Superpages.com that puts the store location directly in Washington D.C., which is a good 40 minutes from the true location(without traffic if you're lucky). The listing in Superpages is no longer there, so it seems Superpages deleted that listing but Google still has it displaying long after it was actually removed.

The second is a correct listing by is being served up by nearbynow.com. The problem with this listing is that it is (as well as all of the others) Conflicting with the true listing that the client has seen and requested modified. We are submitting a duplicate request deletion for this location.

Third listing is actually the store's corporate office which is off site. So even if someone wanted to stop in to buy a quick $20,000 engagement ring, they wouldn't be able to...unless Camilla or Debby jumped in their car and drive them over to the Mall.

The fourth listing is another store that closed some time ago and is still listed.

Finally number five somehow is also listing a location not even remotely close to the actual store. The address is correct but it's still a good 30 minutes away.

It seems Google is attempting to provide and append data and it's pulling in multiple source to get from one true location to having five. We will go in and dispute the duplicates, but it just goes to prove that even the biggest search engine in the world needs a hand or two to clean up the local data.

We'll check back on that listing in a few weeks.

Seach Listings - Octo Mom Search Style

2009-03-11T15:10:00.007-05:00

Local Search is sometimes under valued, not known and often times confusing to merchants. As search marketers we tend to believe that everyone is as knowledgeable as we are. I was stunned as I was thrust back into the world of Local businesses where I started my advertising career as a radio sales guy. The local advertisers were asking about Facebook and had really no idea about local search, geo-targeting or even what the Google one box is.

So I was sitting with a client trying to explain that Search is more than just organic and PPC. The Analogy I came up with.....It's "Octo-mom Search Style". Here's why I say that. that are eight core items to search as a Merchant client may see it.

1) SEOcto-mization - Getting listed in the organic ranking is crucial especially in these economic times - so free is preferred and they are willing to pay more to have a site optimized . Although results from SEO have been pushed lower because of the One Box.

2) PPC - The concept is familiar to buisnesses now as compared to early 2000. Although back in 2003 these merchants would have done gangbusters if they would have done their homework. I have found that there are so many companies managing client campaigns and client have no idea what a conversion rate is.
3) "Octo-mized" Landing Paging - Quality Score is key. many businesses are not aware fo QS. Try telling that to a dealer that wants to scare all of their customers away by putting Flash driven content all over their site .
4) Geo-targeting the PPC campaign is crucial to a business that knows where their customers are located. If they are an established business then they know where the customers are coming from. The key is to drive that customer base into the store and people are saving gas and finding merchants close. In true Octo-mom Search Style world you need to keep your kids close and hopefully not lose them.
5) Octo Ad-testing. It's so important to test out ad-groups and campaigns. Octo-mom changes it up with some crazy coming out party, so why won't the client change ad copy? I guess they're use to having bad ads all year long in the Yellow Pages - so why change?
6) Video - Video - Video. Now that bandwidth is scaling get your story out there and sell the rights. Sure you didn't think it through and protect yourself and now you have lots of inventory "Octo-mom Style." Tell the world and cash in with uploading your Video on You tube, AOL and the other free Video sites. (Be sure to Octo-mize those videos)
7) Local Search Listings - by getting accurate information to all of the directories it helps drive additional traffic and crucial backlinks to your site. If you have eight locations (kids like your kids) and all have different attributes, you don't put all eight in the same outfit? Show off each child for what they have to offer, besides a spot on Oprah.
8) Finally - don't call my kids ugly! So instead of allowing that one nay-sayer customer to complain or put up a bad review. Beat them to the punch, ask your customers for a good review on the engines. This will go a long way and can have impact on conversion and perception. Be proactive with your reviews.

Now Social networking that's a whole subject onto itself - let's just say that's true "Octo-Mom Search Style." She in serious need an anti-social network.

getlisted.org

2009-02-04T12:57:00.005-06:00

I actually was hesitant linking to this site because I didn't feel that getlisted.org was working to it's expectations. I feel it's a great tool and concept but also believe that it's not working to it's full capacity.

If someone wants to see and score how their website listing is coming up in Google Local, BOTWL, Yahoo, and MSN you can use this tool. Be cautious though. I searched for my favorite pizza joint, Atlantis Pizza in Alexandria and found that it is misleading at least for the Yahoo Local portion.

The listing score says zero - I spoke to the owner and yes the Google portion is correct. He never answered and verified the listing when Google sent their postcard after his business was submitted.

Yahoo however is listed
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&y=Search&fr=yfp-t-501&p=atlantis+pizza+alexandria&rs=0&fr2=rs-top
They actually have reviews and photos listed as well. This is a conflicting result from the data on Getlisted.org

The search option also can be confusing. If someone starts their search by putting in address and their zip code - it should display the business. Problem is what if there are multiple businesses at that address. There should be a little more upfront to ensure the listing you are clarifying is the exact listing you are presented.

All in All - great concept and the execution needs works. I hope it has some staying power and grows the list of local providers.

Local Search Marketing

2009-01-30T12:30:00.000-06:00

As search engines attempt to collect and distribute the world’s data, local listings are becoming more prevalent in search results. Searchers seeking local products and services will often find local business listings at the top of their search engine result pages. In addition, the major search engines are now offer a local component – Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Live Search local and AskCity, for example.

The information posted in these areas is typically collected from a variety of third party resources, but merchants also have the option of feeding store locations to the engines themselves. This is a major step towards the evolution of local search. Third party data is limited to business name, location and phone number. Engines that accept merchant supplied data allow additional attributes like business description, service categories, and brands sold, hours of operations, parking options, etc.. These additional attributes increase the chances for a merchant’s business listing to appear under a wider range of relevant search queries.

It is our job as search marketers to make sure businesses are listed properly and the engines are getting the right data. In the blog posts that follow, I will delve into the important aspects of Local Search and how business - can drive more business without having to spend a your entire marketing budget on improving your search listings.

More to come.