Archive for the ‘Local Search’ Category

« Older Entries

Local Search Summit Wrap-Up

Monday, August 17th, 2009

The inaugural Local Search Summit_took place last Thursday in San Jose and was jam packed with top notch speakers and attended by the top companies in the local search industry. With representatives from both Search Engines and the one Decision Engine :) The day also included a much anticipated white list program for Google Maps bulk upload which you can read about here. Here is a wrap-up of all the sessions and important notes.

Keynote with Google TV’s Steve Stukenborg

The Summit got off to a roaring start with Steve Stukenborg’s dynamic presentation about Google TV.  While not directly applicable to Local, it was an entertaining look into one of Google’s newer product offerings.

Google is essentially trying to bring a “Googly” mindset of trackability into a medium that has to-date been largely untrackable.  Through their partnership with the Dish Network and incoming data from viewers’ set-top ID boxes, they’re able to charge advertisers on an Adwords-style CPM auction model.  TV’s increasing fragmentation (compare American Idol’s 25% share today with the Cosby Show’s 49% market share in the 80’s) means that it’s harder and harder to reach large audiences, but easier and easier to target exactly the demographic you’re looking for.  Time for new ads to go live and reporting on reach and audience is typically right around 24 hours, and integration with Google’s web Analytics appeared almost automatic.

I was disappointed to learn that despite Google’s ability to use set-top ID numbers for tracking purposes, it is not possible for SMB’s (or even national franchise-model companies) to geo-target campaigns.  It would seem easy to parse out geo-targeted content to those markets in which advertisers were bidding, and back-filling “empty” markets with national content.  But I readily admit that I don’t understand the technical side of TV distribution one bit!

Local Search Ranking Factors

Localeze’s Gib Olander and I presented the key points to consider when optimizing for Local Search.  Of particular importance (at least in my opinion) is the need to shift one’s mindset from optimizing a website to optimizing a location.

Gib did a terrific job of explaining the two main modes of Local search – those of REcovery and DIScovery.  45% of all Local searches fall into the former category, where people know the business they’re looking for, and are just trying to find “NAP” (Name, Address, Phone) details.  Thus it’s absolutely critical to make sure this basic footprint is accurate across as many search engines as possible.  Tieing back into my own presentation, doing so will also ensure that these additional listings get picked up as citations by Google Maps.

These citations are one of the most important ranking factors and will help immensely with the 55% of searches involving DIScovery—where searchers are looking for a particular type of business but don’t have one particular company in mind. Properly categorizing your business and adding keywords or tags for a richer profile (pet-friendly, happy hours, wi-fi, etc.) will help your business show up for longer-tail searches around those phrases.

In the Q&A, an audience member raised a question about the use of keywords in business title, which was rated one of the most influential ranking factors by the panel of experts.  I got the chance to ensure that people understood including a descriptive keyword in your business title was a best-practice across ALL listings (including offline occurrences like dba’s), not just at the Local Business Center.  Gib correctly speculated that the reason keywords-in-business-title is such an effective ranking tactic is that the Local search engines don’t currently have enough rich information to rely on for the vast majority of listings, a situation that Localeze (and other major data providers) are trying to improve.

What Kind of Online Products Do SMB’s Need?

Unfortunately, I was answering questions related to my presentation one-on-one out in the hallway for much of this session, but I did get to witness a highly-entertaining interchange between Todd Johnson of eLocalListing and Ben Saren of Citysquares.

Moderator Greg Sterling asked these two panelists to role-play a typical sales call to an SMB.  Ben accurately portrayed some of the difficulties in reaching the SMB owner (lack of understanding of the internet, lack of time to discuss marketing, and reliance on a friend or family member for everything web-related).  Todd demonstrated eLocal’s typical strategy of a request for help with servicing search clients and repeated calls and follow-ups to try to bring the SMB up-to-speed with available internet product offerings.

All the panelists rightly asserted the typical SMB’s lack of interest in the process or even the results of optimizing (i.e. rankings or trackable emails) and pure focus on how much additional business am I getting as the only metric that truly matters.

Pay-per-call was briefly discussed with a representative from Marchex whose name I didn’t catch…my own two cents (as well as Gib’s, stated during our Q&A) is that call-tracking local phone numbers have a negative impact on the consistency of one’s listing footprint across the web.  In my personal opinion, call-tracking should be done at the offline level during or after the phone conversations themselves.

Q&A With Google Maps and Bing

Jen Chin of Google Maps and Kevin Hagwell of Bing Local were on the hotseat for this session.  Moderator Jason Calacanis did an admirable job at trying to tease out the mindsets of two of the three biggest players in Local Search.

Bing seems to see a Local profile more like a property, and will likely be taking steps to make their profiles indexable and more static than they are currently (closer to Yahoo’s model).  Google clearly sees Local profiles more as search results and as such, they have no intent to static-ize them any time soon.

With respect to mapspam, Jen reiterated Google’s abiding faith in its community members to police bad results, mark closed businesses as closed, and the like…feeling that Google users will be “highly motivated” to fix what’s wrong. It should be said that those of us in the Local Search community typically have far less faith in this strategy than Mountain View seems to.

And with respect to data feeds and trust, Kevin posed a preliminary indicator of Bing’s mindset in this session and expanded on it during the Q&A.  He feels that Local data from any source will always have flaws in certain places; even business owners mis-type their addresses or phone numbers on occasion.  There will always be a need for Local search engines to attempt to cluster and merge business data in order to present a “most likely to be accurate” result for a particular business. While Bing would like to move towards a trusted-bulk-upload feature (which Google announced later in the conference) they’re not there right now.

Using Facebook and Twitter to Drive Local Leads

Sadly, I was answering emails for much of this session and only had my ears halfway open…

Will Scott mentioned some excellent tools for finding Local followers on Twitter—a popular question in some of SES’ small business sessions on Wednesday.  WeFollow and Twellowhood were two mentioned that I’d seen before.

He also emphasized his concept of “Attention Deficit Twitter Disorder” and the need to repeat your message at various times of the day to ensure that you reach all of your followers, most of whom are probably checking-in and checking-out of Twitter frequently.  (I guess only total geeks like us are on throughout the day!)

I didn’t necessarily agree with some of Will’s recommendations for auto-tweeting and auto-following, but his full slides on Using Twitter for Local are available on his website.

As far as tracking, one of Will’s particularly interesting insights was to use Lo.ly rather than Bit.ly for tracking, due to Lo.ly’s map overlay of where people are clicking in addition to what they are clicking on.

LBS and Mobile: What to Realistically Expect

Mike Boland of The Kelsey Group led off this session with what I found a pretty surprising stat: there are 63 million mobile web users in the U.S.  That is a HUGE audience, and given the natural affinity between Mobile and Local search, we Local Search practitioners are in a great place going forward. The difficulty will lie in the fact that search volume may not be high for obscure categories or obscure locations.

Greg Sterling’s assertion that 1/3 of all Google Japan searches come from mobile devices only suggests further where we’re headed.

Sanjeev Agrawal of Aloqa added an interesting dynamic to The Summit with his conception of Local Search as not necessarily being “pull” based (i.e. it might not involve search at all).  In Aloqa’s mind, “smart” phones should actually be smart.  They should be displaying opt-in content like specials, points of interest, friends, etc. at all times.  Location, time, and social context are more important for mobile ad serving than is text or perhaps even intent-based content.

Q&A with Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman

Kudos to Jeremy Stoppelman for attending what seemed like his first search engine conference.  He shared some interesting insights into Yelp’s founding mindset and where they might be headed.

  • Yelp now has over 7 million reviews and 25 million unique visitors per month.  Their traffic is a “testimonial to the model of User Generated Content.”
  • They’re in 28 cities and now several countries.
  • Yelp’s “secret sauce” so far has been to focus on specific communities and to build a core group of evangelists (the Yelp Elite Squad) for which they throw parties and encourage offline interaction. The highly-successful Portland Community Manager was recently shipped to London to help seed the community there.
  • Stoppelman’s impetus for starting Yelp came from his difficulty in finding a reliable doctor using the extant search engines in 2004.
  • Yelp does its best to keep its algorithm opaque.  The obvious factors are proximity, rating, and volume of reviews.  There’s no set number that “tips” a profile into popular status but Yelp does look at rating trends.
  • Yelp isn’t really worried about Google and Yahoo stepping on its toes…Stoppelman feels that Yelp will always be able to provide a deeper level of engagement for users (echoing Google’s mindset that its own results are just that: search results, rather than deep business profiles).
  • In five years, Stoppelman hopes that Yelp is “the premier brand in Local Search.”  At this point, Yelp has no plans to enter the much-hyped arena of HyperLocal News.

Q&A on Local Search: Where Are We Today?

Rather than duplicate content, I’d prefer to direct readers to the semi-live summary I wrote of this session on Thursday evening.

Kudos to Steve Espinosa & his partners for a truly phenomenal day.  The level of networking and intelligence of the panelists throughout the day was exceptional; LSS alone made the entire SES conference worth attending, in my view.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Google Maps, Local Listings, Local SEO, Local Search, Local Video, Microsoft, Mobile, Web References, Yahoo! Local | 2 Comments »

Google Verified Bulk Upload Goes Live

Friday, August 14th, 2009

If you have followed the any of the local blogs such as this one along with Mike Blumenthal’s, David Mihm’s , and many others;  you know that ever since Google has increased the amount of information required for listings to become verified,  it has come with some consequences. The public has in fact received good data, less spam, and better user experience overall. However,  it has become more difficult for users that represented franchises and companies with multiple locations to verify each location. Rather than receiving a postcard at each business location, users did not receive postcards and thus chose to not verify any location. The time of unverified listings has come to an end.
Yesterday at our first Local Search Summit, which David Mihm will be posting a wrap up on here shortly, Google announced in the final session that they went live with a new feature that allows large franchises and/or any company with 10 or more locations to simply fill out a request form (located here).  Users with multiple locations can now simply plead their case for a verified listing, agree to follow the Local Business Center guidelines and they will receive a yes or no answer shortly after.
This is a big step for Google and I think a much needed one. Users have been screaming for this feature for a long time and Google has come through big time for us. As much constant criticism Google has received for their lack of support for Google Maps (much of which was deserved), they have gone about these changes in the appropriate manner. They had to minimize the verification methods because too many people were taking advantage of the LBC and that was causing too much grief for users. They catered to the majority first (the end user) and then added a great feature for the minority (the large franchises) too make up for it.
Another question that came from the audience yesterday was if Search Marketers could take advantage of this feature. Ari Bezman, Google LBC Product Manager, stated that they are not in the business of mediating who controls the data for the businesses in question. However, what they do need is confirmation from the business via the form that the given LBC account may then have control of those listings.
This is a big, big step in getting large franchises online. Hats off to the Google Maps team for getting this feature launched, doing the right thing, and catering to the need of the larger users in the LBC.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Google Maps, Local SEO, Local Search | 3 Comments »

SMBs and SEM Churn

Friday, June 19th, 2009

With High Churn, Local SEM at a Crossroads

Once upon a time in the world of advertising, life was simple. If you were a brand, the fastest way to reach the biggest consumer audience was through TV. That’s still true though TV is no longer as effective in getting consumers’ attention. If you were a local, small business (SMB), the parallel imperative was to buy print yellow pages. Though SMBs sometimes grumbled at pricing, the yellow pages indisputably delivered value.

Enter the New Digital Reality

Along came the Internet and broadband and the result is the messy fragmented media marketplace we have today – only getting more fragmented with mobile. It’s now very challenging to reach consumers and even harder to maintain their attention. Advertisers large and small are still trying to figure out and navigate this relatively new reality.

Traditional media still deliver value but not at the same level as before. The Internet offers theoretically precise audience targeting and broad reach, but also complexity not found in traditional media. This complexity and the related fragmentation confounds even sophisticated advertisers who, for example, have yet to master “social media” despite the enormous popularity of sites like Facebook and YouTube.

SMBs, for their part, are often confused and even terribly frustrated by the complexity of marketing in the digital era. According to an August 2008 Opus Research/AllBusiness.com small business survey, confusion, lack of budget and lack of time or personnel are among the reasons a clear majority of SMBs don’t advertise online:

Source: Opus/AllBusiness.com survey (survey base 1,000, question n=615)

SMBs have clearly been much slower than their customers to adopt online marketing. And some even maintain the fallacy that the Internet is “not relevant” to their business. Some of the answers in the graphic above reflect a lack of understanding of how the Internet is used by consumers.

The massive SMB market in the US has always been a very attractive target for online publishers and ad networks from the earliest days of the Internet. But the difficulty of reaching SMB advertisers has resulted in development of the current “local search ecosystem” – an awkward set of alliances between traditional (mostly yellow pages) publishers, local search marketing (SEM) vendors and search engines, among a few others. It all works “on paper” but in practice it may be breaking down.

BellSouth and “Local SEM”

In late 2003 or early 2004 BellSouth (now part of AT&T) introduced a product that offered to put SMBs on search engines in addition to the publisher’s own yellow pages site. It was in essence a simplified SEM offering geared specifically to SMBs who wanted to “be on Google,” but didn’t know how. That became the template going forward.

Search engines, unable to acquire large numbers of SMB advertisers directly through self service, turned to established “sales channels” such as yellow pages publishers that could use their “feet on the street” sales reps to reach local businesses. Yellow pages publishers, seeking more traffic than their sites were generating and to prevent potential advertiser defections, all developed similar products: local SEM offerings.

Rather than explaining keywords and bidding strategies, the sale to the SMB was simplified by offering “guaranteed clicks” for a fixed price. That original model has evolved in most cases. But what it permitted was an easy “close” by the sales rep. The complexity of search marketing — setting up and managing a paid-search campaign – was totally outsourced and hidden from the local business. The search engine got ad dollars it might not have otherwise and the publisher kept the advertiser. The publisher-partner/vendor got the headache of fulfillment and managing the campaign itself.

A Perfect Solution That’s Breaking Down

Though a theoretically perfect solution for all players, these local SEM offerings are starting to break down in some cases. There are lots of companies operating in the space and having varying degrees of success. Let’s be clear: what I’m saying doesn’t apply equally to all players in the segment. But in more than a few cases, Local SEM churn rates are between 50% and 100% on an annualized basis.

What that means as a practical matter is that half to all of the SMB advertisers signing up for these local SEM programs are leaving them before the year is out. In some cases, it happens after only a couple of months. In investigating what’s going on, I’ve been offered several explanations by a number of parties in the segment:

  • Local advertisers are not being properly educated about SEM and expectations are not being properly set accordingly

  • Not enough time is being allowed by the SMB to optimize campaigns

  • Sales reps are rewarded according to sales figures only and not retention numbers

  • Not enough of the advertiser spend is going directly to media (search) buying, which diminishes the performance of the campaign

Beyond this, the margins for publishers and vendors are thin and nothing like the 50%+ margins of traditional print media. Accordingly yellow pages and some online publishers such as Citysearch are forming direct alliances and trading traffic to start to minimize their direct dependence on search engines and SEM. More broadly publishers and sales channels are seeking to diversify qualified traffic sources to get more and better traffic for less money.

I see this and other related moves in the market as a partial breakdown of the local search ecosystem alliances that formed over the past few years around simple products (i.e., guaranteed clicks) as a way to bring more SMBs online and solve common problems.

The Next-Generation Products

Let’s assume for argument that many of these local SEM products now being sold are unsustainable, what will take their place? After all, the Internet isn’t going away and SMB advertisers can’t return to an all-print strategy.

The challenge for everyone focused on the local space is creating products that can scale, deliver healthy margins and, especially, provide real value to SMBs. But most of what’s in the market today fails in one or more of those areas.

More sophisticated versions of existing SEM offerings that reach broadly into more traffic sources are starting to emerge. And a growing number of SMBs may be able to manage their own marketing on places like Facebook and Twitter because of their relative simplicity. Yet the majority of SMB advertisers will still need help and want to outsource their online marketing to trusted third parties. Accordingly there’s still plenty of opportunity to get the products right and deliver better value to local advertisers.

The marketplace isn’t getting simpler; it’s only getting more complex.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Local Search | 6 Comments »

How to Twitter… Naked

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009


New Orleans’ own Naked Pizza (@NAKEDpizza) is changing the minds of experts and engaging its local community - using Twitter - in a profitable way.  Naked Pizza is effectively using Twitter for communications, customer service and most importantly, new sales.

For anyone who’s been hiding under a rock the last 6 months or so, Twitter is the preeminent micro-blogging service.  Originally designed around limitations of cell-phone carrier SMS messages to 140 characters, Twitter and its peers provide a very brief messaging platform which has grown to accommodate hundreds of other applications which use Twitter as a backbone.

There has been a LOT written about Twitter in general and as a marketing and branding tool.  But as yet, there is no primer, no “Twitter for Business for Dummies.”

Even without a primer Jeff Leach, co-owner of Naked Pizza, seems to be well on the way to figuring it out.  That’s not to say that Jeff’s approach would map to the “best practices” of Public Relations (PR) and Social Media (SM) pros but it’s working for @NAKEDpizza and most importantly Jeff is tying it to metrics which matter to his business.

This issue of “metrics” and measuring return on investment (ROI) is hindering adoption of Social Media tools in larger businesses.  Quoting from Last Wednesday night’s inaugural #pr20chat on Twitter:

Social Media ROI Discussion

Social Media ROI Discussion

Social Media Return on Investment discussion on #PR20Chat.

Jeff is feeling good about his Twitter ROI and he’s got the numbers to prove it.  And, importantly for Jeff, it’s hyper-local.  NAKED Pizza is primarily using Twitter to market to an area with a 3 mile radius. Or as Jeff said when we talked about his sign, “I didn’t do it to get TechCrunch talking, I did it to reach the 35,000 people who drive by the store every day.”

Naked Pizza Twitter Sign Going up

Naked Pizza Twitter Sign Going up

Oh right, I may not have mentioned that: Naked Pizza is apparently the first company, period, to replace its old billboard with one calling out for Twitter followers.  And as you can imagine it’s getting a lot of attention.

Clearly a smart guy, Leach realizes there’s more gold in them thar hills, and with Naked’s aspirations toward a national franchise strategy, all PR is good PR.  But from a dollars and cents view, the @NAKEDpizza Twitter strategy is showing its potential.

With his first concerted effort at a Twitter-only promotion, Leach was able to drive 15% of daily revenues with Twitter.  And of those 15%, 90% were new customers!  Not bad for a guy who didn’t even have an account until 5 weeks ago.

And, here’s the crazy part, it’s all him.  No high-falutin’ PR firm.  No “Social Media Expert”, just a guy on a mission to change the world one pizza at a time.
Sure, Robbie Vitrano (@robbievitrano) of the Trumpet Group (a well-known branding and marketing firm) is a friend and advisor, but the Twitter strategy is all Jeff, precipitated by an offhanded remark from Mark Cuban (@mcuban) suggesting he thought there was “something to it”.

When asked, Robbie Vitrano had this to say:

What NAKEDpizza “gets” - and they get it - is that in today’s marketplace there isn’t enough money to buy attention.  But you can earn it by being purposeful, authentic, willing to make mistakes, and most importantly, by having the ability to shut up and listen.  The [Twitter] sign is an example of what the greatest natural marketers bake into their entrepreneurial vision — the courage to believe in your mission.  Twitter is a pretty jiffy tool.  But it’s just that.  First, you have to have something to say.  You’ll quickly find out “beaucoup” as we say in NOLA, if what you have to say is interesting and useful.  Check and check.

So, what are the goals for this local business on twitter?  Jeff Leach (@NAKEDpizza) says it best:

“I needed to drive down cost of marketing.  ROI of other media suck [sic].”

“The average Papa John’s does email, door hangers, hard direct mail.  [We were] looking for a way to leverage emerging social media — [there's] no TV attention, radio is too broad and our coverage area is too small.  We wanted to target the store’s delivery area, everyone around us in 3 mile radius.  ROI on direct mail is getting lower / lower.  Even Big Jimmy’s barbeque has an email newsletter.  Email open rates are dropping, too.”

Some people have taken Mark Cuban’s involvement to mean that Naked Pizza needed help. As it turns out, they were already profitable and one would guess this level of engagement will assure they continue to be.

What the Cuban investment enables - in addition to enabling Mark to develop Texas - is expansion into new markets by franchise.  And, as anyone who has been involved in franchises knows there are rules and systems.  The systems support the developer in replicating the success of the original.
With this in mind I asked Jeff “Does the facility with social media become a requirement for an area developer”?

His answer:

“We won’t sell an area developer deal to a guy who can’t identify who that general manager is going to be and that the GM owns part of the business.  An investor must manage or GM must be invested.

“GM must demonstrate facility with new media.

“As we get our social media legs we’re going to have to prepare to cross that bridge by late summer.”

So what’s next, then, for Naked Pizza and social media?  Jeff indicates to me that he’s been given access to some beta tools and is actively engaged in other top-secret discussions which will enable some pretty exhaustive customer analysis such as “Let’s say Will Scott (@w2scott) orders twice a month (it’s actually more like 4X).  Follows us on Twitter, is a fan on Facebook and is getting my newsletter.  Instead of spending money on physical contact, how do I avoid sending to those already following.”

It should be clear at this point that this is something in which Jeff is personally very invested.  Certainly he’s drawing a crowd of evangelists, but this is a lot of hard work.

Thinking of that, I asked Jeff some follow-up questions by email:

Q: “What does it look like when you reach a saturation point and have to delegate to maintain velocity”?

A: “Given the importance… having the top dogs in our company control that becomes even more important. Our brand is everything. For the next year, the most important thing we can do is have the actual owners experience and learn from this environment - then, and only then, will we truly understand its utility and limitations. Having an employee, intern, or even a marketing company handle our SM makes little sense. That strategy would not result in any real learning or enhanced experience for our customers. Anyone other than the founders and top people… do not possess the breadth of understanding of our mission and lack the context of all the moving parts as we adapt and ‘evolve forward.’ By experiencing this myself, I can apply all that is social media to what we are doing - always looking for an opportunity. Anyone other than me and my partner (Randy Crochet) might miss it.

“Is it healthy?  Is it good for the environment? Was anyone harmed in the procurement of these goods? And so on.

“Through tools such as cotweet… we can “eventually” - though not now - delegate more customer service type inquiries. Interestingly, as we open new locations throughout the country, the challenge will be how we structure our social media at these various locations. We will, of course, have corporate flow but will also require a local feel for each location. Having said that, we will probably be the first franchise company in the country that actually makes ones social media skills and capabilities one of the requirements to be awarded one of our Area Developers Agreements. In other words, money and operational skills are not enough: u must have and possess a grasp of social media and how it operates inside our Pavlov Marketing Plan in order to be our partner. In the Franchising 2.0 world, these skills and  understanding of the evolution of customers will probably be more important than the fact u ran similar businesses for 20 years etc. This means we will probably seek out (and we already have) savvy, younger, and smarter partners.”

“The world is gonna be a better place and we want to be part of it.”

Q:     ”How does your current behavior + your methods of delegation become a template for other small-biz”?

A:  “As for how this becomes a template for other small biz? Have no idea. Social Media is different things to different businesses. I think social media will make entrepreneurs and [their customers] think very hard about what they are selling and whether or not it jives with how people think and will be thinking in the future.

So, there you have it.  Jeff doesn’t have the primer.  We still need to write that “Small Business Social Media for Dummies” book.

Naked Pizza has proven, and continues to prove, that a mission, real engagement and a willingness to be who you are online will drive loyalty and evangelism.

And, 15% of daily sales isn’t enough for Jeff and the Naked Pizza team:

“@NAKEDpizza: c’mon order a few pizzas for eat like an ancestor day. shooting for twitter sales record http://bit.ly/iJYjU”.

Is it local search, or is it word of mouth?  In the final analysis we don’t know its impact on local search  (yet), but the impact on Naked Pizza’s bottom line and the Small Business Social Media psyche is undeniable.

Follow Will Scott (@w2scott) and I’ll let you know when we’ve got that Social Media Small Business primer written.

I’m hungry, it may be time to order some more Naked Pizza.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Local Search | 4 Comments »

The Downfall of Geo Modifiers

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Long before the Onebox and Yahoo! Shortcut came along; before all the geo targeting in Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords came along, searchers were already searching for local businesses and services. When performing the search, more often than not, they would simply leave out any kind of geographic modifier (i.e. zip code, city name, neighborhood, etc.) and receive sub par search results.

Since then geo targeting, browser location awareness, and other tools have helped searchers receive relevant results (mostly sponsored). Google has released a search update where it prompts the user for a city or zip whenever it detects a local search, then displays local results. This has increased overall local search traffic and increased Onebox traffic.

The above mentioned feature looks like this:

фото пизды мaстурбaция девушек

searchbox

After the user enters the city or zip, instead of modifying the whole search result, Google simply adds a Onebox and keeps the natural results intact with the results from the original query.

searchafter

With a good amount of research I have been able to pin point the date when this update took place and gather enough information before and after the update to see the effect of this. For those of you that would like to know, my data set before the update was 300,000 keywords referrals from Google and 550,000 after.

lionheart online

nightmare man movie download

So what did I find? I found that there was a rise from 2.06% to 14.78% in referrals with no apparent geo modifier from Google.  Since Google simply displays a Onebox instead of appending the geo modifier entered by the user to query we know that this traffic is purely from the Onebox.

One can only wonder based on our previous research of Onebox vs. Natural traffic that if the entire result set was changed, how much would this effect truely local traffic to websites?  As more technology becomes available, such as browser location awareness, it is only logical to think that Google (and hopefully Yahoo!) will take advantage of this and automatically display local results to users. In addition with the thought that more people probably do not

enter a geo modifier when prompted, you would imagine a local search traffic would sky rocket.

Tags: ,
Posted in Local Search | 8 Comments »

Twitter: The Local Monetization Strategy

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Over the last couple months we have heard many different ideas on how Twitter can successfully monetize their surge in popularity, growing user base, and overall traffic. The ideas range from charging for an account, charging for premium accounts, simply adding AdSense, and the list goes on. What we haven’t heard is how Twitter could add local search into their business model, monetize it successfully, and create more user generated content.

When you think about it almost everything that is on Twitter is inherently local. The simple question “What are you doing?” implies that because, unless you are at home watching TV, you are doing something that is local, whether that is local to you or to someone else. The obvious example of this is when you go out to a restaurant and write about that on Twitter, whether you say “Going out to [insert name here] with @stevemcstud” or “Just had a great dinner with @stevemcstud at [insert name here]“. If you simply perform a search on Twitter for “restaurant in”, the point being to see how many people tweet “I am going to restaurant in [insert city]” or “Anybody know of a good restaurant in [insert city name]?” you can see that with just that one phrasing there are tons of results of people talking about local restaurants.

With restaurants being one of the biggest categories in local search as far as traffic and advertisers, it would be easy to roll out a beta test for this to justify whether local would work for Twitter or no. So how do I propose Twitter take advantage of this? Create Business Twitter pages. Just like Facebook, where the page does not have as much functionality as a real Facebook but simply serves the purpose of people being able to connect and talk about a subject. Twitter can simply buy the data of all the restaurants in San Franscico and publish them with static pages so that people can actually say “I just ate @lunchbox with @stevemcstud and it was great!” instead of actual tweets like this:

tweet1

@dudeman718 could of actually told @SoulPSuperstar where he went rather than a “sushi restaurant in Maple Shade, NJ” and they could of actually clicked on @[restaurant name] and gone and looked at a Business Twitter page. What would a Business Twitter page look like you might say. Like this:

twitter-example

Traffic
With this type of page it requires absolutely no action by the restaurant owner or anyone at the restaurant. Twitter would easily be able to kill it in the SERPs if they structured the business pages into a well done SEO friendly directory which would help users find restaurants in their city. Sooner rather than later you would see twitter showing up for searches like “Restaurants in San Francisco” with all that link juice and fresh content it is no question. This would drive an amazing amount of traffic to Twitter, my guess would be about 4-6 million more visits via search engine traffic with this fully deployed.

Small Business Accounts

Besides the new traffic this would allow business owners who don’t know about Twitter to sign up for it. Business owners always at some point perform vanity searches for their business name, in which Twitter would show up in the results in Google and then they would sign up after seeing all the reviews people are writing about their business. Twitter then could charge for business accounts and then monetize the business account that are not claimed by featuring claimed businesses on other related business accounts that are not claimed, something like a “You Might Also Like” type feature.

User Experience and Advertising
buy lisinopril
By implementing this you get a huge double benefit. You get to charge businesses for accounts which would generate revenue. Then you also get to rank the directory by Twitter buzz, allow users to tell other users what they are doing more accurately and with less characters, and create more user generated content overall. With people doing nothing but saying what is on there mind on Twitter, they can easily pass Yelp! as far as content is concerned while keeping their original model as a web app intact and not selling out but rather adding a needed feature, the website.

Partnerships
Partnerships will come flooding in with the likes of Superpages.com, City Search, and others. Twitter will not have to complicate their business with a sales force, but just partner with the giants in the local industry who already have the customers, their credit cards, and revenue coming from what exactly small businesses want, more customers. With traffic coming in from local searches, reviews, and buzz, companies with have to partner with Twitter just to keep up with the industry.

It’s All Bout The Dolla Bills
So how much money can this actually bring to Twitter? The current valuation has Twitter worth about $250,000,000, last time I checked, and that was based solely on the buzz and the amount of users they have on the site. With an estimated 6,000,000 visits a month coming from this program and a majority of them will no doubt be recovery searches (people or business owners searching for business names, phone numbers, addresses etc.) this will get Twitter in the public eye to consumers and businesses owners doing vanity searches. There is no doubt that a percentage of those new visits will end up signing up for the service.

With the current valuations, the actual worth of each Twitter user is debated to be between $73 and $42, so let’s just say $40 to be safe. If only 2% of my estimated 6,000,000 new hits per month actually sign up for the service that will total 120,000 new users every month. So what is 120,000 users worth at the current valuation? $4,800,000. And that number grows every month with new sign ups and new visits. Now I realize that not every single one of the 6,000,000 visits every month will be brand new every time, but without a doubt from my experience of working with Local Search Destination Sites the majority of them will be.

The number above does not even take into account the monthly residual they could make from small businesses that they sign up through partnerships. From pure revenue stand point they can easily get 50,000 small business clients spending $6 per month. So let’s assume that they have a 50/50 revenue split. They receive $150,000 per month and growing residual income from partnerships. Now if we apply the math we did above with each user worth $40 then these 50,000 new paying customers add a value of $2,000,000 to the company as well.

Conclusion
All and all this is what you get:

  • A better user experience where you will see tweets like “Just had lunch @LunchBox with @SteveMcStud” rather than “Just had lunch with @SteveMcstud at that one cafe at Google next to the main campus”
  • They will increase there traffic generated by search engines by at least 4-6 million per month.
  • Business owners will find there pre-made Twitter accounts, take them over, and interact with the Twitter community
  • Partnerships will follow with companies that already have the very businesses that people on Twitter are talking about actually paying them money. No sales force required.
  • Revenue. You actually have a profitable revenue source that may not be the end all be all model, but will be a huge chuck of revenue that does not interrupt the user experience but actually makes it better.
  • A big increase in valuation due to increased revenue, increased user base, and increased market share.

So that is my 2 cents. For all I know I could be completely wrong. Oh yeah, by the way, in the hour it took me to finish this article there have been 65 more people who had “restaurant in” in their tweets.

Tags: ,
Posted in Local Search | 27 Comments »

« Older Entries