When Rankings Equal Ratings

January 12th, 2009

Of course almost any business would want to rank high on the search engines for keywords relevant to their business, but in the past this was mostly due to the expected traffic which would be generated from these high rankings. With Google and Yahoo becoming household names, high rankings don’t just represent traffic any longer, they represent trust (or high ratings). I recently cruised by a chiropractic office near my house (Care Chiropractic) who is proudly proclaiming they are the highest rated on Google via banner outside their building.

Without even doing a search on Google, people who pass by this office on a regular basis now have a reason to ‘trust’ this practice more than perhaps another one they pass on the way home from work. Even though rankings do not represent ratings (although they are probably a factor in local rankings as seen from the data below), this chiropractic office is able to leverage to their ‘A’ position in the local ten pack even further than the traffic it generates on its own.

As a side note, this practice does not even have an organic top 10 listing, they did however have a number 2 PPC listing at the time of writing this article. This is an excellent example of how a small local business can leverage Google’s brand recognition to promote their own business.
Here is a quick analysis of the business ranking in the top 10 in the local ten pack and Google Maps

URL Ranking on Google Maps Number of Details Number of Reviews Included Coupon? Included Photo? Included Video? Number of User Content Number of Web Pages (Citations)
www.carechiropractic.com 1 5 26 N Y N 3 58
www.activachiropractic.com 3 6 16 N N N 1 34
motionchiropractic.chiroweb.com 2 7 0 Y Y N 2 28
www.caringhandschiro.com 4 6 3 N N N 2 20
www.backsolutionsdenver .com 5 2 14 N Y N 2 12
www.downtownschiropractic.com 7 6 0 N N N 1 16
www.denverschiropractic.com 6 5 0 N N N 1 9
www.arvada-chiropractor.com 10 7 5 Y Y N 0 41
www.chiropracticcolorado.com 11 3 5 N Y N 0 13
www.bothachiropractic.com 13 5 0 N N N 0 11

As a follow up to my initial research I put in a call to Dr. V. at Care Chiropractic to get a little more insight into the ‘Google’ banner and how the idea is affecting his business.

seOverflow: Do you do your own SEO or do you work with a company?
Dr. V: I work with an SEO company to handle the work. I am a Luddite when it comes to anything technical

seOverflow: What inspired you to create this banner?
Dr. V.: I put up banners on a regular basis, people are attracted to freshness and something that moves around. I am very grateful for the good online reviews we receive,

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seOverflow: A while back I drove by and you had a Yahoo banner up rather than a Google banner, what prompted you to switch?
Dr. V: We found most of our internet leads were coming from Google and wanted to appeal more to that user base. I also found out Google is much more pervasive than Yahoo.

seOverflow: How has the banner affected your business?

Dr. V: I am not sure of any direct increase in business from the banner. I do help it builds trust not just with new clients but existing clients as well. I can tell adwords was cost effective, but is now less cost effective for some reason

seOverflow:

How do you think a top 10 organic listing on Google would benefit your business at this point?
Dr. V.: It would be great to have top 10 listing, I’d love it!

How can you leverage your (hopefully high) rankings on Google and perhaps some of the more well know IYP’s beyond the traffic you receive? I am sure this is a trend of which this is only the beginning stage.

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Posted in Local Search | 4 Comments »

Your Target Audience Still Doesn’t Know Squat, So Teach Them

January 8th, 2009

I just spent an hour with a local contractor who has started to feel the pain of the economic meltdown. Guess what? After years of avoiding it, he’s finally ready to put up a website and start figuring out how to market himself online. Good for him. Now he’s really screwed.

The guy barely knows how to click on a link let alone buy a domain, build a website, learn SEO, figure out what people are searching for, set up a paid search campaign, troll for customers on Twitter, etc.

As I was listening to him discuss his ambitions, it occurred to me that even after all of these years of investment in the local search industry, a huge number of the potential advertisers still don’t understand the options available to them in local online marketing.

Consumers may be a bit ahead of Joe the Plumber, but not by much. How many IYPs are there? What’s the difference between them? Why did that list of businesses show up for one Google search and not the other? Why is this phone number wrong? Why do I have to download your iPhone App or join your Facebook group when I just want to find a plumber? How is that video helping me hire a good DUI attorney? Why do I get a SEO blog when all I wanted was to find a place near me that sells enemas?

And you thought Eraserhead download 100 million bc dvd was confusing.

All I’m trying to say here is that until there is a service that makes it dirt simple for SMBs to understand how to get online and how to choose between the options, and until there is a service that makes it dirt simple for people to find reliable service pros, no one is going to “win” this game and every company will be ripe for having their clients and users poached by a better mousetrap.

There are a number of companies out there taking stabs at both sides of the equation, but I have yet to see a model that is not just an incremental improvement on what is already out there.

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That said, you don’t need to have a state-of-the-art product to win at this game. You need to have a state-of-the-art customer education strategy. How can you sell me something that I don’t even understand? Companies that have education as one of the core services that they offer both advertisers and users should do well. Cause if you don’t know squat, you’ll probably be all ears if someone is willing to fill you in and you’ll probably be grateful to them for a long time to come.

So what are you teaching your ignorant customers?

Andrew Shotland - Local SEO Guide

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Posted in Local Search | 7 Comments »

Local Search News Launches

January 4th, 2009

Welcome to the new Local Search News! Local Search News is a new online magazine where you can find out about everything local. We cover everything from SEO tips, latest news, partnerships, acquisitions, and anything else that involves local marketing.

We have compiled a nice amount of highly qualified contributors for the site, here are just a few:

Steve Espinosa

- That’s me. I have spoken at plenty of search conferences on Local Search, Video, User Intent, and just plain SEO. I founded BuzzSpot, a local tv marketing  + seo synergy company which was later bought by Search Initiatives in 2008. Currently I am Director of Innovation at a Local Search Marketing firm that has thousands of clients. I am also a column writer at Search Engine Land, and technical editor of an upcoming Video SEO book.

Andrew Shotland - Andrew is perhaps one of the most experienced local seo experts in the industry. He has worked everywhere from Showtime.com, NBC.com, to InsiderPages.com. He has plenty of experience in IYP optimization and local search marketing in general. Andrew writes regularly at his blog called Local SEO Guide.

Will Scott - Will Scott owns a successful Local Search Marketing firm called Search Influence. He is a very experienced search marketer and also speaks at events like SMX.

Michael Boland - Michael Boland is one of if not the leading search analyst in the Local Search world. Currently Michael is an analyst at The BIA Kelsey Group, at moderates numerous local search panels at Kelsey Group conferences as well as SES.

Ben Saren - Ben Saren is the CEO of City Squares, a local destination site based in New England with a very large user base. Ben has a unique qualification to contribute to Local Search News as he has the opportunity too view literally millions of real time local search phrases and how each user interacts on a local level.

Mike Belasco - Mike Belasco, owner of SEOverflow is one of the original Local SEO gurus. His blog was awarded the best Local Search site of 2006 and he has had the opportunity to help hundreds of local businesses get found on the web. horse adoption premarin

Aaron Irizarry - Aaron will be covering living in an SEO world while still keeping your site looking good. He will tackle on the issues that come along with HTML, CSS, and SEO. Aaron also writes on his own blog at This Is Aaron’s Life.

Every week we will have a weekly recap on all things local that happened at this site, and others we like too. Soon we will be publishing a bi-weekly podcast as well.

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Posted in Local Search | 1 Comment »

Web Reference Building Tips

January 4th, 2009

One of the first things most local search marketers have on their to do lists is getting their listings to appear in a Google Onebox at the top of Google’s search results. To be in the box, you usually need to be in Google’s top local search results. And one of the major factors that influences that are “web references.” Web references aren’t links, but in local search results, they act similarly to how links can boost a page in “regular” search results. Here are some ways of quickly accumulating some great web references and bump your local listing towards the top in Google

What is a web reference?

Google crawls local sites, internet yellow pages (IYPs) and other sources to gather as much information as it can about all the local businesses it has in its index. When it finds a page referencing a business it knows of, it then places that page in the “Web Pages” section of the Google local listing and adds whatever data it has gathered as it sees fit.

1) The more categories the better naprosyn

When creating your local listing in internet yellow pages or local search channels, make sure to add as many relevant categories as possible. Most typical IYPs will have City+Category pages made throughout their website for Google to index. So if you add your listing to two relevant categories, when Google crawls those pages, they will both be added as to separate web references.

2) Coupons are more than just an incentive

Google allows you to create coupons to add to your local listing to use as an incentive for customers to choose your business or help market current promotions. What they don’t tell you is that Google also crawls its own coupon pages and can also apply them as a web reference, as well as you can see at the bottom of this example:

google-coupon-reference

3) Throw a party

After you have been successful in the first two steps and getting some great web references, throw a party. But wait, don’t forget to add this party to local event sites like meetup or Yahoo! Upcoming. Google also crawls these sites for local content about the businesses it knows of and, you guessed it, attributes these as web references:

upcomingweb

Try these tips — there’s a good chance your competitor is not, and they might give you and advantage they’re missing out on.

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Posted in Google Maps, Local Listings, Local SEO, Web References | No Comments »

Onebox vs. Natural Results

January 4th, 2009

In October of 2008 I spoke at SMX East on a panel with Mike Blumenthal, and Eric Stein, Director of Google Local Markets. The panel went really well and had a really great audience, thanks to all of you who showed up. One question that got brought up that I didn’t have time to address that I liked was, the value of a #1 positions in a Onebox result vs. the #1 Organic position on that same page. The answer may or may not shock you.

At the moment I am Director of Innovation at a Local Search firm, and have access to tons and tons of data due to the tens of thousands of customers we have. Recently I started doing a lot of data mining and found some pretty interesting results.

I went through 50 different examples where we had a #1 spot in the Oneox and a #1 in the natural section on the same page. Guess what? The organic result actually got 1.6x more results than the Onebox did.

One interesting fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under. This makes sense because the lower the resolution of the screen the more real estate the Onebox listing gets “above the fold.

We took time to make sure that all the stats we measured that the queries produced both a Onebox result and Organic result with both in the #1 position.

A lot of you may wonder how I differentiated the clicks from the Onebox vs. Natural because Google does not add an extra parameter in the offering URL that allows you to tell the difference between click in the Onebox. We were able to gather this data because our Local Listing was pointing to a different URL than the #1 organic result we had.

Does this mean that the Onebox is not as good as a natural position? Maybe. You see we were unable to track calls so in the sense of click through rates natural is better, but actual customers calls has yet to be determined.

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Posted in Google Maps, Local Listings, Local SEO, Local Search | 9 Comments »

Taking Advantage of Trusted Sources

January 3rd, 2009

So here is a dilemma, you have new site that is not ranking well in natural search but you did gain some traction with my article on how to get more calls on Yahoo! Local . Now you really want to get placed organically as well, right? Instead of cursing the mythical Google Sandbox, do something about it. Like we said earlier your site is too new and you’re not ranking for one reason or another, let me show you how to take the easy road out. Just utilize other trusted sources that Google likes and will rank with the right content.

serevent

Get Your Own Listing to Rank

One tactic I use a lot is to actually link to your optimized Y! Local Listing that you created which is more likely than not already in the Google Index. Then just send a link with anchor text for let’s say, “Lake Elsinore Plumber” for your index page of your site to your Y! Local Listing. The result typically looks something like this (the one on the bottom):

yahoo-local-result

This is similar to the “Page 2 Bump Tactic” made popular by Andrew Shotland.

This also increases your online ubiquity, which we all know Google loves to see and helps you out in the Local Search Rankings because they find these pages with your business on them and add them as Web Reference to your local listing on Google. This can be done with a couple of other listings like Yellowbot, Superpages, and City Search . You can tell if this has been picked up by the crawler if you check your local listing and look under web pages. You want to get as many web references as possible to boost your local rankings in Google Local.

Help A Directory Out

So let’s say you have been doing a lot of great reading on local listings at StephenEspinosa.com, Local SEO Guide, or Search Influence and you have done a great job getting your local listing to rank in Yahoo! Local. Now all you need to do is find the “City + Category” page that is most likely to rank in Google for instance. For example lets say you had a Murrieta Auto Repair business. Simply find the Search Engine Friendly URL like this:

yahoo-sef

Once you get that simply link to the Yahoo! URL with some good anchor text like Murrieta Auto Repair, then sit back and wait and watch the page move up the rankings like this:

yahoo-auto-serp

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Posted in Local Search, Yahoo! Local | No Comments »

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