Google Testing New, More Integrated Local Search SERPs

Looks like Google is busy experimenting with some new layouts to their main SERPs. Blumenthal’s shares the findings of Linda Buquet of Catalyst eMarketing, including such changes as making the Places listings bigger and more like organic results (the only difference being the inclusion of a Map pin) and having the map scroll down the page as you do. Not sure if this will be a permanent change, but what I am sure of is that this will no doubt lower traffic results to individual websites while increasing them to review sites. Not cool, Google.

Google Takes More Real Estate For Business Name Search

Ah, Google. Why are they doing this to us? Not only did they potentially make some pretty lame changes to their SERPs, they also started linking to the business’s Places page for these searches as opposed to the actual website. The article lists a few possible reasons they may be making this change, none of which are very appealing.

Google brings a Facebook rival

We’ve posted about Google’s latest social networking platform endeavor in the past, but the news was sparse. Here we get another hint at the tactics Google may be using to bring down the Goliath that is Facebook. Recently, they’ve been meeting with big name game developers for Google Me. What this means is anybody’s guess, but I hope it means less lame Farmville updates and decent games for a change!

Is Google Watching You? New Plugin Will Let You Know!

Boy, this Top 10 is a little Google heavy this week, eh? Don’t worry, there’s more! Here’s an article about an awesome new browser plugin that lets you see when your personal information is being sent to Google’s servers. Not only that, but it alerts you using a vuvuzela-like alarm.  How great is that?

Why You Need to Monitor and Measure Your Brand on Social Media

If you read these lists of ours often, you’d know we’re no strangers to the social media game. Once you make the leap, it’s imperative to keep your presence known. This article gives a couple of great tips to monitoring and measuring your brand to make sure you can use these great utilities to their utmost advantage.

How to Get Top Search Engine Optimization and Placement Results with Google Caffeine

In our last edition of Top 10 for the Weekend, we posted an article outlining the differences between Google’s Mayday and Caffeine. Well, here is a handy article on how to make Caffeine work for you to achieve results at the top of the ranks.

Should I renew my yellow pages ad?

Here is our most recent blog about whether or not remaining to advertise with Yellow Pages is beneficial to your site from an SEO standpoint. Want to know the answer? Read to find out!

The Google Sewage Factory, In Action: The Chocomize Story

A great article on how sites pollute Google’s news section by taking advantage of some specific editorial criteria, and their lack to police these actions. A very interesting read about Google contributing to the pollutants that make the internet a “cesspool,” according to one of their CEOs.

Google Places Police

We’re no strangers to the confusing and oft arbitrary guidelines Google seems to enforce on their Places accounts, and we’re not the only ones! This is a fantastic article highlighting the hair-pulling experience that Google can induce for businesses and SEO companies alike.

8 New Link Types That Exist On The Web

A hilarious article outlining some of the insane practices that SEO companies and many others use for link building. Check them out and see if you are guilty of any of them. I know I am!

Yes, the yellow pages industry is dying, some would argue it’s dead.

Unused and unwanted.

But a part of me hesitates at completely dropping out of the book.

What I would love to say is “keep your ad or an ad because the yellow pages gives you a free backlink in their online product with any paid ad,” but this is not the case.  It is my personal experience in my local market and my observation in other markets that the yellow pages sales people are not offering a free backlink in the online product with the purchase of an ad in print book. One must pay to be in the print book and pay to be included in the online directory too.

And even if you pay for it, how valuable is that backlink from deep within the yellow pages online directory?  Apparently, not very.  I checked a few different tools for the online directory page where my client would appear if she paid to be included in the online directory, and the page has a 0 (zero) value.

Also, the backlinks are nofollowed. Wow.  Talk about about a waste of advertisers money and about a wasted opportunity by the teleco.

So my suggestion to the client was half-hearted … decrease your big expensive display ad for a smaller in-column ad so you’re not totally out of the book just for the few people who are still using the print product.  She looked at some internal data, and came back with feedback saying she has gotten no patients from a yellow pages referral so she was dropping her yellow ages ad.  I have no data to advise her otherwise, and really, it’s probably a sound move.

In LA too they throw the printed phonebook right away to the trash

Yellow pages sales people have always offered call tracking, but on a limited basis – only to those clients who were waffling on renewing that giant display ad.  What they could be doing is dropping a call tracking number in the every ad over some benchmark value (say $1,500.00 because that would include some of the more elaborate in-column ads) and adding a tracking website URL into the ad.  Together, these tracking mechanisms would give some real data for advertisers to make this renewal decision.  But I know that the real data is probably more hurtful to the renewal rate than having no data.

In comparison, at Search Influence (where a few of us grew up in yellow pages a few years ago),  we understand the need for tracking, for constant proof of our value.  We track form data.  We track phone calls from organic traffic and from paid traffic.  We track all kinds of stuff so we can give real ROIs.  We do this all of the time, and at least every month.  Proving our value every month, month after month, definitely keeps us on our toes, and we share the successes with our clients because of that accountability.

Thanks to Sabrina Tang and lejoe for the great pictures!

Orlando Plastic Surgery Yellow Pages Ads

I worked in the yellow pages industry for just short of 10 years at a CMR, Certified Marketing Representative, where all of my clients were national clients in multiple markets.  So I’ve spent a full decade of my life working in the yellow pages industry, which is not a glamorous media, but at one time it was incredibly profitable for clients based on their return on investment (ROI).  That ROI in yellow pages is now dropping dramatically with every year because of the overwhelming competition from internet for media dollars.

It is in the yellow pages industry where a lot of tracking techniques were started.  I can’t tell you how many tracking phone numbers I have set up and used in a yellow pages ad.  And given a client’s number, had to track a very real ROI each month based on the calls made.

I have organized split run comparisons where we run 1 ad in half of the distribution area of a phone book and another ad in the other half of the distribution area, and then sit back and watch the tracking phone numbers data.

And now in search engine marketing for 2+ years, I find I am doing many of the same things.

When Will first asked me to work with his company, Search Influence, I hesitated – I mean what did I know about search engine optimization?!?

It turns out, it’s a lot of the same stuff. Getting our clients in the right directories, listed under the right categories, tracking incoming calls, proving value …

It is this last, “proving value,” that is the most telling.  Knowing what a large display ad costs in the yellow pages which a lot of our clients would have been doing 10 years ago, and comparing it to what Search Influence charges for SEM and SEO, I realize that the value is definitely in the internet.

In yellow pages, a plastic surgeon might buy a full page or a half page ad for a large percentage of their annual advertising budget.  In some larger metro markets, this can easily reach up to $100,000.00, over $8,000.00 each month, with a yellow pages industry average of 5% increase each year.

This gets the surgeon an ad that is in print for a year, and that’s what you get.  Hope that people pick up the fat book shoved in the back of the cabinet, find the heading, (not under “Doctors,” not under “Physicians & Surgeons-Cosmetic Surgery,” but buried under “Physicians & Surgeons-Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery”) and choose your ad to call.

Most people today are already in front of the computer for work.  They just type it in exactly what they want, no digging, “Plastic surgery Houston“.  It’s too easy to use the internet.

The internet is a living, breathing medium.  For the same amount of money or, amazingly, much less in some big metro markets, SEO actively finds the people searching for your product.

Ringing Phone = Profits

Changes can be made daily or hourly for specials and promotions.  Yellow pages ads are in print for 12 months.

Tracking is not limited to phone number tracking – we can find which pages are working and which pages users are most likely to leave the site on, edit some graphics and compare the traffic patterns week to week instead of year to year.

The average yellow pages display ad attracts over 440 calls per year (Source: YPPA Media Impact Study, 2004).  Search Influence has many client sites with thousands of visits each month, with hundreds of contacts each month.

Businesses are moving their marketing dollars to the internet from yellow pages more and more every day because it’s smart money spent.   I mean I don’t want to glorify SEO for more than it is, but dollar for dollar, internet marketing gives so much more impact for money spent by bringing in real customers.

I did a very informal survey which I think sums up America’s use of their phone books.  Here are some responses to “Where is your print phone book?”:

1. “I may have thrown it away, if I have it, it is in the pantry.”
2. “I threw out the new ones.”
3. “I saw it this weekend when I was trying to make room (in the kitchen cabinet)”
4. “I don’t have one.”
5. Another, “I don’t have one.”

Of course, my survey of 5 people may not be fair because I did only ask people who sit in front of a computer all day, and so I ask, do you know where your phone book is?

Image Courtesy of Flickr User timlewisnm

It’s pretty simple: marketing on the Internet is, on one level, about dominating as much real estate on page 1 of Google as possible.

The typical places to dominate are the left side of the page (natural or organic search results) and the right side of the page (paid search results). However, with the abundance of online directories aggressively marketing themselves, the ability to own more of page 1 of Google for a certain key phrase is more and more attainable.

Many online directories work as lead generation services providing their clients with a profile page that can act as a separate web site in organic rankings. Some even guarantee a certain amount of leads per month for a given cost.  Often they will also sell visible real estate on their site for an extra cost (e.g. a banner on the home page).

The main problem is that businesses sign up for these directories 1) without knowing enough about the service to ensure they are going to get an acceptable return on investment (ROI), 2) not knowing how to use these profiles to their fullest ability and 3) not understanding that in signing up they’re paying the directory to compete with them for search engine position.

I have outlined three ways you can begin measuring your ROI for each online directory you are currently under contract with, and those who may approach in the future: tracking, analyzing and optimizing

Bank of America Stock Chart

TRACKING

• For each directory/profile listing implement call-tracking numbers. These numbers allow you to track exactly how many calls come in from that listing. This also allows you to track leads throughout the entire process and decide if they are quality leads.
• Implement Google Analytics (the best free analytics tool available) to track referring sites (among other things). This allows you to see exactly how many people come directly to your site from your directory listing. There are some directories that can’t be tracked on analytics, so you will have to track these more closely in-house.

ANALYZING

• Each month every directory should send you a recap of the activity on your profile. They usually list how many visits to your profile, how many leads you got from the profile, how many leads went to your site, etc. You can use these numbers to compare to your tracking reports. This will also allow you to gauge if the leads are quality or not. Yes, they might bring in their number of guaranteed leads, but they may never convert into procedures, which is where the ROI comes into play.
• Reality check with customers: If the customer was looking for you by name, and your lead source intercepted them, they’re not doing you any good and you should discount those leads.

OPTIMIZING

• Each listing is different, but it’s important to find out all the ways you can optimize your listing for better visibility. Some allow you to add video, press releases, optimized content, articles, and before/after images – you should take advantage of any opportunity you can. This will allow you to know at the end of your contract that you have done everything possible to utilize the listing and you can accurately measure the ROI (bearing in mind that you are investing your time).

Also be aware of what you can get for free- sometimes free is enough to get you what you need.

If you are considering joining a paid online directory, consider the following before signing the dotted line.

• What is the cost per lead (CPL) the directory is guaranteeing, if any?
• What is your current CPL for your own website and how does it compare?
• How does that directory rank for valuable local and national key phrases?
• How many of your colleagues will you be competing with on the site?
• What is the site’s reputation (seek opinions from others in your industry)?
• How long is the contract? Will they let you out if the leads are no good?
• What are they doing to continue optimizing their site for your key phrases?
• What is your opportunity cost of promoting their site over yours?

Photo: Phone calls = Money

Being able to answer some of these will give you a good idea if it’s worth a shot.

Again, be aware of what you can get for free – this can sometimes be enough to get you what you need.

Directory advertising isn’t evil.  It can help you own more of page 1 and in the case of map based results may contribute to your ranking. Just be aware of the risks, rewards and cost (both monetary and opportunity) of paying someone to compete with you.

Related: Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket

I added it to my feed reader under Local Search. I put it there because I don’t have a category for Dinosaur or Dead Trees or Dying industry

I kid — I think the Yellow Pages has 5-10 years of life left in it.

There may be some consolidation and there will certainly be heroic efforts to save it, but ultimately it will completely lose relevance in a world of ubiquitous connection.

Of course, it may all turn around. Who knows?