Google’s new Data Highlighter for Local Businesses is definitely worth checking out for anyone trying to goose their local rankings. I have found it to be a bit buggy and it’s a new tool, so proceed with caution. Here are some basics on how to use it along with some tricks I have figured out [...]
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Last week, I was lucky to join a number of great speakers at the iLive conference in Riga, Latvia. As with all conferences, I learned a lot. (I simply can’t relate to those who go to a conference and say they’ve heard it all before.) I learned at least as much from the people I met and chatted with — as well as from the people of Riga and Latvia — as I did from the conference itself.
Latvia is a very small country with a population of just over 2 million people — around the size of a smallish Chinese or American city. The country has a very checkered history with a Nazi occupation, being absorbed into the Soviet Union for over 47 years and then finally achieving full independence in 1991 — just 22 years ago.
Somewhere around 25% of the population speaks Russian as their native tongue, but they are still “Latvian.” What this means, in practical terms, is that many Latvians are bilingual, and some speak three or more languages. When you jump into a taxi in the capital, Riga, one driver will be listening to the radio in Russian (I just managed my directions in Russian), while another will be listening in Latvian (directions to him were in English).
International SEO & Personas Are Increasingly Linked. Source:Webcertain
When you land at Riga, you can just about see Estonia in the distance; when you take off, you are rapidly over Lithuania long before the plane has finished climbing. Latvia shares borders with the Russian Federation, Belarus, Estonia and Lithuania, and is just across the Baltic Sea from Sweden.
What, exactly, does this have to do with local/global search marketing? It’s very simple. What most people mean when they say “think local” is that you should work with someone who is “local.” But, if your country is so small that going to dinner sometimes means crossing a national boundary and speaking a different language, then who really represents that “local” person?
In this crazy, mixed-up, increasingly complex world we live in, thinking global and acting local is no longer a useful idea — though the principles behind it were valid (and in many cases, still are).
The main problem with “acting local” is that it you run the risk of putting vastly different customers with vastly different needs into the same “box” based solely on geographic location. And, as Latvia shows us, geography isn’t everything. A more useful way to target such a diverse customer base is by developing personas that represent each different group of customers within your target market. Today, the Web is all about personas — even if you don’t work with them, they still matter.
Keywords and personas are linked. Yes, it would be great to have much more data about keywords and the people who use them available easily online, but if you’re clever and you structure your website around clearly defined “personas,” then you probably have more data than you actually realize. (And, by the way, Facebook is a very useful tool to help build a better picture of your personas, even if you are not advertising.)
Personas are closely aligned with SEO needs. If the information presented in a SERP is appropriate to the targeted persona, the click-through rate will be higher, ultimately improving the traffic and ranking potential of that particular result.
Different personas will respond differently to the same content. For optimal success, you must consider how to differentiate your approach for each of your target groups.
Going back to Riga, we could define our customers and potential customers in the following ways. Note how the personas become more precise and more closely defined as you work your way down the list:
The above list is only to give you the idea in very simple terms. If you have different “description” pages which describe the same product in different ways, then you are already personalizing your Web content to some extent — but is your SEO also personalized? And, do you think about your content and SEO in terms of personas?
I should add that, in my example above, I split the languages to demonstrate my point — but there are cases where it may not make economic sense to target every language. It all depends on your organization.
However, my key argument is that personas take your SEO efforts to the next level. Moving your messaging from “global” to “local” is naturally followed by “personal” — and that that’s where the edgy, fast-moving businesses are going as fast as their coders can take them!
One final note: the word “international” itself means different things to different people. In conversations with those I met in Riga, people did not generally use the term “international” to refer to working between Baltic states. On several occasions people said to me, “there are not many international firms in Latvia,” which was odd to me, looking at a country which bordered with so many others speaking so many different languages. I think it would be fair to say that they often saw “international” as outside their region rather than outside their nation.
And in other breaking CitySearch news, Darren Waddell of RadiusIntel just sent me this awesome Google Alert he received this morning: It links to this article from 2007. For all of you marketers recommending that your clients use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying, be sure to include that it works better if [...]
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Today Greg Sterling asked What’s Going On At CityGrid?: “Here’s my paraphrase of some of the things I was told: CityGrid and Citysearch are struggling (to retain and deliver value to advertisers) Citysearch was characterized to me as having lost so much momentum that it was effectively “dead” CityGrid and associated properties (InsiderPages, Citysearch, Urbanspoon) [...]
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Last week, we published the findings of the BrightLocal Local SEO Industry Survey 2013.
The objective of this survey is to gain greater understanding about the health and nature of the local SEO Industry. Through this survey, we aim to find out what life is like “on the ground” for those in the local SEO industry and share those findings publicly to help improve the knowledge and insight within our industry.
This is the 2nd wave of the survey. The 1st wave was conducted in 2011 and looked ahead to 2012. Wave 1 survey results can be viewed here.
The survey was conducted between 20th January and 20th February, 2013. We contacted thousands of freelancers, agency SEOs and Web designers.
1,409 respondents completed the survey (up from 1,150 in 2011). The majority of respondents are freelance SEOs or small SEO agencies.
The survey consists of 17 questions covering 5 areas of SEO/agency business:
The following five charts show the key findings of the survey. Full survey results are available on BrightLocal.com.
Confidence is running high in the SEO industry. Our data show that 93% of SEOs say they expect their business to grow in the next year — up from 82% in our 2012 survey.
Additionally, 82% of respondents said that they will recruit more staff in the next 12 months – to help drive and fulfill their expected growth.
There can’t be many industries in the current economy that can boast such a positive outlook!
The range of turnover for local SEOs is very broad. Some SEOs earn a worryingly low amount, while others are ticking along at a good rate. The size of the agency and the number of clients under management obviously play a big role in turnover level.
The most telling figure is that 34% of SEOs are turning over less than $30,000/year (3% more than those that earned at this level in the 2012 survey). For a modern and skilled profession which is in great demand, this figure is both surprising and a concern. It begs a number of questions:
The amount which SEOs earn per customer can vary greatly. Some, apparently, earn less than $100/month per customer, while some earn $5,000 or more.
Of course, the nature and depth of the service provided is reflected in the price, as is the scale of customers. The budget and requirements of a single location mom & pop business, for example, are much smaller than those of a multi-location franchise business.
This speaks volumes about the nature of the work SEOs do and how much reputation and relationships matter when selling SEO services. Local business owners are far more likely to commit their precious (even scarce) marketing budget to someone they know, like and trust; and, a big portion of this trust comes through recommendation by others.
With an average lead:sale conversion of 42%, it appears that SEOs are very effective at selling their services. However, 17% say they convert less than 10% of their pitches.
The data here only paint part of the picture. Conversion figures are a product of a number of factors, including method of approach, quantity of leads contacted, sales structure and ability, business reputation, local market competition, etc. I would expect agencies that take a more considered and tailored approach to pitching would convert more than those with a high-volume, sales-focused model.
Full survey results and charts can be viewed and downloaded on BrightLocal.com.
A local SEO industry survey, managed by SEO software company Brightlocal, revealed that the most in-demand SEO services are on-site SEO and Google+ optimization.
Conducted between January 20 and February 20 of this year, the survey evaluated the health and nature of the local SEO industry by focusing on five key areas: agency size and turnover, clients and industries, marketing and sales, services and tasks, and future outlooks. The majority of survey respondents included freelancers, small digital agencies and web designers, with a total of 1,409 respondents.
On-site SEO and Google+ optimization were the most in-demand services, out-ranking Web development, link building, PPC, content creation and optimization, and social media marketing. Less than five percent of customers requested affiliate marketing.
BrightLocal noted that services most often requested by customers reflected the services mostly likely offered by SEO agencies, “In the local arena, digital marketing is driven by the supply side because knowledge resides firmly in the minds of SEOs and digital marketing professionals.”
Survey responses showed that individual client earnings ranged from less than $100 per month to over $5,000, with 70 percent paying under $1,000 per month for SEO services, and 28 percent paying between $500 to $1,000 per month. When asked about revenue turnover, 34 percent of respondents had turnover less than $30,000 in the last 12 months, while 17 percent claimed to have $500,000 or more.
More than 80 percent of respondents said general search was the most effective online channel when it came to generating customers for clients. Local search and PPC rounded out the top three most effective online channels, with classified websites, display advertising and daily deals ranking least effective.
When it comes to marketing their own business, 91 percent of survey respondents said word-of-mouth was the most successful tool for gaining new clients, while only 46 percent gave credit to SEO, which ranked second. Of all the social networks, Linkedin was the most popular for finding leads with 18 percent of respondents favoring the professional networking site over Facebook and Twitter.
For the remainder of 2013, 82 percent of respondents said they plan to recruit new staff this year and 93 percent said they expect their business to grow by year’s end. Most all of the survey respondents have a positive outlook for 2013, with 84 percent of the SEO professionals surveyed confident it will be a good or great year.
Today Yext announced Sync, a service that lets you sync a business’ location data to Facebook along with “enhanced” data such as menus, offers, photos and status updates. While there are plenty of social media management tools that allow you to control content on a Facebook Page, the two big differences with Yext’s service are [...]
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Earlier this month, local search marketing leaders from the U.S., Canada and 12 other countries gathered in Las Vegas for the Local Search Association’s 2013 annual conference, “Search Starts Here.”
Over several days, attendees engaged in informative discussions about the numerous opportunities and challenges facing our industry, ranging from the growing importance of original digital content to the rise of mobile and social media.
In this month’s column, I will highlight my key takeaways from the LSA conference, which are focused on both the strides I believe local marketers should take to better serve our clients, as well as the steps that businesses should pursue as the local advertising space continues to evolve.
Jean-Pierre Remy, CEO and president of Solocal (the French Yellow Pages publisher and a leader in digital and mobile search in France), emphasized the importance of investing in unique digital content as a means of driving value for advertisers as well as consumers. He said the ability to showcase original content is a defining factor in differentiating local businesses in the online space. Remy noted that advertisers with video content receive two-and-a-half times more traffic than those without.
Local search companies should work closely with businesses to create compelling digital content that will help them stand out among their peers and generate new leads. A steady stream of content — whether images, videos, or tweets about the business’ products and services — will help local businesses build engagement with consumers, a critical component to ensuring that businesses have a strong presence in search.
Paul Plant, founder and principal at Radicle Consulting, stated that we are currently in the most concentrated period of disruptive change that the world has ever known.
Mobile, in particular, is redefining local search in unprecedented ways. As LSA noted in our Local Mobile Search report released last month, page hits to online directories and other local resources from non-PC devices more than quadrupled in 2012, reaching a 27 percent share of total Web traffic in December 2012 from a 6 percent share in December 2011.
With such considerable shifts in consumer behavior, local advertisers are increasingly asking for mobile solutions, according to Michael Rubin, executive director of Business Development, Mobile at YP.
Local search marketers should continue to pursue cutting-edge opportunities for businesses to generate targeted exposure in mobile as part of an integrated advertising strategy. Local businesses should recognize that their competitors are already or will soon be following consumers into the mobile space; and so, they should look for partners who can help them seamlessly add mobile to their existing approach.
Tae Kim, head of Channel Partnerships (Multi-Segment), North America at Google, said that mobile has a measurement perception issue, and that our industry needs to change it.
What’s the problem? Tae and other members of his expert panel from Moasis, xAd, and YP agreed that there is a tendency to measure mobile performance simply based on click-through rates, when other factors — like what consumers do after the click — are equally, if not more, important.
Dan Hight, vice president of Strategic Partnerships at xAd, talked about the value of measuring offline conversion in addition to clicks. “Advertisers that are focused on offline types of conversions are working very well,” he said.
Local search companies should educate neighborhood businesses to think beyond the click-through to the way consumers are actually responding to mobile advertising offline. Local businesses should ask their advertising partners to provide them with analytics and anecdotes that demonstrate that their mobile activities are not just generating interest, but also getting customers to make a purchase.
Google’s Tae Kim said local advertising solutions must adapt as the lines between devices are increasingly blurring. Kim noted that as “phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller,” the ability to pinpoint specific devices with specific content is becoming more complex. “Mobile advertising,” Kim said, “should now be seen as part of a holistic advertising strategy, not a separate one.”
Our Local Mobile Search study found that more than one in three (37.3%) of all U.S. smartphone users also owned other connected devices at the end of 2012, including tablets (28.8%), eReaders (10.0%) and other handhelds like portable gaming devices (4.1%), demonstrating that there are numerous options available for consumers to access the Internet and search for local businesses.
Kim stressed that advertisers should pursue integrated campaigns that look beyond the type of device to also reflect other factors, such as a consumer’s location and the time of day.
For example, Google’s AdWords Enhanced Campaigns allow businesses to increase AdWords buys for prospective customers within a certain distance of the store, while decreasing AdWords buys during hours the store is closed. In doing so, advertisers will be able to reach their most valuable customers wherever and whenever they’re searching with the best possible rate of return for businesses.
As local search marketers, we should continue to evolve this concept to deliver more innovative and targeted campaigns that enable improved ROI for our clients. In turn, local businesses should look for partners who can offer integrated solutions that provide them with the flexibility to adjust their advertising to best reflect the context of the searches taking place.
Jason Finger, CEO of CityGrid Media, spoke about the increasing shift to verticals in the local space.
“People are taking a broad approach, but the world is moving toward specialization,” said Finger, who was a co-founder and former CEO of Seamless, the popular restaurant ordering website. “One of the challenges [CityGrid] faced is we tried to be all things to all people. We’re trying to orient our business … so when people go to Citysearch, the page people see is agnostic across verticals. We want to be comprehensive and focused in a handful of verticals.”
Finger pointed to Seamless, OpenTable, and ZocDoc as destinations that own their categories by staying focused in their core vertical. He said that future verticals will not necessarily be dictated by industry, but rather by the tools clients need. For example, industries like restaurants and doctors might be grouped together because both require reservations/appointments. This will further shift our industry’s focus away from generating traffic to providing valued utility to businesses.
Solocal’s Jean-Pierre Remy echoed the verticals approach and is transforming Solocal’s sales team from generalists to specialists in just two verticals. He said the effort so far “has been a huge success,” as lost business in several key verticals is now returning to the company.
I think all local marketers should consider the value of a verticals approach and the benefits it can have for their clients. As verticals gain further ground in the local space, businesses should look for advertising partners who are leading in their specific industries, or offer the types of tools (e.g., appointment scheduling) that they need most. In doing so, they can leverage their partner’s success to generate new business of their own.
Dan Levy, director of small business at Facebook, talked about the importance of local search for social network users. He pointed out that there are 645 million page views of local pages in the average week in the U.S. and that 70% of users in North America are connected to at least one local business.
Levy counseled small businesses to use Facebook’s free product, Pages, to create a presence and begin interacting with customers. For those businesses that want to go beyond Pages, he suggested targeting potential customers via core demographics or leveraging sponsored stories to take things customers are already saying or doing and promoting them.
“We hear small businesses say, ‘We are trying to grow our business … we are trying to find new customers,’” said Levy. “We know that businesses, since the beginning of time, have relied on word of mouth to drive sales. That’s what we’re trying to do — provide them with a word of mouth megaphone.”
Levy said Facebook isn’t really a new approach to marketing — it’s rooted simply in how businesses and customers have interacted for years. “A lot of people think about social media as a new property. [Facebook doesn't think about it that way at all,” said Levy. “Ask [small businesses] what’s worked in the past. If it’s coupons, maybe you should do Offers. At a minimum, set up a Page.”
Similarly to our mobile experts, Levy stressed the importance of not focusing solely on metrics, but also customer actions. Rather than just measuring the number of click-throughs or “likes” on a Page, businesses should spend time asking customers how they found them as a way to gauge effectiveness.
There are significant opportunities for local search marketers to leverage their ongoing relationships with small businesses to add social media management to their portfolios. When necessary, local businesses should take advantage of offerings to outsource their social media management so they can benefit from expert counsel and spend more time focusing on what they do best.
Bob Sanders, president and COO of AXIOM Sales Force Development, talked about the need for local search companies to invest in their own salespeople. Sanders said that developing and teaching sales teams to adapt to the evolving landscape and better engage with small business owners is equally important to the pursuit of new products and innovation. He cited a recent survey that found that 53% of small business owners say that conversations with their local salesperson have more impact on their buying decisions than products, brand and price.
Sanders also said that local marketing companies should create a common selling process and integrate that process into CRM systems in order to continuously reinforce desired sales behaviors from their clients. He believes this will help salespeople to effectively and efficiently sell local search services to small businesses and enable them to differentiate product offerings from competitors.
I think that as the local space shifts toward more defined verticals, sales teams will be better positioned to serve as experts on the industries they’re working with and offer common selling processes that deliver the best return on investment for their clients. Local businesses should continue to look for partners they feel understand their business and can provide the tools needed to drive new customers in the door.
Danny Sullivan just tweeted that Google is screwing up royally when it comes to searches for “dana point jet ski”: Good job, Google. You ignore HTML title tag, make up your own title instead. Result: misname a harbor as business twitter.com/dannysullivan/… — Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) April 30, 2013 I thought it would be interesting to [...]
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enlarge If you don’t have a good SEO QA process, make sure you let the SEO guy know when you push new stuff live. You’re likely to break something. Better yet, let him know before you push it live.
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