Five Steps to Optimizing Local Search Marketing to Secure and Promote Your Brand

Yesterday we covered the first two steps of what a single location business can do to make their business stand out against a franchise operation with multiple outlets.

3. On Site Optimization

So now you have claimed all your local search listings, and optimized them to take full advantage of how their fields influence the local search results pages in search engines. Great! It’s time to do some high-level optimization to your own web page to appear clear and concise in the organic search results.

Write the homepage <title> and <meta> description so they both appear as complete thoughts instead of being cut off in mid-sentence. If the user is searching with the intent of going to your website, they will skip the local listings completely. In the search results page, your website needs to clear, concise, and grab the attention of the user. Most search engines allow a maximum of 60 characters for the title, and 160 characters for the description.

4. Paid Search and Competitor Terms

Other companies are allowed to bid on your brand name, however, they are not allowed to falsely represent themselves as your company.

Advertisers often use DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in the titles of their ads as a way to increase the perceived relevance of an ad to the search query. This gets tricky when the search query is a branded term that fits in the ad title parameters.

In the ProFlowers.com AdWords account, a search for “University Flower Shop” would trigger a broad match hit of the keyphrase “Flower Shower”. Using DKI though, University Flower shop would appear as the ad title (because it fits in the 25 character parameter), meaning that people could click the ad wrongly thinking it would direct them to University Flower Shop.

DKI Ad Example: {KeyWord: Flower Shop}

Search Query Example	University Flower Shop	Flowers in Ann Arbor Michigan
Num. of Characters in Query	< 25	> 25
Displayed Ad Title	University Flower Shop	Flower Shop

When it comes to branded terms, competitors are not allowed to use your brand name in their ad title. Because of this, using DKI on competitor terms often gets advertisers into trouble. If you own a business and someone is using your business name in the title of their ad, you can contact the advertiser directly or send a trademark grievance to Google.

But there is more! If your brand name is too vague (as the business name “University Flower Shop” is above), it is okay for a competitor to use your brand name in an ad title. Because there are dozens of stores across the US named University Flower Shop, ProFlowers is not overstepping their bounds.

5. Bonus! Free Listing of Local “Offers” and “Deals” to Stand Out

Especially if your business is in a very competitive market, and everyone has optimized their local pages, it can be difficult to stand out. A new feature in both Google Places and Yelp is the ability to promote offers for (i.e. “Three free balloons with purchase of bouquet!”).

These are free to post, and give your listing more precious real estate on the search results page. And in Google Places & Google Maps, it puts a green star next to your listing which immediately attracts the searcher’s attention and makes you stand out from the others. An example of what the green star looks like next to Paid and Places ads can be seen in the image below.

This makes you more noticeable, attracts attention, and increases your chance of a click (since people love saving money). A definite Win-Win situation.

Five Steps to Optimizing Local Search Marketing to Secure and Promote Your Brand

Running a small business is tough stuff, and complicated even more when large national brands begin throwing their weight around and engage in questionable practices. Small business owners are left wondering what is and is not legal when it comes to aspects of online marketing. If you’re a small business owner, here’s what you can do to protect and promote your brand, and to help you recognize when another business has overstepped their bounds online.

Here’s the kind of thing that could happen. Last week I spoke with University Flower Shop of Ann Arbor, who were vexed that a national competitor of theirs, ProFlowers.com, had done some very questionable and shady marketing tactics to attain new business, at their expense.

ProFlowers.com claimed the Google Places page of UFSAA, and changed the phone number to their own. Because of this, anyone who tried to call UFSAA ended up talking to the customer service department at ProFlowers. This was shady indeed.

ProFlowers was also showing up in the AdWords listings for University Flower Shop terms. Again, UFSAA worried that they were losing business because of unfair advertising methods.

So as a small business, what can you do to protect and promote your brand, and what is unauthorized when it comes to aggressively competing on the search results page?

1. Secure Your Local Listings (Before Others Do)

The easiest way to prevent others from wrongly claiming your local listings is to beat them to it. Google Places makes it difficult to claim a listing that is not yours, however there are loopholes that shady-savvy marketers have discovered, as UFSAA found out.

Below I’ve segmented the local search sites into three levels of decreasing importance. When claiming your local listings, I suggest fully optimizing each tier (see Tip 2, below) before moving on to the next level, as they will have the greatest impact in creating better visibility for your brand on the search results page.

Tier 1: Google Places & Yelp.

Tier 2: Facebook, Yahoo Local, Bing Local

Tier 3: Yellow Pages, Localeze, Superpages, CitySearch, Yellowbook, and MapQuest.

2. Optimize Your Local Listings to Bolster Local SEO

Each interface has different fields to populate. As an example, I am focusing here on the options Google Places provides, and the significance of each.

Very simply, the more complete your Places page is, the more prominently it appears on the search results page, and the more likely the user is to find the information they were seeking. Including all this additional information and claiming your local listings bolsters your local SEO strategy, allowing you to dominate the organic search listings for highly relevant traffic.

Company, Address, Phone: These fields are the essence of local; alerting the search algorithm that you are indeed relevant and within the local radius of the search.
Note: Phone number is especially important in this instance, because local searches are much more likely to be done from a mobile device, and these users have a high propensity to call you.

Email & Website: Not essential, but including these fields allows the user to learn more information about your brand, and gives them an alternate means of contacting you.

Description: 200 characters are given to sum up your business. Depending on how well known your brand is, you may wish to write your slogan, give important details of your company (locally owned since 1985!), or attract users with short marketing copy (Lowest prices on flowers, guaranteed).

Categories: Five categories are given, and I recommend using them all. This helps both the search algorithm and the user understand your expertise better.

Photos & Videos: Boom! One of the biggest things you can do to increase your real estate on the search results page, and attract a users attention is to add photos (up to 10) and videos (up to 5) to the local listings page. Often times businesses do not include any good multimedia with their listings, making those that do stand out amongst the pack.

Hours of Operations: One of the main reasons people use local search is to find out if/when businesses are open. This is an optional field, but a very important one.

Payment Options: Letting the user know ahead of time what is accepted as payment is a good business practice. You’re a restaurant that doesn’t accept American Express? Please let me know so I’m not out of luck after ordering dinner.

Additional Details: This section is reserved for other details customers should know about your business. Do you validate parking? Include that. You have student discounts every Thursday? Include that. Accept competitors’ coupons or interesting trades? Include it!

Stay tuned for the other three tips… coming tomorrow!

Pirates have taken over at PV! See below…

Subject: Avast! Pretty Kitty Time In Your August Burndown

Eric,

Yarrrrrgh!
I’m relaying this for Gayathri,
who I just made walk the PPC plank,
into the shark-infested Sea of Invalid Clicks.
She was a scurvy sea dog,
whose soul now wonders erratically in the Land of Lost Impression Share.
Her ghost is forever known as the Vixen of Vengeance,
and haunts those who do not participate on the PrettyKitty account.

To save you from her ghost,
and because I’m over allocated right now,
and because you have some extra time for this month,
five hours of time for PrettyKitty was transferred to your lane for this month.

According to my treasure map,
this account is paid for with golden doubloons!

You will probably not use all of these hours,
and that is not a problem.
But if anything comes up this month that involves PrettyKitty,
you’ll have the time for it.

Stay safe,
and always remember,
dead men tell no tales.

Swab the poop-deck!,

Brent  Bowles
Optimizer Prime / Pirate Search Analyst
Pure Visibility, Inc.

Last week marked my two year anniversary of being the resident Analyst/Astronaut-in-training at Pure Visibility.

Its been a great couple years taking on the world of internet marketing, and to celebrate the occasion, I requested that everyone create a portrait of me commandeering a spaceship. The results were awesome! They will all be framed and displayed in the hallways of the Pure Visibility office, so next time you find yourself in downtown Ann Arbor, be sure to stop by and check out the “Brent In Space” gallery.

For those who don’t think they’ll make it to Ann Arbor any time soon, I’ll post the pictures here. Enjoy.

*Pro-tip: My profile is one of only 234 LinkedIn results that appear when searching for “analyst AND astronaut”.  Its true, try it.

This week, Twitter unveiled its new revenue model of ‘Promoted Tweets‘. I wondered, what do Twitters 105 million registered users, who make up 600 million searches per day, think of this sponsored advertising that will start to appear in their previously advertisement free space?

To answer this question, I went to our social media ‘listening tool’, Radian6, to take a deeper look into Twitter users reaction to this news since it broke. For this, I’ve hidden the neutral sentiment, which accounts for ~90 of all posts and are generally just links to articles describing the changes, and focus this post solely on the positive and negative sentiment.

It seems most twitter users (78%) that share their opinions on the subject have a positive reaction to it, while only 22% expressed a negative response. Let’s take a look at what some of the good and bad comments have to say:

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Positive Comments

“Thinking of ways that OCHA (and the humanitarian community) could use Promoted Tweets to aid in the coordination of emergency response”

“Would prefer a promoted tweet in which i search for starbucks and kara thrace brings me a coffee. get to it, twitter”

“I think that Promoted Tweets have great potential to *improve* #marketing relevance: http://bit.ly/cLIbR6″

“Bravo will use Promoted Tweets to engage users on shows and will show some user tweets live on TV #aadigital”

“I really like @johnbattelle’s take on Promoted Tweets and resonance http://bit.ly/aCbuNI”

“Favs are dead. The new barometer of success will be Promoted Tweets. It’s like writing movie reviews and aiming for the box every time.”

“So now which firm will be first to claim paid tweet placement services for campaigns?: http://bit.ly/cdbPtt #twitterGetsRevenueModel”

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Negative Comments

“Twitter unveils promoted tweets. Great, I start twittering and twitter starts advertising ”

“So far my impression of Twitter’s forthcoming ‘promoted tweets’ – one big pop up ad.”

“I hope twitters new ‘promoted tweets’ monetization scheme doesn’t cut into my earnings for plugging MORT’S DELI IN TARZANA.”

“I’m all for monetization but fail to see how paid tweets can be the answer. willing to look at it in action, but have serious doubts”

“I’d pay twitter for filters. Tonight I’d block Glee, Promoted Tweets, the #