The knee-jerk answer to this is, “Yes, people are looking for everything online.” To an extent this is a pretty fair answer; active consumers are connected to the internet with phones, tablets, computers… and have internet access just about all the time – from their phone, at McDonalds, with portable devices, etc.

Marketing has changed, and is continuing to do so, as more devices gain access to the Internet and more locations become practical places from which to connect. These days, people have a vast amount of information at their fingertips, a number of convenient ways to access it, and search engines act as gateways for finding what they need.

This move has caused a shift in advertising as companies scramble to get to where the people are – the yellow pages has moved online (and to a large extent is integrated into search engines); television shows, music, social activity has moved online.

All of this alters the format of display advertising and creates a struggle for companies to monetize from advertising because traditional methods are not suitable; magazines and newspapers have moved online (to the consternation of publishers because of the general “free-ness” of content on the internet).

Google continues to benefit from all of this, as it fuels the transition and answers people’s queries. If you check Google’s stock, you’ll probably see that a lot of the transition has already happened, as almost all of their revenue comes from advertisements that people click on (online).

But Are People Really Searching for My Business Online?

The easiest way to check whether people are searching for your particular business services or products is to use the Google Keyword Tool. From this tool you can see “Local Monthly Searches” which is how many times people search for a business like yours from the location you have selected (probably the United States if you left the default setting).

If you are logged into a Google account you can even change the columns to see the average cost per click advertisers pay when they bid on the term. Unless your product is very new, or if your product is not particularly well-defined in the market, you will probably see search volume for terms that are specifically for your product.

Search advertising is good at answering existing demand. Even if you have a particular niche that can be covered by a group of salespeople, you might supplement those efforts with search advertising. Answering inquiries for your products when they occur is probably going to work better than an unsolicited contact. Search advertising might also reveal unexpected or peripheral markets where you wouldn’t have a sales team assigned.

Probably a better question than “Are people searching for my business” would be “is it cost effective and practical for me to target search engine users?”

Is It Cost Effective and Practical for Me to Target Search Engine Users?

If you are just now asking whether people are searching for your business online, you might already be late to the game. But asking whether it makes sense to get involved with paid search/search advertising/AdWords/SEO/social media, is different than asking if people actually search online for your products.

I think I established that they most likely do, and it takes about five minutes to find out. But whether it is cost effective and practical to make an online marketing effort is a completely different topic. Obviously the answer varies by the type of business you have.

Are you a local business that wouldn’t typically advertise? Are you a franchise? Are you thinking of starting an e-commerce site? Is your business international? Is your business a branded household name? Is your business so large that it is more concerned with reputation management than acquiring customers through marketing?

For any business, here are a couple of easier questions to start with:

• Are your competitors advertising on search engines?
• Based on search query data, what kind of market share are you losing by not actively marketing with search engines?

Hopefully you’ve gained a little insight here on how to start thinking about your online marketing efforts.

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}

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!

At the end of the day, the goal of SEO is to establish your website as an authoritative “subject matter expert” on the topics and keyphrases you want to target; at least in the eyes of the search engines.  To this end, I wanted to share an excellent analogy I heard to help crystalize this notion.

In the early days of the Internet, webpages were conceived of much like academic publications (such as dissertations or journal articles), with descriptive titles and abstracts, deeply informative body content, and references to other authoritative work on the subject.  Translated to a webpage, these correspond quite nicely to the <title>, meta description, <body>, and links to related content.  At a very fundamental level, sites and pages continue to be thought of in this fashion by search engines.

Using this analogy is helpful to understand how a website might be viewed by a search engine as an “expert” on the topic(s) it covers (and thus be rewarded with higher rankings).  Expressed in academic terms, subject matter “expertness” is derived from two basic elements: the size of the body of work on the topic (i.e. the number of pages your website contains dedicated to that topic), and the degree to which that body of work is cited by other relevant, authoritative sources (i.e. links from other high-quality webpages on the subject – both internal and external).

Pretty cool, huh?  Now get out there and act like an expert!  Start fueling your SEO campaign with some high-quality, link-worthy content!

A few weeks back Scott and I had the pleasure of attending SMX East 2011. And now that the dust has settled we figured we’d share with you the most interesting things we learned. Drum roll…

Top 3 Take-Aways from SMX East 2011

3. Panda is here to stay

Not only were there several sessions dedicated entirely to Panda, but it felt like it was discussed in just about all of them. Panda was everywhere! With Panda affecting so many sites and shaking the foundation of so many online businesses, it’s no wonder it was such a hot topic (here is a good Panda Update Video that discusses how it changed SEO forever). There was a lot of interesting discussion and predictions focused around Panda, but what it came down to was that Panda is here to stay. In fact, almost everyone (to a certain degree) agreed that similar adjustments to the algorithm would continue to occur as Google tries to identify ways of filtering out “poor quality” websites. To help protect yourself from being affected by the next big quality update the experts recommended doing the following:

• Write content for your users, not the search engines
• Make sure your site is user friendly – include graphs, charts and images, while excluding excessive amounts of ads
• Remove error pages from your site

2. Schema.org – Don’t get left behind!

Schema.org was launched in June of 2011 and is an effort supported by all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to establish a uniform set of schema, such as html title tags. The idea is to establish one “standard” set of schema for webmasters to use in order to markup their webpages. Although at this point in time, the search engines do not rely heavily on the schema, the experts on the panel all agreed that it is the “way of the future” and several indicated that you will be left behind if you don’t begin to think about using the markup on your pages. This doesn’t mean you should do it now, especially if there isn’t an obvious ROI for your business. It may not make sense to redesign your entire site or CMS to include schema, but when you do overhaul your site or think about updating your CMS, you should definitely consider building in the ability to markup your pages with the new schema.

1. Don’t Ignore Social – It’s part of SEO!

As would be expected, there was also a lot of talk around social and its impact on SEO. One of our favorite sessions was called “Facebook, Twitter, and SEO.” A huge amount of tips and fun facts came out of this session – below are some of our favorites:

• Social media visibility = # of social media events (likes, shares, etc.) linking to a web page, accumulated over a defined time period
• Most popular social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.) depend heavily upon audience and the type of site. Searchengineland.com’s most popular channels are as follows (in order) -  tweets, stumbleupon, shares, and +1′s
• Add Social Buttons to Your Site!
  • Twitter drove 7x more “engagement” and is on only 42.5% of sites
  • Facebook drove 3x more “engagement” and is only on 50.3% of sites
• Social media CAN be a huge time suck. Use technology/tools such as HooteSuite to help you be efficient and get the most out of your social media in as little of time as possible.

Across the board the experts agreed that while specific social signals, such as Facebook likes/shares, may or may not have a direct impact on the algorithm right now, it will be used to some degree in the near future. In addition, social media has a lot of other great benefits, such has helping build brand awareness.

Recap

In total we attended over 20 sessions and had a blast in New York. We hope to see you all there next year!

On August 16, 2011 Google announced the newest version of sitelinks. Sitelinks are links to pages on a website that are displayed below the link description on the search results page. Google explains that often times a broad search term is used even though a specific action is intended. If you search for a local pizza shop, your intention may be to order online. You enter “Ann Arbor pizza” as your query. The local pizza parlor shows up with a sitelink reading “Order Online.” You click the sitelink and go directly to their online ordering system. Now that cheesy goodness can get to your house in fewer clicks!

How do sitelinks work? Google first must determine that there is a strong likelihood that you are searching for a specific site. Say you enter “the met” as your search query. Google assumes you are trying to get information about The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will then display several sitelinks referring to The Met. The more confident Google is that you are searching for that specific site, the more sitelinks they will display. Currently sitelinks are automatically populated by Google. You can influence which pages on your site show up as sitelinks but Google will have the final say.

So what does this mean for your site? Say there is space for ten organic results in Google’s search results page. If someone searches for the name of your company, Google may show links from your site in the top eight results. With the new sitelinks, Google could now take several of those results and include them within their two column sitelinks. Now you have the top result, six sitelinks, and then one more organic link below the sitelinks (equaling the original eight). This now creates more space for other results such as news articles or other mentions of your company on the first page of results.

It is now even more important to monitor what results are showing up for your company’s branded terms. Results that had a lower ranking may now be displayed on the first page of results. Monitoring blogs and news results is one way to keep an eye on what pages may be displayed. Make sure your company is actively sharing and promoting good press and reviews. This can help ensure your company has a positive presence on page one.

Phone numbers within Google AdWords are getting an upgrade. Google will now automatically update all phone numbers within ad text to a Click-to-call number. This will have the largest impact on mobile phones.

While searching on your mobile device, if you come across an ad similar to the one shown, you will now be able to immediately dial the number by clicking on it. Google Voice users signed in on their desktop will also be able to call by clicking.

This feature is separate from Call Extensions which once applied to your AdWords campaign, creates a unique phone number that is trackable by Google. This is done by dynamically creating a phone number that once it is dialed, routs through Google’s system for tracking, and is then immediately forwarded to the company’s call center or office. Google uses a “pay-per-call” model (similar to pay-per-click) to charge for this feature.

Google does not charge for including phone numbers within the ad text. There are many benefits for both Call Extensions and Click-to-call numbers. It is best to use whichever one provides the largest return. Happy calling!

The recent news that Yahoo! is shutting down its popular Yahoo! Site Explorer tool has those of us in the SEO world consider alternatives for backlink research. Yahoo! Site Explorer has long been a handy resource – it’s been reliable and provides great data for informing SEO strategy.

Yahoo! Site Explorer allowed for quick and easy referencing of backlink info.  It helped SEO professionals understand the composition of a site’s backlink profile in a meaningful way.  And, although Yahoo! Site Explorer isn’t the only resource around for this information, it is known for having one of the larger and more reliable link data sets available.

So, what’s an SEO pro to do without Yahoo! Site Explorer?  Some tools worth checking out include the SEOmoz Open Site Explorer and the Majestic SEO Link Index.  Both of these tools have pros and cons, but we recommend playing around with each to help you determine which one best suits your needs.

One final thought on this news of Yahoo! Site Explorer closing down: It’s always smart to understand all of the potential professional resources available.  Taking time to get to know, even at a high level, several tools to help you perform SEO well makes the transition from one to another — depending on a market factor, like Yahoo!’s, or a client need — a simple task versus a complicated transition.

Note: Some graphs were captured from Google’s June Inside Search event video stream which can be viewed here.

Google recently held their Inside Search event in San Francisco. They introduced new technologies and applications for voice search, image search, and Google Goggles. The other main focus of the event was explaining Google’s continued development of mobile search.

So why is Google focusing on mobile search? It has the potential to be another very profitable revenue stream. It can also offset slower periods of desktop search volume.

Below are some rough search volumes for Google by day of the week. Notice that search volume on desktops is highest on Monday. It then gradually trends downward until the weekend. Saturday has the lowest volume of desktop search.

Now compare it to the volume of mobile search. It stays much more consistent from Monday to Thursday. What’s important for Google is that it peaks on Saturday. Mobile search’s busiest time is desktop’s slowest.

Let’s compare search volume throughout the day. Here we see the volume of desktop searches by two hour increments. People obviously search less late at night on desktops. Search volume then grows rapidly until lunch time. People leave their desktop computers and go out into the world. When they return, they have more things they need to search for, hence the peak around 3pm. Volume then steadily declines until a sharp drop off around 11pm when people are heading to bed.

Just as with search volume throughout the week, mobile search volume compliments desktop search over the course of the day.

Notice the peaks at lunchtime and the steady increase. It even peaks at 11pm. People search on their mobile devices until about midnight. At which point volume declines quickly.

Its not just mobile search that people are using. Business Insider’s article on mobile apps vs. web consumption shows that more minutes per day are spent in mobile applications than the web.

businessinsider.com

Why is Google so interested in these mobile search trends? Google’s revenue from AdWords declines with drops in search volumes. Obviously mobile search is not on the same scale as desktop. If Google can make searching on mobile devices easy to use, more effective, and ultimately more widely used, they can offset some of the dip in their AdWords revenue.

So what does this mean for your business? Mobile devices have much smaller screens compared to the large monitors of desktops and laptops. When viewing mobile versions of the search engine results page, there is often only room for one or two sponsored ads.

If your business can achieve the top placement your ad will take up the majority of a users screen. If your campaign is well targeted the ad may have a higher chance of getting clicked. Less competition and a larger share of the visible screen could increase click through ratios.

Mobile may provide lower volumes of traffic but depending on what type of conversion you’re seeking, it may prove to be profitable. Users often search for something on their phone during the day, then visit the site directly when they get home to their desktop. Mobile search could be another effective branding or lead generating strategy.

It is now up to Google to continue to improve mobile search. Additional features like voice search can grow the use of mobile search. Google is focused on this to improve their business, you may be able to as well.

We’re excited that our competitive intelligence toolbox just got better.  We recently began using Bright Edge, a tool that automates our performance tracking and reporting capabilities, while offering a wealth of competitive intelligence tools that help our search engine optimization campaigns.  Combined with our analysts’ industry-leading expertise, Bright Edge will help Pure Visibility clients Own Page One™ more effectively and efficiently than ever before!

Bright Edge supports our own analysts’ abilities by delivering a wide range of insightful reports, expediting the mechanics of routine campaign monitoring. With this new tool, our analysts can get to a deeper level of insight more quickly than ever before.  Understanding our clients’ performance in the context of their competitors, we can formulate and adapt our SEO strategies in a far more informed fashion, for the greatest ultimate success.

Bright Edge also enables us to develop custom dashboards for our clients.  These dashboards are similar to the ones used by Google Analytics, and allow us to slice and dice specific intelligence by business unit, product type, or semantic group — a real bonus to our diverse, global clients.

Tools like these take our SEO practice yet another step beyond typical SEO best practices. Pure Visibility is again outpacing our competitors…while helping our clients do the same.