Local Search Statistics
Statistics about local search from SBI+ M:
• 97% of American internet users use the internet to shop and…
57% "shop online, purchase offline" (NPD Group)
• 90% of online commercial searches result in regular store purchases (proprietary research / comScore)
• 82% of local searchers follow up offline via an in-store visit, phone call or purchase (TMP / comScore)
• 80% of budgets are spent within 50 miles of the home (DMA / proprietary)
• 74% of internet users perform local searches (Kelsey Group)
• 73% of online activity is related to local content (Google)
• 66% of American use online local search, like Google local search to locate local businesses (TMP / comScore / proprietary average)
• 61% of local searches result in purchases (TMP / comScore)
• 54% of Americans have substituted the internet and local search for phone books (comScore networks)
• 35% of all searches are local (DM News)
• 25% of internet searches have a purely local, commercial focus (Kelsey-Bizrate)
Seems like the data is pretty conclusive. Local search and optimizing your website so that you appear as highly ranked as possible, is rapidly gaining in importance.
I think that no matter what technical innovations might come along (like smartphones, 4G networks, whatever,) the internet and your locally focused website will be a critical component of your marketing.
I also think that a critical component of your website's performance and profit will be it's search engine position. We've seen repeatedly that improving local search rankings can double your business; or more.
Filed under Blog, Local Search by . 
Claiming Your Listing in Google's Local Business Center is Critical
Beat the spammers, scammers and unscrupulous competitors from claiming your legitimate business listing!
Google is pulling data for local business listings from places like phone directories (yellowpages, superpages, etc.) and other sources. Once these listings show up, they are "unverified" and business owners can and should claim your listing. Once you have gone through the verification process with Google you can edit and refine your listing.
These are the Canadian instructions on how to do this from Google. You can also add your business if you're not showing up yet, which is highly recommended!
Here's the starting place for the US, UK and Australia.
Claiming your listing and using a strong password can stop someone else from claiming your listing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of reports of unclaimed listings being falsely claimed by others.
Below is an unclaimed listing. It's hard to tell the difference from a claimed listing.
The advantage to the business owner to claim this would be to fill all the information out completely- there are sections for descriptions, reviews and categories; hours of operation; pictures and videos; even coupons.
Then get it optimized and be rewarded by higher local search rankings, more traffic and ultimately more profits.
Filed under Blog, Local Search by .
5 Steps to Protect Your Business Online: "Let's be safe out there!"
One of the unfortunate things about life and the internet is that there are a plethora of unscrupulous people who are more than willing to mess with you online.
Sure, there are lot's of people who want to take your money; and then there are lot's of people who just seem to have nothing better to do than to try to make someone else's life and business more miserable. I honestly dunno; doesn't make sense to me, yet it still happens.
What's the answer?
It is all of our responsibilities to be educated and proactive about our business and personal online reputation. And below we're going to go thru the five steps you need to take care of, to make it harder and less fun for "the bastids to monkey wit ya!"
1. Subscribe to the newsletter of (IMO) one of great, wise men online, Paul Myers. Paul's Talk Biz newsletter is free and he gives you his 112 page book about how to succeed online for signing on. The book is superb as are all Paul's products.
BEFORE you read further, go subscribe to the newsletter. FREE! Seriously, this is the best advice I could give you about learning about the online world.
Go – do it now – you'll thank me later!
These next steps are from the latest "TalkBiz" newsletter.
2. Grab the .com domain for your business name (if it's available) and the local version as well – ie. JimsPlumbing-Vancouver. If you don't plan to do anything online, this is still a must do – just so someone else cannot gum up your rep online.
For $8 or $12, this is cheap insurance!
3. Register your business with your Google Local Business Center. Now!
(You already did that cause you read my earlier blog post, right?) Here's how – Register at the Local Business Center
4. Social media – yes, that foolishness! It's important and going to be more important (and can easily be the best time investment of all your marketing).
Get yourself and your business registered with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and for bonus points MySpace.
Once you are registered, it's more difficult for someone to masquerade as you. You can control what information gets distributed and reap all the benefits.
5. "Tell the Truth." No fakery! No fake testimonials, no flogs (fake review blogs), no getting friends to make glowing reviews, and especially, no trashing the competition!
This is a simple one, but somehow people get fooled into thinking they can get away with stuff online. It will come back to bite you.
5 easy steps that you can get accomplished in a weekend, that will both protect your business and personal reputation online and ultimately help grow your business; even if you don't have a website!
Filed under Blog, Local Search by .
Site Redesign SEO Considerations and Checklist
Making wholesale or even minor site changes is an exciting and challenging time for a business. Making your site bigger and better can promise more traffic, and more business.
However, often the SEO effects of the new site vs. the old are not taken into consideration, resulting in a drop in traffic. Very disappointing!
Whoops! New site and the traffic tanks!
Here’s how to Not have that happen to you!
Before you make any site changes – have analytics in place to fully understand what traffic you are getting and to exactly where.
You must know these elements:
• What keywords/copy are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What graphics are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What videos are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
Look at the internal site linking structure and map it out. Use your sitemap (and xml sitemap) and create a referral sheet.
As the new site is created, you use this link map referral sheet to make decisions on how to setup the new site and the possible costs/benefits of changing the link scheme. When you are changing the site architecture around, there are effects.
For instance, if you are taking a high traffic page, that is a main navigation tab and moving it to a sub navigation tab, there will be a change in traffic to that page. Being aware of that in the planning stages and taking it into account can minimize the traffic impact.
Look at (…and if extensive, map out) external links into the site using Yahoo Site Explorer and other link finding tools.
Use this as another guideline as to the cost/benefit of changing navigation and site structure, navigation, naming conventions, etc. As much as possible, you want to avoid changing your site structure so that you do not break all links of sites that link to you.
Clearly, this is not always possible. Having this map though will allow you to create an intelligent 301/302 redirect scheme that makes the links still lead to the information that other sites originally linked to, rather than a broken link.
As you plan and build the new site, it is important to keep track of the below areas and how they will effect your SEO:
• Site architecture: the overall category/site section scheme, navigation, naming conventions and URL’s – how will changes here affect the search engine referrals and what can be done to compensate?
• Pages – what pages are going to be deleted and what keywords, content and links (internal and external) will this effect?
• What pages are moving within the site structure and how does that effect their importance?
• Home Page – what internal links are changing and what will the effect be on the links to the home page?
• Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, title tags – which are changing and how will this effect search engine referrals?
Checklist
1. Analytics in place on current site tracking:
• What keywords/copy are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What graphics are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
• What videos are getting search referrals, how many and on which pages?
2. Map out current site internal linking structure – use site map and create a referral sheet/map
3. Map out external links into the site. Use this to create a re-direct scheme for the new site.
4. Site architecture: the overall category/site section scheme, navigation, naming conventions and URL’s – how will changes here affect the search engine referrals and what can be done to compensate?
5. Pages – what pages are going to be deleted and what keywords, content and links (internal and external) will this effect? Do these pages need to be deleted?
6. What pages are moving within the site structure and how does that effect their importance? What will the SEO effect be?
7. Home Page – what internal links are changing and what will the effect be on the internal links to the home page?
8. Page titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, title tags – which are changing and how will this effect search engine referrals?
Filed under Blog, Local Search by .
Website Conversion… It's Lost?
There are many elements that go into a website; design, brand, message, offers, most wanted response, usability, heck even coolness.
What about conversion and what is it? My definition of conversion is where the website, viewed as a marketing and especially sales tool, is effective!
I have expert internet marketer friends who would argue that, for the majority online, website conversion has never been found! Can't really argue with the fact that many websites do not achieve much if anything, let alone an increase in business.
Others would say that they have always focused on and optimized their websites for conversion, "It's the lifeblood of an online business, me boy-o!"
I think that for the most part, conversion has been an ignored factor in the creation of websites; especially in the small local business space. In my opinion, building a website without having conversion as "the" major focal point is a huge waste of time and money.
The components of creating a high converting website are well defined. They include elements such as: usability – does it do exactly what you expected; design – the look and feelings it evokes; site analytics and testing – tracking the results and continually refining.
Sidebar: Yep… continually. One of the most important lessons I've learned in websites and internet marketing is: A Website is Never Done!
The best, most effective sites both grow and refine constantly, and that is why they double, triple sales and more!
In my experience, during the site planning and building stages, there are a couple other elements that 99% of sites completely ignore – these are creating a wireframe prototype and then user testing before launch. (I'll get back to these later.)
There are global, critical questions to ask, that will ensure that you frame your website development around it being effective. These questions are:
1. Why am I building a website?
• Is it to get orders?
• Is it to get catalog or information requests, or to get the phone to ring?
• Is it to get email signups?
Each of these dictate a different conversion process. There can be different processes on different pages. Combining them on one page almost always doesn't work and is what many sites try to do.
2. How does our customer see this?
Always, always, always look at the site from your customers point of view. The website is not for you… it's for your customer and the more you can manifest that in the finished website, the more effective it will be!
3. What is the focus of the site and specifically this web page from my customers point of view?
• Buy Something?
• Give me information?
• Click deeper if I want to know more?
Another way of putting this is – What is the most wanted response?
4. Does our navigation scheme answer these below questions immediately?
• Where am I?
• Where can I go?
• Where have I been?
Ultimately, your navigation scheme must follow convention. It's a mugs game to invent your own "cool" system. People spend most of their time somewhere else than on your site.
The #1 rule here is: Don't make me think!
Your navigation must be obvious and unfortunately, the more familiar you are with your developing website, the more blind you become to the obvious and non-obvious. Here's where user testing kicks butt!
You can test 5 people and catch 80% of your usability errors. Test 10 and you'll see 95% of them. The key to this is simple; give them a task and then shut up and watch.
For example: "Sign up for our email list." You'll see where they get stuck. Save opinions and surveys until later… stand behind them and watch where they struggle and then ask them about what happened!
You will discover problems with how you've named things, organized and setup up the page layout, and with the expected sequence of your most wanted responses. These are gold because solving them means more effectiveness!
Do you want more blog posts like this? Comment below telling me you want it...Filed under Blog, Website Conversion by .
Website Optimization – The Basics
Website optimization is the action taken to increase your conversion rate on your current website.
Often I've found that customers are a bit obsessed with traffic. Traffic, traffic, traffic!
Think about it though. If your website sucks at helping your current visitors easily move to being clients, how effective is getting more traffic to your website going to be?
I propose that you improve your current website first. Then once you have proof that it is doing a decent job converting, turn on the traffic taps. Often it can make sense to tackle both of these jobs at the same time.
The first step in any journey into the unknown is to find out where you are. For your current website that means setting up analytics so that you can accurately measure how much traffic you are getting, from which keyword searches or website links, and to which area of your website.
What tool should you use? Google site analytics is a professional grade tool that you can add to your website in 5 minutes. It provides you with multitudes of data on your traffic and you can easily set it up to track your conversions as well.
It's Free! There may be better deals out there, but I have not ran into them. OK?
If you want to know the ins and outs of how to use Google's analytics program they even provide a complete training program – Conversion University.
So now that you have analytics installed on your site. you can begin to make sense of the traffic that you already are getting and what sort of job you are doing in converting that traffic into clients. You need a baseline in order to be able to accurately assess the next changes you're going to make.
There are many areas of conversion to be addressed after this. However, the primary areas boil down to 4; interaction, security, social proof, and moving the free line (or ethical bribery…).
Multiple Ways To Reach You – Interaction
I think most humans like getting answers to their questions, quickly and efficiently.
Sidebar Rant: Please, everybody who enjoys talking to a robotic "smart" answering machine and who doesn't end up yelling into the phone at it, put up your hands… OK – You guys can leave. A pox on the inventors, buyers and sellers of such abominations. Nothing says "we hate our customers" better than that crap.
Provide your customers with many ways to reach you. Telephone (answered by humans please), click to talk, click to chat, email signup, web contact forms, all make it easier for your customer to interact with your sales and service personnel, and that means more business and better conversion.
(Do a Google search for "click to talk" or "click to chat" if you do not know what these are yet. They are extremely effective tools for conversion if your customer value warrants using them.)
You can also use polls, online surveys, and newsletters – emailed, (and if you really want to stand out) old fashion mailed! Ask your customers how they want you to communicate with them and then build your newsletter strategy from that.
Can They Trust You? Security
Your customers must know they can trust you online and there are some important ways to communicate that. First and foremost is the ability to reach you easily.
After that, there are numerous industry certifications that would apply to your niche. There are also security assurances such as Trust Guard, Truste, BBB, McAfee, etc. and spam free certificates that are worthwhile. You want to prominently display your guarantees, and warranties and it's best to show shipping guarantees and assurances during the shopping and checkout process.
(Search in Google for Trust Seals to find out more about these.)
Testimonials, etc. – Social Proof
One of the most powerful unconscious decision aids is social proof… which is where people are more likely to buy something if others have already purchased it.
Depending on your niche you can use client testimonials, awards and other recognition, reviews of your products and service, and case studies/success stories/white papers. These are also most effective when they are also available in other places online – review sites, Google local business center, referenced in articles, etc.
Every company has a different target customer base, so it's important to know what type of content is most effective with them.
Retailers and companies with large catalogs of product or services can benefit from having "Best Seller lists" and "Recommended items".
Promotions – Ethical Bribery
Giving way free stuff will always be an effective way to reward the customer behavior you want to create. Again, it is based on another unconscious decision aid called reciprocity. Basically it's I'll scratch your back and you scratch mine. It works.
Offer your customers a free report, a valuable video, demonstrations, free trials, webinars and podcasts in return for their email address. Many retailers will have a sweepstakes in order to drive email subscriptions.
You can also offer contests, rebates, discounts and free shipping; these are all effective ways to spur action.
These are the cornerstone steps to improve conversion on your website… if they seem familiar it's because they are used in many areas of marketing. They are based on researched and proven psychological principles and have worked for centuries. Use them and profit!
Does this help or do you have a problem with this?Filed under Blog, Local Search, Website Conversion by .
Increase Your Website Conversion 2
Once you have completed the first round of implementing the 4 basic conversion factors:
1. Increase your customers possible interaction points
2. Increase your customers trust of your website
3. Increase the available social proof on your website
4. Use promotions and ethical bribery to reward your most wanted behavior
… there are a number of other areas that can be addressed.
However the next areas do require a lot more work, more management and more expertise. The elements are straightforward however.
The most important elements include testing video, video sales letters, headlines, and your offer/s and their page placement. The key here is continual split or multivariate testing.
There is some exceptional multivariate testing software available. In my opinion though, most customers will get great results from Google's Website Optimizer. It works well, and is easy to setup.
Testing accomplishes 3 things… it allows you to listen to your visitors and give them what they really want; it increases conversions; and it takes all the guesswork out of optimizing your site.
Video online has become very important and will continue to grow in importance. You Tube is the 2nd biggest search engine after Google in the english speaking world.
People love video! From a marketing perspective, video can dramatically shorten the time it takes for people to get familiar with and ultimately trust your company. That familiarity leads to more sales and higher conversions.
There are numerous examples of companies adapting their written sales copy into a video form and increasing their conversion rate. Depending on your niche, it can be very effective to have both, since some professions tend to process information in different ways. ie. Show an accountant a spreadsheet and an ROI analysis; show a creative person images that evoke powerful feelings.
Headlines can often turn a poor converting website into a champion. The good news is that you don't have to be a good copywriter in order to benefit from this.
I have analyzed many websites that did not have an offer. An offer is just a clear way of asking for your customers business, and having one will outperform not having one! Testing different offers using persuasion elements like scarcity, limited quantities, and deadlines can clearly make a difference in your websites conversion.
Other elements to test later are copy, color scheme, elements that are emphasized and their placement on the page, if you are doing e-commerce – all the elements in the shopping cart and fulfillment page.
What are you going to do with this information right now?Filed under Blog, Local Search, Website Conversion by .