Convert Offline

Having spent so much time over the past year reading about SEO, in an effort to figure out the best-practices of great SEOs; I have found one principle that comes up time and again: Symmetry. I think great SEOs look for single tactics that provide a turn-on for the site’s visitors and the search engines.

The simplest example of this would be… to state what the site is about in clear writing and then highlight it in some fashion, the h tags are mentioned quite a bit. This will help search engines to know what the site is about, while preventing folks from hitting the back button because they weren’t sure they were in the right place. However simple that is… I think that is an SEO best-practice.

But what about link building…? Can I find symmetry for a local service business?

In an article, co-authored by Eric Ward, Robin Nobles and John Alexander titled Over 125 (Legitimate) Link Building Strategies, written over 5 years ago (I think), it states:

“Our position is pretty straight forward…it’s not the technique that we are concerned about, it’s the intention.”

What this quote means to me is that I should not try to get links to the site with the sole “intention” of ranking the site. That, I should instead, find some legitimate business reason for that site to link to mine and then my site will naturally move up in the serps. In other words: find symmetry.

The symmetry that I find most referred to in link-building is to find links from topically related authority domains that will provide high quality traffic. It is difficult to argue with this tried and true method from the traditional-link-building-vault: except that it really won’t work for a local service business.

Why? Because the best traffic producing links for a local service business are from Internet Yellow Pages, but they won’t help a website to move up naturally in the serps. (I recently made the mistake of trying to explain to someone that links are an important part of ranking on Google, but IYP links don’t count; I thought their head was going to explode).

Of course, the local service business should still get links from IYPs, paid or otherwise, depending on ROI, traffic needs etc., but where does that leave us with respect to the symmetry we seek.

Are there other sites in such a geographically narrow space that I could rely on for quality traffic? I’m sure there are, but I might need to begin measuring conversion rates in years and decades instead of weeks and months.

What is the very best link building strategy for a local service business?

Here is what I believe to be the answer to that question:

In the same way that the best links for traditional websites are those that help with traffic, the best links for a local service business are those that provide help with conversions.

I have seen empirical evidence that the mention of associations to which the business belongs in print ads can lead to more phone calls from that ad. The Better Business Bureau is the most obvious example of this type of association, others are chambers of commerce etc.. But I think there are even better ones. Most preferably, they would come from organizations that have huge barriers to entry and are topically related to the service provided by the business.

They are the ultimate spamguard for search engines because no spammer is going to study Landscape Architecture for 4 years just so that they could get a link from the American Society of Landscape Architects. So, they should provide an advantage over other types of links in ranking, while at the same time make a visitor more likely to hire such a business when that membership is displayed prominently on the website.

That feels like the link building symmetry for a local service business that I’ve been seeking.

Any membership or association that would help a visitor decide to do business with that business qualifies.

Multiple associations and memberships displayed prominently on the site raises the credibility of the business owner. And this could create a predisposition to hiring the business with less sensitivity to price. Which is the basic symmetry of all advertising.

Subscribe | Submit

Miriam Ellis is in the midst of creating an excellent series of interviews with local seo’s over at the SEO Igloo. I was humbled to be part of the group she is interviewing and I really enjoyed doing it. Thanks again for the invite Miriam.

In the introduction to the local seo interview series, Miriam listed a number of things that she felt a good local SEO should be able to do. Among them was to explain the value of the service without first having to turn the client into a local SEO. I thought this was very well put and made me realize that I haven’t really sat down and thought about my presentation as I contemplate opening my own shop.

So, I set down and penned it out. As someone who has done an awful lot of this kind of sales training, I often advise doing this as I believe more can be learned than can be taught.

Thought you might enjoy it… And if you find any pitfalls, I would love the feedback…

Set The Agenda

I would like to begin by giving you an overview of my philosophy on internet advertising, we’ll talk about that for a bit and then I’ll review some of the challenges and limitations that we are likely to face. After that, if it sounds like something you might be interested in… then we can start to talk about price and your budget for the project. Would that be ok?

My Philosphy

When people use the internet they are typically looking at websites… and they are using search engines to find those websites. In fact, people do 90% of their searching on 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo & MSN. (Reminder to self: Let the client hold the stats; they are engaging and can help build rapport).

When they search for a local business like yours that behavior changes just a little bit. According to this study from Comscore there are 6 engines that will bring 90% of the traffic. So, I think our time is best spent targeting these 6 sites, with a majority of that time devoted to Google and Yahoo. Does that make sense?

From there I want to focus on two things:

First, continually increase your visibility on these engines in your target area; this will bring you the most traffic.

And second, monitor and continually improve the cost-effectiveness of acquiring each customer; that will maximize your ROI.

Let’s talk about visibility first. Visibility to me means coming up on the first page of results when someone is searching for your type of business or your business name. And then trying to get closer to the top of the first page. There are 3 areas, each with their own strengths and weaknesses that we will focus on to bring traffic: (Show a page of search results… )Here – PPC, Here – Maps/Local, Here – Organic. Do you agree that if we focus on these 3 areas we can maximize the traffic you will receive?

I’ll talk about the challenges and limitations of these in just a bit… but before I do want to speak for just a minute about how to make this most effective for you in terms of cost.

The way to continually get the most bang for each dollar you spend in advertising is to focus on your conversion rate. The more of your visitors that actually contact you and spend money with you, the more cost effective your program is going to be. There are 3 ways to get an awesome conversion rate:

1. Get really lucky.
2. Understand the most important copy elements of a local ad and get really lucky.
3. Understand the most important copy elements of a local ad and test.

To test the website, we will simply borrow a trick from the direct mail industry. In direct mail, what they do is to create two mailers, shuffle the deck, and mail them out. When you track the results, one will get a better return than the other. So, they kill the loser and try to create a new ad that will beat the previous winner. Then repeat.

With this approach you have the opportunity to continually increase the number of customers who contact you, while at the same time, reduce your cost of acquiring each one. Does that make sense?

The Next Step

Hopefully, I have now earned the right to ask them questions about their business to better understand what they need to accomplish. And then can review the differences in the way organic, ppc and local/maps/iyps can help meet them meet those business objectives given their most important keywords and target geography. And finally to make sure they understand the risk/reward/no guarantee aspects of internet marketing.

Subscribe | Submit

Why does this listing Rank #1 for House Painting in Paramus NJ?

• The listing is credited with 69 web pages pointing at the name of the business but these are all essentially scraper sights that have picked up the listings of the competition as well. And there is no website, so no links.
• The business has no reviews.
• No relevant keyword in the name or business description
• No alphabetical advantage.
• No proximity to city centroid advantage, in fact, the business is not located in the town searched.
• None of the categories on Superpages.com have anything to do with Painting, nor in the business profile, which was filled out with care…
• Because the business does not do House Painting… just Power Washing.

This is exactly the type of thing that Local Seo’s complain about… Results like these that are seemingly unexplainable. Well, I might have an explanation.

When I wrote Top 3 in Google Maps, back in August, I asserted that allpages.com was the key to ranking in Google Maps. Thanks to the wonderful work of Mike Blumenthal here and here, I now believe that Allpages is a key not the key. But I also believe it has special powers (wow, that’s a little over the top).

Let me explain:

As I wrote before, I think Google uses Allpages because this site does not allow a business owner to modify the listing at all. All the information comes from the local telco. This allows Google access to local information that is hand-edited by telephone operators. Brilliant if you ask me.

I also know that part of every phone record is a service date. That is the date that the business line becomes effective. In effect, knowing that service date, gives an accurate account of the age of the business.

Now, the theory part: If you were Google, would YOU consider the age of the business when displaying results? I would. It would produce so much of a better result for consumers than the alphabet or the city centroid or anything else. The age of the business is something we all consider when making a purchase. Why wouldn’t they do this?

Now, back to the special powers part and more theory. I am suggesting that if the category you are listed in on Google Maps comes from Allpages.com, it comes with additional information… the age of the business line, and that information provides extra Google Maps Juice. Similar to domain age in regular SEO, but perhaps more powerful.

Now for this theory to have a chance of being right, I would be able to find the listing for this business in the yellow pages under the heading Painting Contractors, remember the information would originate from the telco, and this would be quite a coincidence because this business does not provide that service. And I would be able to find this business listed under Painting Contractors in Allpages; again quite a coincidence.

Off to the library I go…

I find the yellow pages that is local to Hawthorne and eagerly look through the Painting Contractors heading for the listing. It is not there. If you saw my face at that moment you might have thought I lost my first born. I began checking other directories, each time without success. I found only his advertising under the heading of Power Washing. Until… one last thought…

I picked up the Business to Business Yellow Pages and lo and behold… BINGO. Whooommp, there it is. I could hear the conversation in my head between the telephone operator and the business owner that must have taken place years before. “I’m sorry Power Washing is not available in the Business Directory, would you like to choose another heading?” Sorry… Sorry… “Alright, just throw the listing in the Painting heading, it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Now, to check Allpages.com:

There it is… 2 for 2… that is enough for me to think this idea is worth testing. Here is what I think we need to do test:

Check your local yellow pages… only the ones put out by the telephone company for the listing. Check any and all books put out by the Telco… there may be up to 3 depending on where you live: the regular phone book, the B to B and the companion. You are looking for the free listing… the one that comes with the business line. It will be in upper and lower case, light type.

Check those listings against Allpages.com to test the first part of the theory and then if you want to add or change your categories in Google Maps, call the telephone company or your yp rep and have your free listings moved. If you are in an area with multiple local books, like the B to B or companion, put the listings in different headings to spread the love. And then wait.

Here is what Allpages has to say about waiting… which could also account for the slow response time of Google Maps updates.

Subscribe | Submit

Yes, I know Benjamin Franklin was not a President but I do believe he is as responsible for the way in which we are governed as any one man. And though Thomas Jefferson was an awesome writer… I don’t think he would have made the front page of Digg, nearly as much as Old Ben.
Take this letter; which Benjamin Franklin wrote following the repeal of the Stamp Act, when the British were insisting that the colonies help pay the printing costs of the now worthless stamps.

The whole proceeding would put one in mind of the Frenchman that used to accost English and other strangers on the Pont-Neuf (a pedestrian bridge in Paris), with many compliments and a red hot iron in his hand; Pray Monsieur Anglois, says he, Do me the favour to let me have the honour of thrusting this hot iron into your backside? Zoons, what does the fellow mean! Begone with your Iron or I’ll break your head! Nay Monsieur, replies he, If you do not choose it, I do not insist upon it. But at least, you will in justice have the goodness to pay me something for the heating of my iron.

Quoted from: Benjamin Franklin, self-revealed;: A biographical and critical study based mainly on his own writings,

Other suggested reading:
The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (Which I’ve read…)
Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School ( Which I intend to read soon…)

Subscribe | Submit

Armed with an index finger, pencil and an analytics package (other than google’s), I set out to see what I could I learn about those folks searching for local service businesses by looking at what they typed in. Here is what I found. (I included a scanned page of the “notes” so you could appreciate the “scientificness” of this study. I also find it useful to examine 2 campaigns separately, so that differences can be observed, as well as averages.)

I studied the campaigns of 2 different businesses and business types in different states. Both are service businesses with average customer worths in the $thousands.

Local Search Campaign NY

1. Out of the 529 queries tracked, 253 contained a geographic indicator.
2. 176 typed the business type first and then the geography; i.e. widget maker timbuktu
3. 60 typed the geographic indicator first, followed by the business type; i.e. timbuktu widget maker
4. Of the 127 queries where the searcher used the name of the county, 91 omitted the word -county- and 36 included it; i.e widgets orange vs. widgets orange county.
5. 108 included the state as part of the query.
6. Of those 21 typed out the state and 87 used the 2 letter abbreviation.
7. 116 typed only the name of the city or county without including the state.
8. 2 used a zip code
9. 27 queries included the word -in-
10. 40 were navigational queries for competing firms.

Local Search Campaign NJ

1. Out of the 298 queries tracked, 177 contained a geographic indicator.
2. 105 typed the business type first and then the geography; i.e. widget maker timbuktu
3. 36 typed the geographic indicator first, followed by the business type; i.e. timbuktu widget maker
4. Of the 107 queries where the searcher used the name of the county, 2 omitted the word -county- and 105 included it; i.e widgets orange vs. widgets orange county.
5. 85 included the state as part of the query.
6. Of those 15 typed out the state and 71 used the 2 letter abbreviation.
7. 86 typed only the name of the city or county without including the state.
8. 4 used a zip code
9. 47 used the word -in-
10. 17 were navigational queries for competing firms. 42 were navigational queries for this business and these seemed to accelerate as the year went on.

Conclusions

1. I believe queries that include a geographic indicator are more likely to convert into sales for local businesses so I begin there. And I would not pay someone for “clicks” unless the report somewhat resembled this. For instance, if you get your click report and you see that only 25 out of 2000 queries include geography and you’re a local service business… run for the hills.
2. People are more likely to use the sequence: “business type + geo” than “geo + business type”; about 75% -25%
3. (answered in 2)
4. Whether a “county searcher” includes the word -county- or not can vary wildly from place to place. Here is an example where an average would be of little use. In the NJ campaign, nearly every searcher included the word and in the NY campaign, the majority omitted it. The conclusion is to test for each county in which you advertise.
5. About half the queries that include a geographic indicator, include the state. This occurred in both campaigns.
6. Most people use the two letter state abbreviation (>80%). At least in New York and New Jersey they do.
7. (concluded in 5,6)
8. Zip Codes are nearly worthless.
9. The word -in- is fairly common in queries that include a geo indicator, as in ‘widgets in Timbuktu.’ More than 10% in geo-queries in the NY campaign and 25% of geo queries in the NJ campaign included the word.
10. Re-read #10 in both campaigns above: If you don’t have a website that can be found by searchers that are looking for you, you are losing a ton of business.

Subscribe | Submit

If you’re a small business with very good content, the kind that those who hang out in social media sites would like, I would suggest submitting that content to stumbleupon. Because when these folks finally turn off their computer (it could take awhile) they will shop in their local area and I bet an awful lot of them will use Google to do it. And boy will you stand out with a Stumbler in this sea of 10.

This is an Actual Screen shot pulled from Google during a search for plumbers in Dallas

Subscribe | Submit

I recently read an article by Dr Pete discussing conversion rates and one of the points he made was that nobody seems to share theirs. Hmmmm… could that be because we are all insecure about our conversion rate. Maybe… no one seems to be able to answer the question: What is a good conversion rate? And few things lead faster to insecurity than ignorance. Will publishing one’s conversion rate lead to the spontaneous purchase of a sports car with a very large engine as other shortcomings have.

I don’t know about that; but I’m up for a game of… I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours… I’ll start.

The 2 metrics I am most interested in are: the overall conversion rate (those who contacted the business) and the % of visitors who ended up at the contact page from other pages on the site (the path).

So, here I am exposed: (the website belongs to a small house painting company, it’s real)

Just About 4.5% of the uniques contacted the business.

Now, it’s your turn… please show me yours. Please use the comments below and tell me about the conversion rate of your best site… and maybe a tip about how you did it.

Now, I’m not sure if this is really a “small analytic” or not; but I do think it can do better. So, I’m going to split test it using the Google Optimizer.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share more about the test I set-up and from to time to time provide progress reports. And remember this is all about getting this dirty little secret out of the closet, so please comment and share as little or as much as you like… thanks!

For more about conversion myths.

Subscribe | Submit

Mike Belasco’s – Mike The Internet Guy Blog, has always been one of my favorites in the local space. It is certainly one that I subscribe too… but in the last couple of months it was the same 3 posts each time I logged on… until last week.

It came back to life… a new article flashed up on the center of my iGoogle home page… Mike announced his return! Curious and seeing an opportunity to learn, I reached out to Mike for an interview.

It was Super Bowl weekend and I knew from Mike’s post how busy he was… so I proposed an email interview.

We went back and forth a few times and if it is possible for a person to be “approachable” by email, Mike is… and in the true spirit of the SEO multi-tasker, Mike had the answers back to me within an hour of Brady’s 4th and 20 Hail Mary!

For those who don’t know Mike; he runs a successful local SEO company in Denver.

Mike, you were on hiatus for a few months; was that because you were busy putting together seOverflow or depressed after the Rockies loss in the World Series?

Tim, it was a little of both plus some well deserved vacation time, and a whole lot of work! I am actually a bigger Astros fan than Rockies fan, but it would have been nice to see the Rockies win it all (I have been a Colorado resident since 1996).

Could you tell us a little about seOverflow and how it’s different from what you were doing before as “Mike the Internet Guy”?

seOverflow was established to better target my best customers and referral sources: web designers, marketing consultants, and other SEO companies. The company has a little more professional and “bigger” image that I think will help the business grow even larger. We are doing the same great SEO/PPC with the same great people, but now have a new image to grow with us.

Could you expand a little on what seOverflow does for other SEO firms, what is its Unique Selling Proposition?

As for us working with other SEO firms, we can be the “go to” overflow company for many different types of SEO/PPC firms. We have several companies right now that refer business to us whether that be a straight referral or just a case of offloading some work that has been overbooked. The unique selling proposition is that we provide very high quality work for very reasonable prices and don’t off load the work to low quality staff overseas. We care for other companies clients just like our own.

Hmmmm… good to know that service exists. You mentioned on your recent post that your goal was to get back to being the best blog in the local space, Could you give us a little preview of what to expect?

Well my goal is to blog once/twice a week on seOverflow blog (custom theme coming soon) and the Mike The Internet Guy Blog. I am presently making an editorial calendar of posts I want to get to and then I will also cover more recent news and discoveries I make along the way.

I look forward to some good reading, before we wrap up, how about a tip? What are a couple of things you would do if you were a local roofing or painting contractor who just got their first web site and are looking to get new customers from the web?

Tim, thats a good question and I would hate to give you one of those “it depends” answers so I’ll just speak from my experience working with new small businesses. Typically these business got some type of “out of the box” website and have virtually no budget to spend on search marketing. Their websites are typically very hard to work with as they are either hosted in some type of CMS or contain way too much text inside images. So what I would recommend to a business person in this situation is to sign up with a service that will get your name, address etc out to as many of the IYP and review sites as possible. I would then recommend developing a program whereby customers are encouraged to leave feedback and comments on these sites. A small PPC campaign could also be a good bet if managed correctly. I would then recommend taking the profits and investing in a very nice website and SEO. Again though it totally depends on the situation however including the size of the are the company is geo-targeting, the competitiveness of their services etc.

Good advice… thanks Mike

Tim, thanks again for the interview. I appreciate the opportunity. I am also looking forward to reading your blog on a more regular basis as well. I checked out some of your articles and you have got some real juicy stuff in the archives. Keep up the good work!

Visit seOverlflow’s About Us page to learn more about Mike and get a quick introduction to his Local Seo Team.

Subscribe | Submit

Rather than right down my New Year’s Resolution, I decided to resolve it. Sure, it’s a month late but I bet most resolutions have been discarded by this time, so maybe I’m ahead of the game after all. Anyway, the resolution? Oh, yes… to update my blogroll. I have tried to include those blogs that have provided me the most help and inspiration over the past year as I’ve been pouring through material on local internet marketing.

This is the list I wish I had a year ago. If you are a small business or someone just starting out learning about marketing a small business on the web, save yourself a year and bookmark/subscribe each one. You can thank me later.

Of course, most of the links represent the ‘Best in Local’; but others are great blogs on those subjects which one is going to have to become familiar if they want to really learn search marketing. I’ll let you discover those for yourself.

Subscribe | Submit