Convert Offline

I’ve been seeing more and more local campaigns set up on search engines with no local phone number. The only number on these sites is a 1-800#… I assume this is done for analytics… and it is a bad idea in my opinion. Let me show you why.

Open up your Yellow Pages and flip through it… c’mon, I know you have one… and look for ads that have 800#’s. I’ll bet you find very few.

Do you know why?



Applying this YP concept to your Website should crank up
conversion, while providing ‘local seo’ benefit. (addt’l locations)

All the studies shows that people prefer calling local numbers and that having only an 800 number in an ad will significantly reduce call volume. If 800#’s worked better, the Yellow Pages would be loaded with them, after all, at one time both products were sold by the same company.

Want to take it one step further; check this out from YP Commando:

Research on over 77,000 Yellow Pages ads using metered telephone lines found that ads with multiple local phone numbers received many more calls than ads with only one local number.

Ads with only a single toll-free number received the fewest calls. Having both local and toll free tends to increase call counts slightly.

So, if you believe that you can apply lessons learned in local advertising from yellow pages to the web… and I firmly do - STOP using 800#’s in your local website for the sake of analytics. Use local numbers instead, and use many.

In my last post, I showed you a keyword report from a campaign put together by a yellow pages company managing a paid search campaign for a local advertiser. In this post, I am going to show you another keyword report and let you compare it. And again I will ask you to sound off in the comments. Thank You Local Seo for taking the time to comment on the last post.

For clarity, let me begin by defining “keyword report” as I used the term - the word or phrase typed into a search engine prior to the ad being clicked as reported by the analytics program.

Here is the report from the campaign set up by a yellow page company if you have not seen it:
Keyword Report

Now, let’s take a look at another keyword report for a different local business engaged in search marketing. They are in different lines of business, so it is not comparing apples to apples. But this is closer to what I would expect when looking at the analytics for a local campaign. (geographic references have been ’smudged’ for privacy reasons)

3 Take Aways

1) In my opinion, it is optimal to see geography plus category - I believe this represents a transactional search and the searcher is close to making a buying decision.

2) The next best thing would be just the category. 49% of local searchers report searching this way. In my opinion, it could represent a transactional search or an informational search, which makes it slightly less valuable than a search that included a geo-modifier, but I would still want to come up in that search using geo-targeting.

3) Advertise for the keyword that is the name of your business…wow… look at the “names” in the searches above. These are the names of competing landscape architectural firms. Did these companies lose referral business because they were hard to find on the web?