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I read Matt McGee’s post on promoting Google Favorite Place status on more than just your window and I thought how right he is!

The problem is I couldn’t find a badge to display on the site. So, we created one. Here it is:

If you are a favorite place in Google Maps and would like to display this on your site please feel free to right-click and download.

Because I do believe this is good social proof, when used it I put it in a prominent place in the left side bar with a link to the maps listing that is the favorite place. If you would like to see an example, you can see I did it here for a garage door company in San Diego

The analytics of local search are different than e-commerce; avg. time on site, pages/visit & bounce rate are largely measures of engagement and e-commerce. Yet, us local searcherati try to fit these square pegs into our round holes. Why? Because these are the tools Google Analytics made available to us.

Let’s face it, we never considered these metrics prior to the GA installation, and then after we hooked up GA, we had to do searches on Google just to find out what these terms meant. And now we use these terms as if they are truly meaningful. Well no more! It’s time to add a 12th internet marketing skill…

From now on we are going to use only the metrics that we can tie directly to revenue and profitably. I know that’s boring when compared with exciting things like “engagement”, believe me I know, I love it when you talk that way. However, times being what they are we must consider the more practical aspect of dollars actually going into our pocket.

Here are the Ratios and Metrics I’m going to watch from now on.

Clicks to Phone Calls Ratio. This measures your sites ability to get people who are interested in your service to call for an appointment or request a free estimate or some thing like that. Whatever the equivalent is in your company you know.

For service businesses, your website’s main job, perhaps its only job is to generate phone calls. Yet, I bet very few people are actually measuring this right now. This will helps us measure the effectiveness of our most basic internet marketing skills, keyword analysis, copywriting and website design.

% Calls Booked- This measures your ability to convert phone calls into appointments or estimates.

As a former Yellow Page rep I can remember telling clients over and over again, “All we can do is make your phone ring.” But now as part of the service we provide, we listen to our clients web calls and provide feedback.

This metric is far easier to take action on then avg time on site or the others to which we typically pay attention and the opportunity is tremendous, really. To fully comprehend the power of this metric, imagine raising booking % from 40% to 60 %. This is not a 20% increase… it is a full 50% increase in the amount of leads your generating and you didn’t need to spend anymore on advertising to generate it!

Closing % – this measures your company’s ability to turn leads into customers

Because of this metric’s proximity to actually collecting money it is already pretty well regarded by most; but I would venture there is still some room for improvement.

Avg Sale $ – What is the average sale?

Don’t leave home without this one and definitely don’t talk to any advertising people without knowing it.

Profit Margin%- the percent of each sale that goes into your pocket.

I think of this number as the dollars that make it into your pocket on your last sale— expressed as a percentage.

Focusing on and improving these stats can help you stretch your advertising dollar and bring in more sales. Which is why we pay attention to analytics in the first place. Imagine logging into your analytics package and seeing the number of unique phone calls you generated expressed as a percentage of unique visitors. Next you see the % of these calls that were booked and finally how many turned into customers and how much was spent. I see this as being the default analytics package of the near future for local service businesses. The tools are actually available for this right now, it’s just a matter of putting them together.

*Here’s a little secret: If you get the numbers for your company for each of the 5 metrics above and multiply them, it will give you the single most important number in your entire internet marketing campaign… more on that next time.

Go to Yahoo, Superpages.com et al. and do a search for a ‘business type’ and select your home county as the ‘geography’, you will get a message saying something like; “we are not able to find that location”. Not on Google Maps.

I used several different lines of business and used Bergen County NJ as the geographic modifier on G maps and got very good results. Here is a screen shot for Interior Decorator Bergen County NJ:

Double Click for Full Size Image

With the ability to produce results this good at the county level, it probably won’t take long for the local box to show up on Google.com for county searches the way it currently does for city searches.

Could this lead to Google dominating local search the way they dominate general search now? Could be… every article I ever read on local predicted functionality would be the key to taking over the fragmented industry… and this is functional.

If you have optimized your site for county search you might want to begin preparing now for the local box stealing your serps. To get acquainted with the local algo here is a great post from Small Business SEM and one from me earlier in the month Top 3 Spots in Google Maps.

Allpages is the key to ranking in Google Maps. I haven’t tested this or anything but it seem logical. Allpages is the only Internet Yellow Pages I’ve found that does not allow business owners to add their listing to the directory. The only way to get in is with a business line through the local phone company. The data is provided from the phone company to Acxiom to Allpages; where Google picks it up.

When you think about it this is brilliant on the part of Google. It allows them to have the telephone company’s operators hand edit Google Maps.

Sure anyone can go in and add their own business through the Local Business Center but ranking begins with Allpages. It seems to me that Google will only begin giving credit for Links once it sees this listing. To test this I checked out a few sites from the SEO Industry.

I started with a search in Google Maps for SEO in State College PA. I’m a big fan of Aaron Wall’s SeoBook.com so I decided to see how this PR 6 site ranked in Maps. Only 2 SEO’s in State College so it came right up; but after clicking on the more info link something interesting… no links pointing to the site. So, I checked to see if SEOBOOK.com had a listing in Allpages and I wasn’t able to find one. So, it may indeed be that one does need to be in Allpages before links begin to count. And that starts with adding a business line from your local telephone company. I was able to find other SEO sites with plenty of links pointing at their listing, and they did indeed have a business listing.

Oh, how things have changed… there was a time when you needed a business line to be in the yellow pages… now that is no longer true but you need one to rank in Google. That’s funny.

I also suspect the age of the listing is a factor. I took a peek in some categories that weren’t that competitive and found the listings that made the top 3 were consistently in my copy of the Yellow Pages from 1999. I wonder if this will lead to folks trying to buy old numbers the way they buy old domains.

But the listing and it’s age will only take you so far in competitive categories where adding links is the name of the game again.

Top 3 Spots in Google Maps

A good way to search for links is to do a search in G Maps for your category without adding a location. Here’s one for Pizza:

Now if I own a pizzeria I have 522 web pages to research for link opportunities and a bunch of ideas for sites that I can try to send my customers to for reviews.

As you play around with this for different categories you begin to get an idea for just how strong the name algorithm is when the category is not typed in exactly. For instance, I did a search for Landscape Architects and found a company in Connecticut with only one web page pointing to it and yet it ranked second in the nation.

A series of coincidences led to this result that are quite revealing. Clearly it is the name of this company that brought them up so high on this list. So, did this company really name themselves ‘Landscape Architects’? No, they didn’t, the company is listed in Allpages as: Lent Wesley E Asla. So why does Google list it differently.

As near as I can tell there are 2 reasons; the first is ‘Asla’ is not his last name it is a designation, it stands for the American Society for Landscape Architects and there are a bazillion links pointing to it on the internet, so Google discounted this name and looked elsewhere. In this case it found another site, partypop.com, with a listing for “Landscape Architects’ that included this company’s address and phone number. So Google used this name and Mr Lent picked up the top spot in Google Maps for his most important keyphrase.

Another interesting example is Attorny in Manhattan. No doubt a common mispelling for this uber competitive phrase. I wonder if these attorneys have any idea why they are getting so many new clients from Google when they don’t even have websites.

Essentially, Google Maps is providing a list of Attorneys whose listings were handled by telephone operators who did not know how to spell attorney. And if my theory is correct, they are in chronological order.