Convert Offline

Yodle was kind enough to reach out to me after my most recent post regarding their link building strategy. It turns out I had some things not quite right so I appreciate them letting me know so I could correct it.

The process that I described in that post was not the link building for their new organic product but rather a pilot program called the “Expert Authors Program.”

The Expert Authors program is free and intended to bring in additional leads at no additional cost to the advertiser. Interestingly, the articles are ghost written by Yodle’s internet marketers and not by the business owner. Interesting because Bryan Phelps of Orange Soda and Nick of Brick Marketing commented on the last post that leaving this up to the customer would be a bad idea. Turns out Yodle agrees.

Yodle was careful to point out that the client I cited was not part of their new organic product and “they would not block robots on a Yodle Organic client’s site nor set up duplicate Web sites for Organic clients.”

One of the questions I was anxious to ask was whether the new organic strategy would be applied to the client’s site or the .net site they often create for sem customers and I was shocked by their answer. They told me that on and off-page optimization would be done to the client’s domain and NOT the .net site. And here is the part that shocked me. I then asked what happens when the client exits the program and they told me the client keeps his or her site.

I’m surprised by this because it removes rather than puts up a blockade to quitting the program. Like cutting the wheel in the direction of a fishtailing rear-end to come out of a slide this seems a counter-intuitive way to reduce churn – actually creating a better product. Who knew they’d come up with that?

Court Cunningham, Yodle’s CEO, recently talked about Yodle being “experts in automation” and that’s reflected in their recently launched organic product’s method of link building. Here is how it appears to work: The customer writes an article/blog post on Yodle’s website, local.yodle.com, and links back to their own site. This allows Yodle to pass the power of their own domain to their customers. Interesting.

What’s brilliant from an “automation expert” point of view is that they turned the job of creating content over to the customer; eliminating the time and cost of producing good content. Here’s an example.

The client’s original site needs to be seen to be believed— here it is. So, I have little doubt that Yodle can help them or that this small business owner knows a single thing about web marketing for that matter. But my problem with this from a customer stand point is that the link building is being done on the site created by Yodle, the .net version of the domain. Which means they are just renting the SEO. Because there is such a long time investment required in an organic campaign this represents the SEO version of holding a gun to the client’s head if they wish to cancel.

Or perhaps Court Cunningham is trying to automate a solution to the churn problem.

What are your thoughts on this type of SEO? Does the customer’s level of sophistication matter here? Is this the future SEO business model?

With Superpages ranking highly in Google for a ton of local search queries you may want to figure out how to get your listing to the #1 spot so when folks click-thru from these top rankings you become the number 1 choice. This is just a little twist on barnacle seo using SuperPages PPC to get high quality traffic to your website.

Begin by doing a search on Superpages.com for your type of business, get a feel for it. Think about what a consumer would type in when looking for a business like yours. Is your competition there? If not keep looking, you might be in the wrong category? Think about what a consumer would type, not what YOU think they SHOULD type

You found your category? Good. Now go back to the results and look in the left-hand most column. You’ll find suggested related categories under best match. Write down the ones that apply to you. Below that you’ll see headings: Products, Services & Brands. I’ll tell you how to get your business listing in those “categories” when we talk about the business profle later in this post.

Let’s talk about the layout. Superpages has 2 columns of listings, in a well-searched heading both are dominated by advertisers. As you would expect the left column of listings is going to get the majority of traffic. Forget about the right unless your interested in advertising nationally.

The left column contains up to 25 listings with up to 10 pay-per-click advertisers. The rest of this post will be dedicated to using pay per click on superpages as it is only way to grab the top spots.

Ok, here’s how it works – the Algo. Like Google, placement is based on relevance so placement is determined by your Click-Thru-Rate (CTR) as well as your Bid Amount. So like Google you want to write compelling copy.

Unlike Google, superpages has 4 campaign types and you need to understand them to know in what types of searches your ad will show and the types of searches in which your ad will not show.

1. Local
2. Metro
3. State
4. National

Your account can have as many campaigns as you like.

Advertisers that use a Local and/or Meto campaign will show in the results when a town or city is included in the searcher’s query. For example, Chiropractor Paramus NJ would display only advertisers in Local & Metro campaigns (covering the Paramus area).

In a Local Campaign you can advertise in your
a) Your Home City
b) Your Home County which will obviously include your home city.
c) Your Home County + ANY County That borders that County.
Counties separated by water are in most cases ok when reasonable. Bergen County NJ borders Westchester County NY despite the Hudson but Orange County Ca is not considered local to Hawaii.

Metro areas are pre-determined by superpages and coverage area maps are provided in the account set up tools in the PPC portal.

State campaigns are shown when the city is omitted and just the state is typed-in. For example, Chiropractor NJ.
This isn’t very practical for a local business and I don’t use it. If, however, you target the whole state you can and probably should include this.

National – No geography is used by the searcher indicating they want to search the whole country. Not a good option for a local business.

Local and Metro campaigns are your best bet so let’s talk more about those options. Your goal is to cover your entire service area without showing your ad in areas you don’t service. Obviously showing ads outside your service area is going to cost you money without any hope of a return.

If your service area is larger than just your home & contiguous counties, you will need to go to a Metro campaign to cover your whole service area. Maps of Metro areas are provided as you set up your progam on the superpages.com ppc portal. If your service area is bigger than Local but smaller than a Metro, you’ll have to decide. Perhaps start with a Local and move up if you find the ROI is there.

If you do a metro campaign, you will want to include a local campaign as well. The more local you get the more local signals you can provide at the listing level. You may choose to display your actual address in the local campaign and hide it in your metro. There are advantages to displaying your actual address in a local campaign I’ve been told, but I think I’ll save that for a future post.

As you go through the portal, superpages walks you through setting up a campaign step by step in the fashion of a wizard. When you get to the business profile option you’ll want to fill out as best you can as each word you include in your business profile becomes a keyword that will allow you to come up in a keyword search.

Superpages.com is kind of a hybrid between a search engine and IYP as it will search for business categories like a traditional Internet Yellow Pages but it will also search for keywords if the query demands it. And the place it seaches for keywords is the business profile.

You will also need to determine what links you want to do display at the listing level. Go back to superpages.com and do a search. Under the listings you will notice links. Phone, More Info, Map it, Email etc. These are all clickable and in a pay per click you can imagine what that means. You guessed it, you’ll pay the full price of the click and might never even get traffic to your website if you decide to display these links. You are also likely to have a higher CTR than a business that doesn’t display them. I’ve made the decision that I will only pay for a click to my website, so the only clickable item I will display as part of my listing is the url. If I need to bid higher because of decreased CTR I will do so.

Because I track my site using Google Analytics I also use url builder otherwise the traffic will show as direct traffic in Google Analytics. If you don’t understand that last sentence. Don’t worry about it. Use the tracking provided by superpages.com and don’t give this paragraph another thought.

Greg Sterling has been writing a lot about the possible disappearance of newspapers.

Seth Godin has also speculated about newspapers’ disappearance.

I think both of them and others are talking about them because they feel like it is really important; but what about yellow pages. Does anyone care? Until yesterday I thought so.

Now I believe people who use the internet on a regular basis believe yellow pages are irrelevant. What changed my mind?

Late Thursday it was reported by the Dallas Business Journal

Idearc Inc., a provider of consumer information that includes phone directories, posted a fourth-quarter loss of $77 million on sales of $709 million, and said in notes attached to the earnings statement that it is “currently considering a restructuring” under federal bankruptcy laws.

The company, headquartered at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, said that based on current forecasts and year-end results, it is out of compliance with one lender’s agreement and risks being out of compliance with a second.

As a result, lenders have the right to consider all the company’s debt in default and could call it due within 30 days.

You would think this would be big news and people would come to Google and type in ‘Idearc Bankruptcy’ to learn more about this huge story. Well, another post on this blog happens to rank #1 for that very term and I was just looking over the analytics and thought I would share them with you.

This screenshot shows the network location of the folks who were reading the Idearc Bankruptcy post yesterday. As you can see, only 126 views… a big yawn, right? But even more telling is that most of the views were from inside the yellow page industry and more than one-third came from Idearc and Verizon. Folks who may lose their job tend to care, what surprised me, was how few other people did.

I don’t believe people care that much if a single yellow page provider goes out business.

Where can you buy a company that generated $377 million in cash after expenses in the first 9 months of this year for a total of $14.6 million? Check your local yellow pages.

Though Idearc has not made any announcement regarding bankruptcy, in the last year and half Idearc’s (publisher of the Verizon yp and superpages.com) stock has dropped from $35 to around 10 cents a share. The company has 146 million outstanding shares of stock, which means you could pick up a company that does about $3 billion in revenue with fat margins for just over $14 million. Usage of the yellow pages is still relatively strong at over 12 billion look-ups last year.

So, why would a company that is so cash rich be facing bankruptcy? Well, when Verizon spun it off in 2006 it sent it away with 9 billion dollars in debt. (Which sounds a little shady to me). So, it would seem the logical thing to do now would be to file bankruptcy, pay off the debtors at a few cents on the dollar and reorganize.

But they may cause a whole other problem. In this headline driven world, everyone is going to hear only that the yellow pages is bankrupt. And everyone will think they ran out of money because no one is using it anymore. Then people will think they now NEED to use the internet to get information when making a local purchase decision. Then the yellow pages will be bankrupt for real.

Idearc better think long and hard about the public relations end of any bankruptcy.

If Idearc does file bankruptcy it could void their intellectual property agreement with Verizon.

Under the Intellectual Property Agreement, Verizon Services also agreed not to
grant any licenses to use specified intellectual property to any person who
competes directly with Verizon or Idearc Media. The Intellectual Property
Agreement is terminable by Verizon Services only in the event of Idearc Media’s
bankruptcy, or in an event of default by Idearc Media.

I would not be surprised if they are in negotiations with Verizon right now over this and this may be what’s been keeping them from filing thus far.

The company I work for has been in business for over 8 years, does great work and has exactly 0 reviews in Yahoo and another 0 in google. Not that surprised are you? I know.

But I find this surprising… having signed up with Service Magic only a few months ago, this garage door business has already been reviewed 5 separate times. I started asking why.

I found there are 2 things a small business can copy from Service Magic to get more reviews. The first ask multiple times… or at least once. The second is to make it smoother. You see when a person goes to review a business on Service Magic they are already signed up, so they don’t need to make up a password or download anything or stand on their head. Their in… it’s smooth.

Small businesses often know/ask for their customer’s email addresses, now use it to make it easier for the customer to review you. If they have a yahoo email, they already belong to Yahoo; if they have gmail they already have a Google account. Send them a link to the review site of which you know they already belong – Smooooth.

On the lighter side: I spent my vacation in part reading Seth Godin books, which is why I’m using the term smooth. And I couldn’t help but think his cover photo resembled an athletic african-american.

Now, those of you who know what Mr. Godin looks like think I’m crazy… so I’m going to prove it to you. Here is Seth Godin side by side with David Justice – retired baseball player.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the death of the yellow pages, however, much of what I read is anecdotal. There is little doubt that yp usage is slipping but the reports I read would have you believe that it is already buried. Usage is down less than 15% in the past 8 years… the year it was originally predicted to die (the year that the always-on internet tipped). And if you look at the top headings the ROI is about the same as 8 years ago, according to Dr Fromholzer, whose evidence is based on metered lines, thousand of them.

Most recently the bell was rung by Chris Silver Smith a person with considerable knowledge of the industry, in fact when he left Superpages a few years ago they came up first in Google for the term yellow pages, and they haven’t since his departure. He was careful to limit his prediction to 10 years from now… but is that what people will read and re-tell? Or will they just read the word dying… I think the latter.

To be successful, small business owners need to focus on the here and now and right now the yp is still a powerful tool. In fact, the small business that just hired me gets 50% of their business from yp and 15% from the internet. My job is to get that number to 25%… (a wonderful assignment). In my heart of hearts I believe I’ll do a bit better but this is a very good example of how powerful the yp still are.

And often, the results are often sooooo much better than you find in Google in large measure due to spam, check out these reults where Google goes 0 for 10, that’s right out of 10 in the local one box not one listing is helpful as a single spammer has overwhelmed the results:

There are thousands of results for this locksmith across all of North Jersey. Most of which are pointing at a single website… which I’ll let you find for yourself, I won’t link to it even with “no-follow”, sorry. I will tell you this though, the website is written in Latin, which one would think, Google could easily detect as spam.

David Mihm has recently written about filtering urls that are obviously spamming and in this case his solution would have gone a long way to solving the problem. Mike Blumenthal has written a ton about cleaning up results like these but Google has left us with only confusing instructions.

One could easily envision a searcher abandon their search for a garage door repairman and grab a yellow pages given the above results, don’t you think? Maybe in 10 years, Google will have it worked out and Chris Silver Smith will be right… but until then Small Business Owners: You need to maximize both media.

The first site I got to the first of page of results for a specific keyword, I did so, quite by accident. When I designed the site I did so with PPC in mind and I included all the copy points that I knew from years of yellow pages ad design were necessary to motivate a potential buyer to call.

I found this to be a wonderful thing… that the things that would help rank a site in search engines would be the same things that would help convert them to a customer… that’s my kind of symmetry.

There are 3 of these “symmetries” between ranking and conversion factors that I think are the most important in Local Seo:

The first:

When writing a yellow page ad include everything you do. Every study I have ever read has concluded that if it is not in the ad the reader assumes that you don’t do it.

This little fact often frustrated potential advertisers or they thought it was a trick to get more copy and sell them a bigger ad. But I always believed it whole-heartedly. If I need a drain cleaned and I find 2 ads side by side under Plumbers and one says they do drain cleaning and the other doesn’t… guess who is getting the call?

This is true with Search Engines as well. If you don’t mention the service on your site, Google assumes that you don’t do it. And you will have little chance of ranking for that term (unless of course you get a bunch of other folks to say it in anchor text, but that is a story for another day ).

This idea seems to carry over to the local ten-pack as well:

Notice how often the words drain and cleaning appear in the results near the top.

The second:

Define your service area… specifically.

Long before small business owners thought about search engines, they were asking me to find space in their ads to list the towns they served. These were the savvy, long term yellow page advertisers. And they did it because it worked.

A quick example: You want a pizza delivered… and you find an ad for a Pizza joint in the next town who offers free delivery… do you call or keep reading? You then find and ad that says free to delivery to… and lists your town. Yup, that second one is going to work better even if some answered “call” to the question above.

Listing those towns could be a great help to your site too, if your looking for Google to serve up a first page result for those queries in neighboring towns.

The third:

This one is really true regardless of the media. Try and come up with the best content. If you’re going to advertise in the yellow pages; read your competitor’s ads… learn from them and then design the best ad in the heading. Try and answer all the questions that one might have when shopping for your type of business.

If you want to get your site ranked number 1 on Google… begin by looking at what’s there now and try and create a page that is better than that one based on the searchers intent for a particular search query. Some of the ideas above might help.

The best team wins nearly every game and the faster runner wins nearly every race, so are we surprised that the best ad gets nearly every phone call?

For similar sized ads; the standard deviation of the calls received from yellow page ads is greater than the mean.

-Paraphrasing Dr. Dennis Fromholzer, CRM Associates

That quote means that 2 same size yellow page ads for the same type of business are likely to get wildly different call volumes. One of the ads will be just like the better team and the faster runner and win nearly each time the product is searched. Should we expect this to be different on the web? I think not.

Eighty-five percent of respondents agreed that the quality of a business owner’s website is an important factor in earning the consumer’s trust. Over 75 percent of respondents said they were more likely to make a purchase from “an unfamiliar business with a quality website,” than “a poor website from a known business.”

-This is from a Study by Nielsen and WebVisible as reported by Peter Krasilovsky.

The lament of the loser

“I was getting the clicks, but I wasn’t getting the calls” or “Yellow Pages doesn’t work for my type of business.”

I always felt terrible when I heard this and I work hard to inform anyone and everyone around me as to the importance of good content. But the challenge is always the same… how do you define it? What does it look like? The only way to consistently improve the content of any form of advertising that I am aware of is to split test it.

It is has always been much easier to focus on coming up higher in the search results or getting a bigger ad; but there is no doubt the best bang for your buck in advertising will be accomplished with good content.

Local advertisers have been relegated to a place where marketing tools like split-testing just weren’t available to them. After all, do you think the publishers of any Yellow Pages, are going to spend the extra millions to publish and distribute 2 directories so the ads could be split-tested? Not likely. (Side note: This might not be a bad investment for yellow pages, as they would own the copyright on almost every small businesses best yellow page ad and could prevent that ad from being published in a competitor’s book).

The Times They Are A Changin’

I am thrilled that this is not true for the local advertiser on the web even if they depend on phone calls; and can now have this data all reported in one analytics program.

Such a local site can be measured with nearly the precision and ease, previously afforded only to e-commerce sites. It can be done without creating dynamic pages and except for the cost of the phone lines and calls… it is free.

It could also be used to measure conversion for keywords. I have just set up a test that will measure the difference in conversion rates between search phrases that include geo-modifiers and the same terms when the geo-modifier is missing. That’s cool… when you are a local nerd like me.

How To Split Test A Website When Measuring Conversion In Emails and Phone Calls.

What follows is a step by step tutorial for setting up split testing for a website when conversion is measured in contacts through an email contact form and telephone calls. In order to use it, you must have or set-up an account in Google Analytics and have or set up an account with Mongoose Metrics. I have no affiliation with either service.

1. Have or create 2 hidden pages on your site.
   • One for contact form submissions and one for telephone calls. Only the one for contact form submissions will ever be seen by the customer, this one should say something like “Thank you for contacting us, we will return your message within 24 hours. The other one doesn’t need to say anything as it will not be viewed by the customer.
   • Both need to have the code from Google Analytics. The same code will be on all your pages. Not to worry, we’ll set up filters for that in GA.
2. Replicate the site twice and put each copy in its own subdirectory
   • On each of the replicated pages use the meta tag “noindex, nofollow” to prevent your content from being indexed multiple times. (Make one copy; add the tags and then make the second one to save you from having to add the tags twice)
   • The name of the subdirectory you choose will be viewable in the url (www.example.com/subdirectory/actualpage.html), so choose something that relates.
3. Have or create an account in Mongoose Metrics and purchase 2 phone numbers.
   • Consider waiting awhile after purchase to make sure the lines are clean.
   • In your mongoose account, map the tracking number to the actual phone number and configure the tracking to the url of the hidden page of each replicated site.
   • On each of the replicated sites, replace the real phone number with the new trackable number on all pages. Make sure you have one unique phone number per “site”. And that the url’s are mapped to the corresponding phone number in your mongoose account.

   In effect, you now have 3 sites, each with a unique phone number, and unique confirmation pages. But all on the same domain. We just need to prepare Google Analytics for our first test.

4. Go to Google Analytics and set up a new profile. Put the radio button on “Add a profile for an existing domain” and use the pull down menu to choose your site.
5. Name the profile and add a filter to include only traffic that comes to the pages within your first subdirectory. Here’s the set up:

Filter Type: Use Only Traffic From A Subdirectory
Subdirectory: ^/mysub/ (inside the lines put the name of your subdirectory)

6. Find the profile for your original site, and create a filter to exclude the traffic from pages in a subdirectory

Filter Type: Custom Filter
Exclude
Filter Field: Request URI
Filter Pattern: ^/mysub/

These pages in the subdirectory will now be tracked in Google Analytics like they are on their own domain. Which is exactly what we want.

7. Repeat steps 4, 5 & 6 for the pages in your second subdirectory

We’re now ready to set up the goals in Google Analytics

8. Find the settings column in your first “test’ profile and click edit to add the goals:

/mysub/emailformthanks.html
/mysub/ijustgotaphonecall.html

9. Repeat this step for the 2nd profile.

That’s it… now you’re ready to go. Split test a redesign, keywords, copy… whatever you like. And since both Mongoose Metrics and Google Analytics allow you to tag urls you can use this set up to test conversion on almost any form of internet advertising.

Local websites, typically don’t get enough traffic that these tests can be done overnight. So be patient, over the course of months, I believe they will prove invaluable when making decisions about where to spend money, how much and changing aspects of the website.

None of us are good enough that we are going to develop the very best combination of content on our first try. So, track and enjoy.

With the upcoming change to Google’s display URL policy on redirects, I have been rewriting my PPC ads. I have had a difficult time defeating the click-through rates of the display url: www.geocategory.com, that is re-directing to the website. I got a number of good ideas from a question I asked on Gooruze, including:

geography.domain.com

domain.com/geography

Both of these suggestion helped maintain a good quality score and .04 cent minimum bids, but in limited testing I was not able to beat the CTR of the redirected URL. I will continue to experiment with them.

But if at first you don’t succeed… try, try, again. I finally found an ad that has showed some promise and early in the test is defeating the www.geocategory.com set up… and it uses the original domain, which is even better. What I did was add the geography and the telephone number to the 3rd line of the ad. I tried to make it look like an in-column yellow page ad. The 3rd line reads: Fillintheblank County… (123)456-7890. I was surprised that Google allowed telephone numbers in their ads but I now understand why they do… they are good for click-thru rates! Google will allow 3 consecutive periods but not 4… between the geography and the number.