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.

Yahoo! recently said, we’re rolling out some changes to our crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.” Is this to the detriment of the linkless local site?

2 Sites I manage that ranked well in Yahoo! for their industry+county disappeared. Both ranked consistently #1 or #2 for those terms in Yahoo! and now neither of them is in the top 100. On Google they are on the first page, though one of them floats in and out of supplemental as it is the company’s secondary site and is not even listed in any of the IYPs.

Some of the local sites I was competing with for those terms are still there but they are older and have link support. So, I am wondering if this represents a shift in Yahoo’s thinking about local sites in the main search results. Has the move to show more results from 3rd parties in local queries been accompanied by a more fundamental algo shift that places more emphasis on authority? Aaron Wall wrote about this nearly 2 years ago. Maybe that represents the lag time in local.

Anybody else noticing any changes to their ranking in Yahoo! over the past week or so?

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.

#1 – Paraphrasing Mike Grehan, author of The Search Engine Marketing Book:

If you create a page about a unique word or phrase, you can easily rank for that term.

As an example, if you were to create a site about xandrough, Google will want to return that site when a searcher uses that term because your site would be the most relevant to that term. The problem of course is that nobody is likely to type that into any search engine because the word does not exist, so ranking for it won’t do any good. However, how about a keyphrase like:

Landscape Design Sussex County, NJ

Now, the possibilities of this concept seem pretty exciting for Landscapers located in Northwest, NJ. To check this, click on the image above and you can see that the sites returned in the organic lack a sense of relevancy. Is that because, like xandrough, it is not likely to be typed into the engine. I don’t think so, as you can see many landscapers are competing for the phrase in Adwords. It actually looks to me like a phrase that is juicily near a conversion worth thousands of dollars.

Try a search like this for your business plus a regional term. If you don’t find many sites that match that query, there may be an opportunity.

#2 – Search Engines Return Pages Not Sites on the Results Page

With this in mind for the example above; the page has to be about Landscape Design in Sussex County, not the site. In other words, if one page on your site is about landscape design and another page is about sussex county, no page of your site will come up for the keyphrase: ‘landscape design sussex county’.

This can be used to the advantage of the linkless site, making it possible to come up in the results for multiple search queries. For example, one page could be for Lawn Maintenance, while another could be Landscape Design.

For more on this see Local Biz Bits

#3 – The Order and Proximity of The Keywords Matter

Write a sentence or phrase that contains both the service and the geographic term and have those terms in close proximity.

High Rankings Advisor has a great explanation of Keyword Proximity.

SearchRank provides another great example of how to write for search engines.

#4 – Time

It will take some time before the search engines trust a linkless site. So, you may just to have to wait. However, if your site is a couple of years old and you re-write it, applying some of these principles, you may be able to rank for your terms as soon as the next time Googlebot visits your site.

To speed some things up even more you may want to add your business listing to Google Maps and verify your business listing. After filling out the information you will recieve an automated telephone call and you will have to enter the numbers they provide you.

Also, you could fill out the business profile on superpages.com. Don’t just set up a listing, you want to make sure you add your url to the business profile… Google only spiders business profiles on superpages.com, not the rest of the site.

The above options are free… the links they provide won’t have any value in ranking your site in search results but they may help your site get indexed quicker by google. And they both get traffic in their own right and could score you some work.

There is a post on local search over at Search Engine Land recounting what the big boys of local search are talking about at the conference. It begins with:

Huge market, huge confusion, huge challenges—that could summarize discussion on the Meet the Local Search Engines panel

They talk about content as the major issue and argue about the solutions; but that isn’t the problem. There is plenty of content in the local space you just can’t find it… why?

There is so little SEO in Local.

As much as people rebuff SEO, the local space proves that SEO provides a critical function in the usability of the web.

Content is the issue? I’ve been in local since 1997 and I remember the days when few small businesses had a web site but it’s just not true anymore. There are dozens of local sites in nearly every line of business in every region now. The problem is search engines can’t find them.

The navigation is almost always Home, Services, About Us, & Contact Us and the only unique content in most of them is their name. Think how much more satisfying local search would be if SEOs played a larger role in development.

As for “huge confusion”, here’s where the confusion is: 3 out of every 4 local searches is done on a search engine, and search engines can’t find the appropriate sites to return because they have not been optimized for search and nobody is willing to admit that. Because it would mean admitting that SEO is good… and the big boys are not going to do thay… at least not until they can figure out a way to monetize it.

I guess stuffing the names of towns into local business websites has been around for as long as the internet, but every time I see it I get annoyed. I don’t know why… wait… yes I do… because it’s a stupid thing to do!

And here’s the reason why. Putting the areas served on the page will help you with conversions. No one knows more about the content that will make local searchers convert in yellow pages than CRM Associates and I was fortunate enough to train a lot of their material, it’s copyrighted so I can’t publish it. But I can tell you that defining your target audience and listing the towns you serve is a very good idea in a yellow page ad. So, if you believe that translates to local search and I do (I actually think it’s more important on the web). Than you have to agree that displaying these words is to your benefit.

So, instead of stuffing a bunch of towns into a box and using CSS to make it unreadable to humans – display the names of the towns you serve and do it with pride.

How about something Like this:

We proudly serve these areas: list the towns, cities, counties, states, etc that you service here.

Now I can the hear the webmasters that serve 3 or 4 counties each with 70 towns moaning. Don’t worry, just go ahead and list them proudly on your site. Display them nicely on your home page like this:

We are proud to serve these communities in Orange County: list all the town names in alphabetical order and make them bulleted items so it’s easy for your visitors to find their own town.

Then go on to the next county and do the same thing. Repeat as necessary.

If the area you serve gets much bigger than optimizing your site will be more about your keyword + the 2-letter abbreviation of the State you serve, than listing town names.

Adapting this simple idea will make your site more useful to your target audience, convert more and you can stop worrying about getting penalized by the search engines.

More Ways to Display Towns Names on Your Website

I often see small business websites with photographs showing off their work, then in the caption it says something like ‘Smith Residence’. This is a waste of a great opportunity. Use the name of the town instead, this actually proves to your visitors that you serve their area!

You can use this same technique with testimonials. Joe says your great, perfect, now go ahead and tell your visitors where Joe is from.

Additional telephone numbers are another tried and true yellow pages way to make you look more local and drive calls through the roof. Pick some of the bigger towns or cities in your area and purchase an additional number with that exchange from the telephone company or a company like Ring Central. Then list the additional telephone numbers with the town that corresponds with the exchange.  This conveys the appearance of a well established company and your visitor knows you service their area if you are willing to pick up the charges for the call.  These types of numbers are also excellent tracking tools. And most importantly it’s all useful for your site’s visitors.  Stay from 800 #’s, local searchers are looking for local numbers.

Now, after all that, if you are still tempted to do stupid things with the content of your website, learn more about writing for search engines. This site is run by SEO professional Jill Whalen and she keeps it nice and simple.