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If you take a look at the image above at a Google Maps result you will find listings for 4 companies that don’t really exist, at least not with that name or at the address listed. I called and asked if they were licensed, they said no. All 4 phone numbers were answered by a person whose voice sounded remarkably similar to the others. The address doesn’t exist; And they dominate the search result for Garage Doors Danbury CT.

What’s amazing is that similar listings dominate the Maps’ search results for this query in the cities that surround Danbury as well; Plus hundreds of cities in Connecticut, New Jersey, California and their now moving into Pennsylvania.

With location being such an important factor how could a company rank in the Local 7-pack in so many cities across the country. Here’s how it works.

1. Set up a listing in Google Maps at an address that does not currently exist. For example, where there is a 60 Main St., Anytown and a 64 Main St, Anytown and these represent real addresses. Set up your listing at 62 Main St.

2. Name your business USKeyword-City, or Keyword-Pro-city or Ficticious name of person plus keyword for the personal touch.

3. Build citations to your listing. These listings contain citations from Yahoo Local, Hotfrog, Guidespot, local.newstimelive.com.

4. Create a blog on one of the sites for the purpose of creating a perfect citation for thousands of listings.

5. Link build

6. Give your new listing a sparkling review

7. Now find an adjacent town and repeat. Again and again and again again.

A search in Hotfrog for Overhead Garage Door CT turned up 88 separate listings belonging to this ring.

A search in Yahoo local for garage doors in Danbury returns their listings 16 times out of the first 30 results.

In Google Maps they take 4 spots in the Lucky 7-pack, and in the Other Places You Might Like on their Places Page their other listings show up as your only choices. Dominant.

Why Does It Work?

Because location is such a big part of the ranking algorithm in Maps the key to their success is the fact that they have a “location” in each of the cities.

They are obviously creating new listings which Google will allow you to verify by phone most of the time. Theoretically, they could be using the bulk upload system. I don’t use the bulk upload system so I’m not sure whether that’s possible or not. If you are… please let us know in the comments.

Once established, these “locations” need only trust to start ranking in Google Maps. This trust is established with citations and backlinks. As mentioned earlier they have only a few citations on each listing, so it got me wondering… Does it help that they use made up addresses?

Addresses that have never pointed at any other listing or place on the web? Is that why they chose a non-existent address, rather than a business park or an office building like many spammers of the past? Is their a sort of “citation-certainty” in the algorithm that takes into account not only the volume of citations but the percentage that point at a single listing.

Perhaps an 11th extreme local search optimization technique: New Construction.

Most studies I’ve read regarding mobile seem to focus on statistics that may lead to conclusions that overstate the importance of mobile. I wanted to put together a study that would show the actual traffic from mobile devices to a local website in an industry that was traditionally driven by yellow page advertising. My goal is to create a resource that a small business owner making the transition from yellow pages advertising could use to put mobile search in perspective. A change to Google Adwords platform helped.

Back in February, Google added a feature that allows you to segment Adwords traffic by “device.”
It’s an option on the segment drop down menu… here’s a screenshot:

I decided to study this to determine how important mobile was to my clients. I wanted to find the answer to 2 questions:

1. What percentage of traffic came from mobile?
2. Does the percentage of traffic from Mobile vary in different parts of the country?

All of the companies in the study are of the same type, garage door companies, which provides an almost unique opportunity to study mobile patterns across different parts of the country without having to factor in for the type of company.

Here is a map that shows the traffic from Adwords on a smart phone as a percentage of all Adwords traffic to each of 7 garage door companies from around the Country.



Mobile Traffic By City For Garage Door Companies

This data was taken from February 16, 2010 – April 16, 2010. Impressions, rather than clicks were used, to eliminate click thru rate as a variable. I felt like this made a better comparison and each of these businesses had at least 3,000 impressions during this time interval.

San Jose 3.27%
Chicago 2.63%
Denver 2.38%
Pittsburgh 2.13%
Nashville 1.84%
Akron 1.43%
Westchester 1.10%

Conclusions And Areas For Further Study

• Not a big surprise that San Jose, which falls in Silicon Valley is number 1
• The small data set follows the general pattern that people in bigger cities (more population) are going to use mobile devices a higher percentage of the time
• Westchester County NY surprised me. This is a high income area which I would thought would lead to higher mobile usage. Interestingly, Westchester County is the oldest population in this set. Could be that age trumps income when it comes to selecting a small business on a mobile handset.
• For different types of businesses Mobile is going to be more or less important but overall it’s likely to be less than 5% of overall traffic. Again, this is a small study but Adwords and Google Analytics both provide easy segmentation of mobile traffic. Look in your analytics or call your PPC provider to see what percentage of your traffic is mobile.
• Tip: Ask your PPC provider what your average position is when segmented for Mobile. I shoot for top 3 in computer devices and top 2 in Mobile (Google shows 2 ads on top on Mobil devices)
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Pay Per Call brings about a conversation like no other in local advertising. Small business owners, who normally deal in broad strokes, all of sudden are fighting tooth and nail each time their phone rings. And Yext, a technology that was created to alleviate this, by using transcription technology, may have amplified it judging by the comment section of Local Seo Guide’s old post on Yext which has spontaneously transformed into a Yext Review portal.

I would suggest heading over there and reading this if you have considered buying or selling advertising on a pay per call basis. It could save you lots of time and aggravation later on.

At Christmas I got a Droid. That’s good.

I had 10 months left on my T-mobile contract. That’s good for you.

Here’s the offer. You get the G1 for free. You need to agree to take over my contract.

What’s in it for you:

• Free G1
• Contract Expires in October, so you are only locked in for 10 mos., NOT 2 years like me!
• The phone is awesome, only slightly less awesome than the droid

What’s in it for me:

• I get my $200 T-mobile penalty back

Contract Details:

The contract is $49.00/mo for 400 minutes on T-Mobile. With that you have access to the internet on wifi, phone, music player. Kind’ve like an ipod touch with Gmail and a phone.
Optional: Add $30 month for data plan to get on 3g.

If you need any addt’l info you can ask in the comments below. If you’re interested please use the contact form near the bottom of this page.

Last week Google formally launched its Click-to-Call functionality in Adwords. Greg Sterling spoke with Paul Feng, Google’s Group Product Manager for Mobile Ads, about this new feature. Feng said that some advertisers in Google’s Click-to-Call tests saw improvement in CTR’s up to 30%, compared to ads on the PC. Sterling goes on to hypothesis that the local number provides additional credibility, making the user more inclined to click or call.

I share Sterling’s theory about the power of a local number in CTR. We’ve been including local numbers in service business ads for some time now, and they consistently outperform ads without numbers. Sure, with the numbers in we have less room for creative, but if CTR is better it’s a no brainer.

So after reading that Google made Click-to-Call functional we set it up for a garage door repair company in Las Vegas. We thought Click-to-Call would be a pretty good thing for them. Mobile users in Las Vegas looking to repair the garage door would be able to call for service right away, no need to go through the website.

So we followed Googles “2 Simple Steps” for setting this up:

1)Set up location extensions and add your business phone number. Customers will be able to click to call your business location nearest to them (as determined by the phone’s location awareness technologies, GPS, triangulation).
2)Check that you’ve chosen to show your ads on iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers in your campaign settings.

After making these simple changes to your campaign settings, you should see something resembling the picture above.

Split Your Campaign Into PC and Mobile

We decided to split our campaigns into two groups: One for just mobile, and one for just Desktops.
This way we can tailor the content of the ad and their landing pages to the mobile user. Plus we want to see just how effective these ads are against the regular ones.

Anyway, we set everything up and then pulled out our iPhones and Droids to test it. Here’s what we saw.

The click to call number wasn’t displaying! The address was showing, so we knew we got it right. What happened?

How come my address shows in my ads, but my phone number is missing?

We double and triple checked our settings and ads. Everything was set up correctly, but why wasn’t the phone number displaying? The AdWords Help page wasn’t useful, offering only the advice to make sure you haven’t set up custom targeting to show an address with the ad. We hadn’t.

We finally threw in the towel and contacted AdWords support. Here’s the answer we got:

So if you’re having the same problem getting your Click-to-Call numbers displaying, don’t worry. Google just needs time to catch up.

Guest Post by Chris Keenan.
Chris Keenan is a PPC Account Manager at A2Opinion, a local search marketing agency.

Over the weekend I had my first sighting of the new Google Product Listing Ads.
Having missed all the write-ups last week I was shocked when they showed up in a search I was doing over the weekend.

Visually dominant and uber-relevant, these ads dominated my attention as a search marketer and someone looking for an above ground pool.

Screen cap of my first sighting and interaction with a Google Product Listing Ad.

Google continues to expand the types of searches for which it displays the 10-Pack. Today for the first time I found the 10 pack for a search with a county geography.

In the light of Borrell Associates recent study that showed astronomical churn rates at local search resellers like Yodle and ReachLocal, there has been a lot of speculation about the reasons why. I commented on David Mihm’s Blog that price is a big issue and how much they charge is still unknown.

Andrew Shotland, a a well respected seo, speculated on that same post that cost was probably between 30% – 50% of spend.

Here is what 2 customers of a prominent reseller told me:

I told them I wouldn’t do business with them until they told me how much they charged. I knew they weren’t doing it for free so I pressed. They still wouldn’t tell me and I continued to press until finally they got a manager who told me “We get the clicks at a discount from Google, so you would be paying the same thing as if you did it on your own”

That last statement sent my eyebrows up to the ceiling. The customer asked me if I could find out for him whether it is true or not. I told him that I would put out to the community.

I would like your opinion please help by commenting below.

Do you believe that some resellers get a lower price on clicks from Google and make their money on that spread?

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.

In the mid 60’s, the word ’screw’ and the phrase’hump the hostess’ were said in the film ‘Whose Afraid Of Virgina Wolf?.’ People freaked out and the Movie Ratings system was born and from it sprang the porn industry.

Earlier in that decade, the surgeon general wrote a report asserting that cigarettes caused lung cancer and congress passed a law requiring manufacturers to a put a warning label on their product. This shielded these companies from liability for years and allowed the cigarette industry to just keep growing.

Later the music industry was required to label their music and today there is more foul and explicit language in music than when I was a kid. Why? Because bands that had stronger warning labels on their CD sold more, and so it became… be explicit or be obscure. The result is explicit language is almost a requirement today.

Doesn’t it feel like enough time has passed since the TV and Video game rating systems that they’re going to come after something else?