Posts Tagged ‘local search’

What Is Geo Targeted SEO?

Published by admin on November 18th, 2011 - in Local Search

Online advertising has become the newest marketing trend for local and online businesses. And while many marketers aim for global advertisement, many marketers want to market their products or services to a specific market through Geo targeted SEO. It has allowed business owners to focus their target audience into a specific location and increase local visibility. But how does geo targeted marketing works? Find out more below.

What is Geo Targeting SEO?

Geo targeted SEO is very simple: you are directing your advertising efforts in a specific geographical location. Such advertising is designed to target a specific market, which could be located in a given country, region, or city. Therefore, it is very focused in the promotional approach and is often catered for the individuals residing within that specific location, despite leveraging online tools and methods.

Geo targeting is a method that is used to control the content displayed on a website to reflect a business located in a specific geographical area. The center of geo targeted marketing happens on the server before the actual website is sent over to the browser. Basically, a mechanism detects the IP address of the web user, then verifies it to the database to ensure that the search matches that of the browser’s location.

For business owners, geo targeted SEO is very useful since it enables you to dominate the popular search engines and their local counterparts.

Benefits of Geo Targeted SEO

  • What is the relevance of geo targeted marketing to local businesses? These benefits are listed below:
  • It enables local businesses to target their marketing efforts to the local audience. And with a targeted approach to marketing, you are likely to increase conversion rate.
  • Geo SEO enables a small business to compete in an even playing field with larger businesses.
  • Geo targeted SEO enable small businesses with minimal marketing budget to achieve real results and higher return of investments. However, experts insist that you need to have an in-depth understanding of your local market in order to improve your quality of service to customers.
  • It enables you to dominate your local niche. It also encourages people to purchase your products or use your services instead of purchasing from someone that is far from them.
Tags: , , , , ,
No Comments »

Consumers Use Search Engines For Local Community Information

Published by admin on October 3rd, 2011 - in Local Search

To cater to a consumer base that continues to increase its online media consumption, many traditional local media properties such as newspapers, TV and radio stations have made the shift to digital. But when seeking out local information and news online, consumers are less inclined to turn to digital editions of local newspapers, radio and TV stations, preferring search engines instead, findings from Pew Research Center suggest.

Overall, most US web users still rely on traditional media for their daily dose of community news and information: 49% tuned in to local TV news stations, 33% relied on radio broadcasts and 22% read local newspapers daily.

But today’s average consumer gets their local info both online and offline. September 2010 data from the Newspaper National Network (NNN) showed 69% of US local news consumers used a mix of traditional and new media sources, compared to 30% who used only traditional media. Given the boom in tablet and smartphone adoption over the past year, today’s percentage of mixed-media news consumers is likely even higher.

Online consumers were most likely to refer to search engines (28%) such as Google or Bing every day for local community news—a rate higher than that of US web users who read local newspapers for such information. Only 18% of web users surveyed said they had never used a search engine for local community news.

Though it’s likely search engines sometimes function as navigational tools for finding local information on traditional media websites, the data suggests such information sources often remain untouched. The percentages of internet users who had never turned to digital versions of local newspapers, TV and radio stations were 38%, 37% and 64%, respectively.

For local business information, search engines and portals like AOL and MSN were used by the most internet users, beating out local print newspapers and common word-of-mouth referral sources like friends and family.

Search engines were also the top resource for finding information on local restaurants and bars: 38% of online consumers said they used search engines for this reason; local print newspapers were the second most-used resource, cited by 26% of respondents.

Maintaining a search engine presence is a must for local businesses looking to drive traffic to their websites and stores. You must be listed in sources like Google, Bing, etc. for being found using local business map listings by major serach engines.  In addition, media companies should look to optimize and expand their search engine presence to drive additional traffic to their web properties.

Click to enlarge

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
No Comments »

Is Your Mobal Site Ready for the Future?

Published by admin on August 11th, 2011 - in Mobile Marketing

Today, nearly 40% of U.S. subscribers regularly browse the web on their mobile phones. By 2013, Google predicts mobile web traffic will surpass PC web traffic. In other words, your mobile website will attract more daily visitors and generate more sales than your desktop site.

Some mobile sites will get there even sooner.  ESPN reports they are already seeing more mobile traffic than PC traffic on some weekends.  Recognizing this clear trend towards mobile, top brands and retailers are racing to develop new strategies for mobile and dedicating increased resources to the mobile web.

Exciting new devices with modern mobile browsers are driving innovation in the mobile web space.  Consumers with modern devices now expect brands to have mobile-friendly websites and reward retailers that embrace mobile. Retailers report higher conversion rates and order sizes which are 30%-40% larger with a mobile-friendly website.

For mobile retailers, getting consumers to the products they want to see quickly is paramount. Furthermore, getting consumers through the shopping cart faster has a direct impact on sales. A speedy, more efficient experience translates into more conversions and less abandoned shopping carts.

First generation mobile sites require a new page to load with every touch – and it can be a painfully slow experience. Each time a mobile user waits for a page to load, you stand a chance of losing them. Next-gen mobile sites deploy sliding menus, quick sort functionality, and product list views that change without reloading the page. Menus and product views change instantly

Geo-location is the first ‘killer app’ for mobile.  New mobile sites leverage the geo-location API to not only detect your current location, but utilize that data point to present content with super-context. For example, Pier 1 imports provides a real-time view of stores near you where the product you’re looking for is currently ‘In Stock’. Travelocity provides a local view of their vast content (deals, available reservations, gas stations, etc.) based on your current location. Geo-fencing applications, which trigger events if you enter a virtual perimeter, are also starting to gain traction on the mobile web.

Tags: , , , , , ,
No Comments »

Local Search with Mobile Apps Growth Rate at 34%

Published by admin on August 8th, 2011 - in Local Search, Mobile Marketing

As online search activity continues to grow in usage and intensity, new data show local searches now account for 13 percent of all core search activity on top web search portals as of January 2011.  Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) and local search sites also exhibited strong growth with 5.6 billion local searches in 2010, a 15 percent increase over 2009.

The State of Local Search study conducted by comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, and released by the Local Search Association, looks at the online local search industry and explores local business search behaviors, highlighting usage trends and profiling searchers and their engagement with search options.

The study shows significant growth in mobile local search use, which provides opportunities for local businesses to engage with potential customers via mobile.  In January 2011, 77.1 million mobile subscribers accessed local content on a mobile device, up 34 percent from the previous year. Local content users accounted for 33 percent of mobile subscribers, with 87 percent owning a GPS-capable handset (up 9 percent from the previous year).

An analysis of core mobile usage behaviors showed local content dominating, as mobile subscribers increasingly turn to their mobile phones for information on maps, weather, traffic, retail and other local content.

App use for mobile local content grew 34 percent, with 56 percent of respondents using apps for local content.  Browsers lead in usage of local content with 73 percent, dropping from 75 percent last year.  Local content via SMS dropped to 25 percent from 30 percent.

Online daily deal offers and discounts have also emerged as an additional customer acquisition channel for local businesses. The comScore study found that primary IYP searchers were less likely to report purchasing online daily deal coupons for local businesses than business searchers on other sites (27 percent vs. 38 percent).

Tags: , , , , ,
1 Comment »

Local Search Will Become Automatic

Published by admin on August 5th, 2011 - in Local Search

Location is no longer a service like maps or navigation, but increasingly an enabler of new product experiences. In a nutshell, the very notion of location-based services doesn’t not mean much anymore as I outline in the new Forrester report, “Mobile Location Becomes Invisible:”

—Location and maps are increasingly becoming features of new mobile products and services

—Location will happen automatically, behind the scenes. Think about the automatic weather update on your home screen widget. These adjustments happen automatically and, from a user perspective, invisibly. A growing number of applications will use geospatial information—without necessarily generating a map.

—Relevancy of local data will improve quickly. The era of basic point of interest (POI) information is over. This is no longer about just the address and the business name of a local shop. Enriching content with more accurate information on opening hours, real-time data (traffic information, coupons and promotions, etc.), product data, brand data, dynamic (review and promotion) data, and inventory data will deliver greater consumer benefits.

—New algorithms will bridge the physical and digital worlds. Coupling more accurate local data with user context and other sources of information will enable developers to create new algorithms bridging offline and online worlds.

—Such a new model, linking consumer behaviors with local data, will foster the development of crowdsourcing and predictive analysis. Think about predicting traffic congestion or air quality monitoring. Moving forward, these new algorithms will have far-reaching consequences far beyond mobile. There is tremendous value in knowing not just where customers are at a given moment of time but also where they are going and who they are in an aggregated and anonymous way.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
No Comments »

Google Places: What Else Went Missing on the Places Page in the Update

Published by admin on July 26th, 2011 - in Local Search

This is a great post by Understanding Google.

Last week Google Places updated the display of the Places Page. In doing so they removed the review summaries, review snippets and 3rd party citations from the page. They removed a number of other fields from the Places display as well.

Quite a few readers have asked where this field or that field has gone and whether it is returning or why it is not displaying so I am reposting Google Places Community Manager Vanessagene‘s comments from the Google Places forums to make explicit what else is not showing:

Seeing a lot of questions in the forum, let me just clarify a couple things about the new Place pages. The following info you provide may not appear on your Place page, but it’s all still used to help us understand more about your business:

• Email address
• Menu
• Reservations
• Optional attributes / Additional details
• Service area toggle “Show service area”

So just because we’re not showing it, doesn’t mean it’s not helpful for us to have — it helps our system ensure that your organic listing appears and ranks appropriately on Google and Google Maps when potential customers perform searches related to your service.

For more info about ranking, check out this blog post:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-local-search-ranking-works.html

Hope this helps,

Vanessa

Google has always contended that the content on the Places Page was informed by what searchers found useful. Whether this removal of the information reflects that ethos, the desire to make the page more visually streamlined or whether Google is making space for additional (money making?) features is unclear at this point.

A number of readers in the forum were displeased with Google’s decision to remove this data and the post comments are worth a read. The most salient being that it makes little sense to provide all of these details to Google if Google is not going to show them. Regardless, I would presume that the above fields of data are not coming back to the Places page any time soon.

On a related note there is still a bug on a number of Places pages where the business description is not showing. Google’s intention is to show the description on the page. They are aware of the bug and, one presumes, that they will locate and display that data some day.

Tags: , , , , ,
No Comments »

Why Local Search Is An Important Tool To Get More Customers

Published by admin on July 26th, 2011 - in Local Search

 Approximately four years ago, Google made a major change in their search engine results page by introducing a “Universal Search” system that blended listings with video, images and news results along with the sites it gathered from crawling web pages.  Universal Search also accommodated the increase in searches for location-specific information.  Instead of just searching “restaurants,” many people were searching “restaurants Louisville KY.”  Search engines tested this new interest trend by placing a map and local listings at the top of the results page.  Heat map reports showing how users absorb a search results page implied that users paid a good deal of attention to the map listings at the top of the page.

This research also indicates that users interact with map listings and organic search results more frequently than the paid ads.  This change prompted Google to prioritize local search to the top of the search results page, and in time most engines followed suit.

Before the rise of local search, users had to enter a search term plus a geo-modifier (e.g., Louisville, Kentucky, 40299) in order to get location-specific search results.  Today’s search algorithms take into account the IP address of the user, showing location-targeted results without the searcher requesting it.  A search for just “dentists” from a computer in Louisville will pull up dental offices in the Louisville, KY area along with the general information pages.

Google experimented with how many local search listings to display in order to maximize user experience.  Originally, only three local search listing results were displayed as flags next to the area map.  Google tried increasing local map listings to a 10-pack, but found that searchers did not like how far down the page that moved organic search results.  Research indicated that local searchers wanted a selection of map listings, but also valued the organic search listings.  This led to the 7-pack format, which presented seven listings at the top of the search page.  The most recent iteration of Google’s local search display is called “Place Search.”  This format combines the organic listings with local map listings and positions the map on the right panel.  There is also an option to see only local listings by clicking the “Places” link in the left-hand panel.  The latest iteration personalizes local search by allowing users to select their location to see local listings in any area, not just their current location.  This change puts even more emphasis on local search results by showing more robust listings with pictures, meta descriptions and review quotes.

Bing and Yahoo have followed Google into the local search marketing.  However, all local search does not work the same and they have different algorithms to determine business rank.  Obviously, you get more traffic if yau are ranked on the first page of local search.  To obtain a high ranking, you must build out your business listing using geotags, reviews, citations, product and service keywords and addition information. 

If this is all confusing to you, Let G3 Marketers get your business a top ranked position. Call (502) 409-3451 to get a FREE Market Analysis to generate more customers for your business through local search.

 

Tags: , , , , ,
No Comments »

How To Categorize for Local Search

Published by admin on July 24th, 2011 - in Local Search

Many Local search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Best of the Web, and Bing, allow you to place your business into a number of categories (usually between 2 and 5) that help describe what your business does.

This may seem like a trivial step when you are filling out your business information, but it’s actually very important. The search engines use this data when deciding which businesses to show for particular searches.

Yahoo Local’s Shailesh Bhat explains in an interview,

“ In cases where we do not have a self-serve listing, where the merchant has not provided any data, but we have data from other sources, we essentially look out for the degree of agreement between various sources. That is one heuristic element that helps us in figuring out the right category.”

As a rule, the search engines will not display a business which is not categorized, or even worse, mis-categorized, for particular sets of keywords. This usually happens among keywords and phrases that are most competitive—where there are already a number of businesses who are associated with a particular category, and that will satisfy what the searcher is looking for.

One example might be: if you’re a pizza parlor, and you’re only listed in a general “restaurants” category, you may not show up for “pizza parlor” searches, because the search engine finds enough relevant results in the “pizza parlor” category to satisfy that searcher’s main desire. So it’s important to list yourself in as many categories as are relevant to your business.

Tags: , , , ,
No Comments »

Why is Local Search Important to Your Business?

Published by admin on July 24th, 2011 - in Local Search

Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines have revolutionized how we learn, how we collaborate, how we shop, and in general have helped billions of people around the world harness the full power of the internet.

Today there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month, and that’s just in the United States! Of those searches,

  • 40% of queries have Local intent (1)
    • 5% use the city and/or state name
    • 2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods
    • 0.5% use zip codes

On Yahoo alone, 100 Million unique visitors per month search with “local intent” (2). We can extrapolate that there are HALF A BILLION unique Local searches per month on Google, based on Yahoo’s ~15% market share (though we’ve not seen any “hard numbers” released by Google about its average Local Search volume). We’ve seen both Google and Yahoo make dramatic shifts in how they return results in 2008, and all the trends point to Local.

On top of that data, respected technology experts around the world think the world of mobile search is ready to take off in 2009 and 2010. In some places around the world, like Japan, many of these technologies are already in place. They’re in use even in the United States, with more sophisticated devices like the iPhone. Mobile searches are primarily going to pull their results from Local Search Engines.

Tags: , , ,
No Comments »

Changes at Google Places – No 3rd Party Reviews?

Published by admin on July 23rd, 2011 - in Local Search

Google Places is no longer showing 3rd party reviews.  there is a lot of speculation that Google Places has changed the algorithem.  This is probably not the case as it appears to be more asthetics than changes in rankings.  You should continue to focus on 3rd party reviews and citations.

Here is an observation from Linda Buquet:

From what I can tell this was ONLY a front end cosmetic change NOT a backend change that affects the algo or ranking.

In some quick ranking checks I did last night, it appears the lack of 3rd party reviews showing up in the count DID NOT affect rankings. Not in the rankings I’ve checked anyway. Regardless of how many 3rd reviews were removed from the COUNT everyone’s ranking stayed the same.

Same thing holds true for the lack of visible citations. 

For example: Dentists that have 200 DemandForce reviews often have 300 DemandForce citations. Even though those reviews and citations no longer show in Google, the rankings have stayed the same. (Based on just a few spot checks, not saying I’ve done a thorough analysis yet.)

Here is what the recently released Google Local Patent says that was published in September ’10 just before blended results hit the streets:

[0051] The number of documents with reviews of a business associated with a document may be used as a factor in determining the location prominence score for the document. Reviews for businesses can appear in a number of documents, such as newspapers, magazines, web pages, and blogs. In one implementation, the number of documents with reviews of a business may be used as a factor in determining the location prominence score of a document associated with the business.

Here is what Understanding Google says:

Google is looking to represent the most popular and relevant businesses to their searchers. It would seem counter intuitive for them to ignore signals from websites that have more and better information about a business than they do. Just because they are not showing the data does not mean they are not using it. And just because they are showing the data does not mean that they are using it more.

While I do think this change is a perfect way for Google to get more information about businesses and to “up their review generation” game, I can not see how favoring their reviews over all of the other historical information on the internet would improve search results. Above all Google wants to return the best results. That is where their bread is buttered.

The patent that came out last fall clearly speaks of review diversity as a factor so I don’t think that is going away. Maybe in the future but not yet.

Stop chasing the algo. Treat your customers right, encourage them to say nice things about you on the internet at a place that THEY are comfortable with and all will work out.

Tags: , , , ,
No Comments »
© G3 Marketers 2011