Last December Google announced the suspension of their Local Listings Ads trial in the San Francisco and San Diego markets according to Search Engine Land
It’s official now. Sometime in the last 10 days the following two links that explained Local Listing Ads have been deleted by Google, not a best practice in my mind.
I was very excited about this new service and started recommending it to my small business owner friends and anyone else who wanted a low, flat-cost alternative. If there is something in the works at the GooglePlex I sure would like to know.
Does anyone out there know where they’re going to take the lessons from this trial and apply it?
There are more and more articles being written lately about how page load time (page speed) will impact your organic rankings. (Search Engine Watch & Search Engine Land)
For those interested in knowing more about how they are currently being measured and how to improve it, go into your Google Webmasters Tools. Assuming you’ve already verified your domain, beneath Labs you will find “Site Performance”.
A recently acquired client of ours displayed the following performance data.
That is not an impressive 4 month trailing average to say the least. Every day came in above (peach area) the acceptable page load times expected by Google (green area). To resolve the issue you need to pull back a few layers of the onion and interrogate each of the offending components. Google recommends PageSpeed. It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you have the hustle and time it will break down exactly which of your page elements are slow and also offer advice on how to solve the problem.
This is Google’s attempt to speed up the web. By demoting sites that have poor performance it is announcing to those webmasters that speed is important to users and if they want to rise in the rankings they need to consider the user experience in relation to speed.
Don’t miss out on this free tool set to keep you ahead of the game before your slow site continues to fall!
Many small businesses here in the Tampa Bay area have ventured into online advertising this year and many more will as part of their 2010 advertising plan. While it is likely a viable option no matter the size of your company, it is critical to consider your budget and how to build the plan.
Here we’ll focus exclusively on pay-per-click costs. You also need to do your due diligence on the other areas of your online marketing plan be it search engine optimization or web analytics. For simplicity, we’ll look into Google AdWords given its dominance in the PPC industry.
Here are three areas to consider when reducing your paid search costs:
- Quality Score:
Your quality score is a number Google applies to each of your bidding keywords that has a direct relationship on your final cost of each click. While there are many factors associated with assigning your Quality Score, one of the most overlooked is the relevance between your ad text and the text of your landing page.
Say you’re advertising your law firm’s Tampa environmental law services. You may choose to use the word ‘environmental law’ in your text ad, but if you do not have the term on your landing page (the page the user clicks through to) your quality score will likely suffer, driving up you cost-per-click (CPC).
- Match type:
Are you bidding on terms using only “Broad” as the match type? If so you are going to match on the ones you want, but you’ll also match unwanted searches. Adding “Exact” and “Phrase” into the mix on the same terms allows you to dedicate higher bids on those critical terms and lower bids on the broad matches.This reduces your cost AND keeps you higher in position for your critical terms. As a plus, your Quality Score will be rewarded with higher click-through rates.
- Poor Performing keywords:
Do you still have the initial keyword list in your campaign? If so you’re campaign is suffering if some of these terms are poor performers and never get an impression. Clean house every now and then by removing them and adding new ones via Google’s keyword tool.
There is much to optimizing you AdWords campaign than can be even outlined here. If you’d like more insight and suggestions, please feel free to contact our pay-per-click team in Tampa.
Search popularity is always an interesting topic as people get deeper into their Tampa-unique search marketing initiatives. However peeking into local search popularity is another matter since the volume is never high enough for terms related to Tampa. Nor can we peek at what those within Tampa are searching for. The most popular tools, like WordTracker and Google Keyword Tool, just don’t do that.
But another tool from Google allows to see what the searchers here in Tampa are doing, Google Insights. You can drill down with many different levers in the tool, but the regional filter is worth delving into.
Using the tool’s filter I ran reports looking back over the past thirty days targeting the Tampa Bay area and its search terms on Google. As we might expect many of the popular terms at the national level show up, like ‘Facebook’, ‘YouTube’, ‘news’, etc. But if you drill down into the categories you find some very unique Bay Area terms.
In the Financial category are many searches for Suncoast Federal Credit Union. Notice the absence of some of the other big banks in that list. Hats off to Suncoast.
In the Local category, we see a near breakout search for the recent Ribfest in St. Petersburg.
In the Real Estate category the county property appraiser’s offices (Hillsborough, Pinellas and Sarasota) are quite popular.
In the Society category, it’s the universities that dominate, in particular the University of South Florida and the University of Florida.
So are you are preparing your strategy to aggressively attack the search marketing channel here in Tampa, are you going to this level of detail to not only do the due diligence on your industry’s terms, are you are looking for opportunities to align yourself with popular terms that are local in nature?
If not, Google Insights is a great starting point.
UPDATE 12/8/2009: The St Pete Times has an article this morning on the most Googled terms in Tampa Bay. Here’s a direct link the raw data. It’s interesting to see Google’s view compared the my take above.
As the New Year approaches here in the Tampa Bay area many businesses large and small are looking to make changes and begin the new life for their body as well as their business. Online marketing is usually the first place people target to make a substantial impact to the business. So we take a look at 4 new Google trends worth watching closely.
Google is cluttering the search results page. Over the past few months and in months to come Google will add more components to the results page including:
- Social Search results. Currently at the bottom of the page.
Social Search Results
- Profiles. Also at the bottom for name searches.
Personal Profiles
- Local Listings Ads. An expansion of AdWords that pushes organic results (non-revenue generating) even further down.
Local Listings Ads
- AdWords SiteLinks. Another line or three within the paid results.
AdWords Sitelinks
What does this mean for you? It’s no longer easy to dominate the search results on Google. In addition to traditional organic search results and AdWords tactics you now need to expand your list of campaigns if you want to own the results page and starve out your competition.
As with any channel of marketing it’s important to weigh the time and investment you make in online marketing to insure you are getting a good return. Even with online marketing there may be better and more efficient options than Google for gaining new business.
But most of the options are niche and focused on your particular industry or vertical. Google is the good catch-all for all industries, but don’t be blinded by its press. There are other options; ones that may be less expensive.
Soon I’ll delve into a few of those vertical as they relate to Tampa and how businesses in them could attack the online market and capture local, regional, national or even international business.
If you would like to see me focus on your industry, contact me and I’ll glad to share the results right here with you and the world.
In case you haven’t already, do not wait any longer to claim your business on Google’s Local Business Center. This step is critical to putting your business in the local search results of your prospects.
Local search results are those associated with the map you regularly see in one of the top positions of the search results. Searchers click on these links in drove for many business categories. As you optimize you site to rank for terms in the organic results, do not discount getting you business in the local section of results.
An significant advantage of the clicks is you get to direct them to a specific page on your site rather than letting Google determine which page is most appropriate. For example, if you were to Google “south tampa dentist“, you would get the following results as of today.
Dentist In South Tampa
Notice Coast Dental among the top spots in these results even though Coast Dental does not rank in the organic positions for that term or “dentist in south tampa“. This business and the others are receiving top billing just by managing their local business pages through Google.
Benjamin Franklin once said that it takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it. The reputation of a company has always been important, but perhaps never so much as today. Living in this Internet age, it is much easier to learn the reputation of companies, not only the ones down the block, but also those halfway around the world. Knowing your company’s reputation is important to your brand but equally important to the bottom line.
Researching Online
Marketing departments have long known that one of the most important tools for getting the word out about their business is through word-of-mouth recommendations. While advertising is about what you say about your company, recommendations focus on what your customers are saying. It is also believed that for every public review about your business, there are many more customers who feel the same way but simply have not taken the time to formally express it.
The Internet makes posting a review simple, and it makes that information easily available to the masses. Studies show that the majority of Americans today go online to research products and companies before moving forward with a purchase or arranging to do business with a company. Because of this, it is important that you pay attention to what your online reputation is, and become proactive in building it.
Encourage Customers, Follow Up
A great way to build your online reputation is to encourage your customers to spread the word and write reviews. There are many places on the Web where customers can write reviews about a company, good or bad. Encouraging all customers to review your company, product or service is one of the best ways to take control of your online reputation. Consider identifying specific places where they can leave reviews, or even provide a list of such sites on the company website or in your online newsletter.
Once people have been encouraged to leave reviews about the company – whether favorable or not, take the time to keep up with those reviews. Setting aside some time each week or bi-weekly to search out and read the reviews can be beneficial, and using that opportunity to respond to reviews can help build a positive online reputation.
As with most situations, there are individuals who have found ways to ‘work’ the review process. There are people that get friends or family members to stack the deck with glowing reviews. There are even companies that pay writers to whip up favorable reviews. As tempting as this may seem, avoid engaging in such behavior. If the word gets out that your reviews are bogus, it is going to be more damaging to your reputation than one or two less-than-perfect evaluations. Besides, consumers can often pick up on the trend, and will learn to discount the reviews outright.
Learning, Moving On
While online reviews can be helpful to a consumer who conducts research, they can also be a valuable feedback tool for the company being reviewed. Rather than immediately discounting the negative comments, be sure to consider the full context and overarching themes of the negative comments. The information may be accurate and valuable in helping to improve the overall customer service experience or in creating a better product with enhanced features.
In the end, when you have taken the negative information into account and made positive changes, future write-ups about the company should be much improved. Today, Benjamin Franklin might well give his quote a second thought and revise it to say “it only takes one bad review to help a company see the error of its ways and make improvements.”
Sidebar
Online company reviews appear on everything from personal blogs to Amazon.com. Setting up a Google alert with your company’s name can help keep you informed of anything new that comes out about your company. Once you have set up an alert, any time your company name is mentioned online and Google picks it up, an e-mail link will be sent to you.
Other good places to check online reviews include:
Maps.Google.com – This is the most important of all review sites since these reviews have a significant impact on your local search results.
Yelp.com
Shopping.com
CitySearch.com
ConsumerSearch.com
Epinions.com
JudysBook.com
AngiesList.com
Superpages.com
What should you do if you come across a review that is false or possibly slanderous to your company? Contact the website directly and explain that it contains false information that could be damaging to your company, then request the site to remove the review and/or allow your company to post a written response to it.
