Recently eLocal Listing was a sponsor at the Local Search Summit conference during SES San Jose. Local Search Summit was one of the first conferences with it’s main focus being local search. Some of the highlighted speakers were Jason Calcanis (Mahalo), Steve Stukenborg (Google), Jeremy Stoppleman (Yelp), Jennifer Chin (Google), Sarah Smith (Facebook), and plenty of others.

Since Local Search Summit was only one day each panel was jammed packed with today’s thought leaders on local search, social media, and mobile technology.  Steve Espinosa moderated quite a few panels, and eLocal’s Todd Johnson made an appearance on the panel about “What kind of products do small businesses really need” and shared his sales experience and knowledge with the crowd. I personally was honored to share a panel with Will Scott of Search Influence, and Sarah Smith of Facebook where we discussed social media’s impact on the ability to drive and convert leads for small businesses. You can see my presentation here, and Sarah’s presentation here. (make sure to turn up your volume, as the audio is a bit low).

Overall I enjoyed every session and was able to take away something valuable from each one. eLocal’s Own Steve Espinosa headed up the conference and was well applauded for a great event that ended up being the talk of SES San Jose.

Here are some links to other blogs that covered the events and their feedback/wrap up’s.

SES San Jose YouTube Chanel

Local Search News Wrap Up

Aaron Irizarry Social Media Session and Q&A

Expand 2 Web by Don Campbell Summit Wrap up

I was reading a book on the merits (or lack thereof) of cold calling and came across some poignant points that made me stop and pause for a moment to reflect on the difference between more traditional (ok, some will say old fashioned) methods of selling and newer methods fueled by the Internet, the power of Search, and the influence of the consumer.

I will paraphrase a few of these concepts from a book written by Frank Rumbauskas …

“A certain percentage of the market is predisposed, ready, and willing to buy your product [or use your service]. Instead of wasting time [reaching out to] a bunch of people who will NEVER buy your product, you need to find and perfect ways and means of attracting the people who WANT to buy your product before they call your competitors and buy from them instead.”

That is what Search offers small businesses; a perfect way of attracting the people who WANT your product or services.  With Online Search, consumers actively search for businesses who can solve their problem or provide a service or product.   They Search for you – imagine how effective this type of advertising and marketing actually is.  You place your business in front of customers searching for you.  Local Search is even more targeted and effective since consumers are looking for a product or service in a specific location (city/town/zip code).

The secret to sales success is no longer in television, classifieds, radio, or direct mail, (although I really believe that online mixed with traditional advertising is a great way to grow businesses and I will blog on it in another post) instead the secret is to “create and enact systems to uncover people who WANT to buy your product” or service.

Online search marketing does just that .. a way to reach interested, qualified, and motivated customers searching for YOU!

I actually thought I had missread the story when I received the alert in my email this morning. I was skimming stories at the airport headed to Silicon Valley, and when I mentioned it in passing to a steely eyed VC type today he leapt gazelle like to his Blackberry and indeed confirmed that the mighty Idearc had filled for chapter 11. I’m a huge audio book fan, I get to fly a lot and I fill in the spots where my laptop is out of juice with the spoken word. When the narrator starts a section with “Chapter Eleven” a shiver runs down my spine. I wish the good folks at Idearc nothing but the very best, they are a very smart hard working bunch and we are already working with them successfully on several projects. I look forwards to them emerging stronger moving forwards.

What this story, and the pending possible restructuring of several other Yellow Pages giants, points to is the perfect storm of bad news which has swamped the decks of many fine companies. The economy is famously bad, sales are down, the Yellow Page print product has been hemorrhaging cash for years and the increasing stampede of local advertisers from print yellow pages to online offerings which generate track-able local results is becoming overwhelming.

Newspapers have been beset by many of the same issues, my own local Metro the mighty Boston Globe may stop publishing in the near future. Both the Yellow Pages and newspapers have been unable to completely replace the revenue lost from the high priced print products sold by humans on a face to face basis with much lower cost online products sold online or over the phone.

In the old days the purveyors of print ad products never had to prove that their products delivered value for money….over a hundred years or so they emerged as part of the landscape…a must have for any local business. Indeed in many, perhaps all cases the “dead tree products” proved highly effective as a way to deliver customers to advertisers. There is an advertising truism that “half of all advertising is wasted…the problem is nobody can tell which half.” Since the late 90’s print advertising products have been pecked away at by the pure play verticals. When was the last time you sold an exercise bike, bought a car or found a soul mate through a print product? Of course it still happens but it happens less often than it used to.

Even given those changes some sections have remained robust print advertisers. However increasingly local advertisers have an alternative to print products across all segments; they can count the clicks and measure the calls generated by their online advertising and those ad products don’t have to be bought on an annual basis.

Here at eLocal we see the impact of these changes every day. Our advertisers are looking to get on the front page of search results and they count every click, lead and call which we generate. They rightly hold us to a very high “what have you done for me lately” standard. If we aren’t effective we apply more effort to get them to where they need to be. The print equivalent would be a yellow pages company delivering more and more books, burying entire city blocks in paper, until each advertiser was satisfied with their results. It’s a tough standard and we are happy to deliver against it every day.

You can read the entire story here.

Over at Search Engine Land Greg Sterling has some notes on the Sempo results from the “State of Search Engine Marketing” survey.

SEMPO formally released data on the state of search engine marketing, its annual survey of agencies and marketers. This year’s survey consisted of 800 repsondents from all over the globle. However 68 percent of respondents were from the US, with 20 percent coming from a range of contries. Seven percent of respondents were from Canada and 5 percent from the UK.

The respondents/clients represented a range of industries. The top sectors were “retail, business services, electronics manufacturing and financial services.”

As part of the findings and related report SEMPO forecast that SEM spending would grow from a projected $14.7 billion in 2009 to $26.1 billion in 2013. SEM is defined broadly as all spending on search-related marketing including SEO. Consequently it represents more than the share of online ad revenues that the IAB assigns to search.

For the survey results and complete article click here

Stumbled across a good read over at MediaPost…

Effective search engine optimization (SEO) can improve query rankings, but companies also need to give consumers easy-to-use Web sites to boost conversion rates and close the sale. More visitors to the site is great, but if the price of average orders drop, marketers should rethink strategies, according to panelists on a Webinar Tuesday.

Search Engine Land Executive Editor Chris Sherman moderated the Search Marketing Now Webinar, “SEO and Conversion Rates: Hand-in-hand,” sponsored by Range Online Media. Herndon Hasty, senior SEO evangelist, Range; and Chris Knoch, principal search engine marketing (SEM) consultant at Omniture, presented and fielded questions. [READ MORE]

I recently came across this article from eMarketer.

New data provided by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), based on research conducted by Radar Research, sheds light on how search marketing dollars are being spent.

In 2008, $13.5 billion was spent on search marketing. The space was mostly made up of paid placement and search engine optimization (SEO), with a sliver going to technology providers whose software assisted in the execution of search campaigns. Paid search ads saw 88% of the total pie, SEO only 11%.

The ratio of paid placement to SEO will change in the future.

To continue reading this article click here

While on the road to the Kelsey Group Marketplaces 2009 event this week I stopped by Barnes & Noble to pick up the new book by Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?  Early on in the book, Jarvis quickly states and focuses on the fact that small is the new big. Companies can start up with a couple people and not grow past 20 and still attract a large amount of customers. At Kelsey this was proven over and over again.

Small businesses will soon be overwhelmed with the amount of choices they have to market their business online through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing. A great great of this is the start-up dotMenu, which started out by simply hiring stay at home moms to go out and scan in menus from local restaurants for $2 a piece. This allowed them to keep overhead down, efficiency up, and grow within the constraints of cash flow. In 2008 dotMenu ended up taking 3,000,000 online restaurant orders.

The consistent trend of people connecting, sharing, and collaborating on the internet is only going to have a positive effect on small business marketing. When companies and individuals become more open, competition grows larger. When competition grows larger, innovation begins. Products will start to become more transparent, ROI for marketing efforts will become clearer to small business, and the businesses that provide real value will rise to the top, whether they are small or big.

Every time I attend a Kelsey Conference I am amazed at the overwhelming amount of new start ups attending the conference. But the one thing that is more overwhelming than that is the fact that all these start ups are striking partnerships with companies 1000x their size without even a blink. 2009 is going to bring an enormous amount of opportunities for small business to get online, with the big question not being ‘should we be online, but who should we be online with?’

Now that small is the new big, things are going to be a lot more clear for small business.

Developing a productive call center actually involves the process of developing productive people. The most important asset in the sales quiver is the team and simply seeking the best persons for the job is simply not enough.  Your leadership must be up to the task of continually developing significant growth and change in their lives.

It has been proven that money is NOT a long term motivator but rather a short term instigator.  The state of being BETTER is truly a long term purpose charged goal of all individuals, and harnessing that leverage is key to curt tailing attrition and generating more happy sales veterans.

Let’s take an inventory of your team development tools and techniques:

What are the primary needs and wants of your team?

How do you recognize if they are infected by fear?

How much time do you invest in their personal vision at work?

Are you expecting them to understand and purchase your mission?

How much time do you spend in significant change in your life?

Your team needs to be heard and understood.

Their belief is key to the selling proposition and they will only truly follow leaders that they respect and trust.  They need a mature parent that has their needs close to heart.  It is necessary to connect with them one on one, in small groups and in team gatherings to discuss what is truly important to THEM.  Let them voice their heart and translate your business decisions, policies and programs to their internal desires.  Remember, it’s easier to sell people what they want then to make them want what you are selling.

Fear is the mind killer.

Every human reacts to fear in one or more of four different ways:
Run away
Attack
Denial
Crippled Stasis
Fear will feed defects and simply stop any sales rep from truly producing.  Fear is based on two facts occurring:  They are afraid of not getting what they deserve or they are afraid of losing what is theirs.  You can not snap a human out of fear by stamping your foot.  Simply put, fear is the absence of HOPE.  So give your team a plan they can believe in.   Demonstrate your experience and saddle up next to them in the dark.  Let them know that they are safe and they will come back to confidence.  We will talk more about this subject later.

Each week talk about change.

Books, tapes, teachers and programs of significant change are necessary for them to connect with work as a purpose filled location in their lives.  They need to know that there is more than a paycheck waiting for them to feel excited about Monday.  There are many great teachers that you can invite via technology into the lecture room to help translate the work experience into an institute of learning and growth.  Meaningful lessons will create leaders that enthusiastically stay!

What is your mission and why should it be theirs?

Building a company should be about personal pride and feeling of participating in an award winning team experience.  Share your vision constantly and get everyone to understand the WHY of it. But most importantly help them connect with it on a basic level.  It must make sense to THEIR mission if you want them to purchase it.  Don’t demand or expect loyalty if you don’t help your group find their own WHY they should.

You can’t give away what you don’t have!

Those who don’t learn can NOT teach.  Watch out for leadership that feels it already knows what it needs to know.  Pride is summed up with:  I KNOW.  Humility is summed up with:  I want to KNOW.  The seeker is growing and has something to pass on.  The man who demands the world follow his plan and is not open to change and grow is no longer learning and is actually of weaker character.  The man who admits their failings and is willing to look at and change their weaknesses is actually of strong character.  Your team will sense the truth of it and will be pulled towards leadership of strong character naturally.

Change…Grow…Learn…Teach…

If work becomes an Institute of Significance, in turn your sales figures will become significant!

The Kelsey Group gathering has just finished in LA and our team there had what sounds like all together too much fun hanging out with the great and the good at the show. It was apparently well attended and given how hot the whole local online space is nowadays that’s hardy surprising.

There were many sessions of note but I though this post about the local session given by Chris LaSala from Google was particularly interesting. The ideas he addresses are fascinating and exciting. He outline a world where you will be able to search for local information and not only find basic information like addresses and phone numbers, but local content even down to information about availability of inventory in your local shops. It’s a great idea and one that has been tried by several companies in recent years. The problem that those folks ran into and Google discusses here is that small business don’t have the time in there day to get this stuff done and do the million other things they have to do. The information that Google wants is out there but it’s not online and getting it online is going to take time.

This is a problem that we have been working with for a couple of years now. We make sure that as much information about our customers as we can manage get put in the right places online and we work to ensure that information gets found by people searching for the goods and services offered by our customers. We don’t as yet have a way to publish what the current stock levels but we are looking at adding more and more of this kind of information.

The ideal world Google is discussing in this article isn’t here quite yet…but we are helping to build it one local business at a time

Google Cozies Up To SMBs For Digital Content

by Laurie Sullivan,

Imagine searching on Google for rare coins or Topps baseball cards. Aside from listing the brick-and-mortar address, directions and phone number, the search query might return the suggested retail price and the quantity in stock at each local store.

That’s the picture Chris LaSala painted this week at The Kelsey Group conference in Los Angeles. The Google director of local marketers and strategic partner development said the biggest problem the search engine faces in reaching that goal is the lack of digital content serving local markets. “There’s a vast array of content specific to local markets, but the majority isn’t available in digital form, so getting access to it isn’t easy,” he said.

Small and medium businesses (SMB) have been reluctant to give Google access to digital content that is specific to local markets. Basically, it’s because they don’t have the time to turn hard copies into bits and bytes. “Getting the SMB to give us access is something we need to get better at,” he said. “We aren’t even close to where we need to be.”

LaSala estimates that Google has indexed about 10% of the available digital content geared toward local markets. “If you look at Main Street USA–the barber, the church, the synagogue and the sports shop–you might get the hours of service and address,” he said. “But wouldn’t it be great if you find out if you could get an Alex Rodriguez rookie card? If you knew it was in the shop and the costs, you could go down to the store and buy it. This is just an example of where we are today.”

LaSala admits that Google hasn’t done as good a job in serving the SMB market as it would like. Many of Google’s products don’t meet their needs. Citing a Webvisibility study, he said 40% of SMBs go to the Internet first when they look for local data, yet less than half spend less than 10% for online ads.

Aside from getting SMBs to provide more content in digital format, the biggest challenge has been to support them as advertisers. He suspects that while the features in AdWords drive success, they also hinder success, too.

While the AdWords’ platform lets businesses choose a host of advertising options, SMBs don’t have time to pick keywords, design ads, decide on budgets for cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns, and pick sites they want to advertise on. “It’s all these things the SMB doesn’t have time to do,” LaSala said.

LaSala admits there’s a gap between the design of the platform and the ability for them to carry out the campaign. Improving the gap might mean making Google Maps more intuitive or offering bundled services.

There are plans to roll out new bundled services and APIs for SMBs that should align better with the philosophies of smaller companies, LaSala said. The sales force has seen a makeover, too, because Google has learned that selling into the SMB requires specific talents to understand the market.

“We’ve retrenched with a smaller group of partners,” LaSala said. “Google’s not immune to pressures of effectively using the resources on our team, so we narrowed the scope to the partners that we think log the highest opportunities.”

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=102383

I have just read a very well thought through article about how to measure SEO performance. It’s written with traditional SEO done to large sites by SEO specialists but the metrics it speaks about are also relevant for the kind of large/small business SEO that we specialize in. To condense the article to it’s essentials it asks the following questions:

· Are your pages indexed by the large search engines? Ours are submitted and indexed every day

· Do you have back links pointing to your pages? We have an enormous number deployed

· Do you rank well for query term that you care about? We test and adjust to maximize this all the time

· Does your site make money? In our world that means do your marketing dollars make your phone ring….our testing indicates a resounding yes to this metric.

You should ask the same question about your website, enjoy..

March 17, 2009 · by Jill Kocher

Measuring success in search engine optimization can typically be done in four ways. “Indexation” measurements will determine if a search engine has properly identified all of your site’s pages. “Backlink” measurements will show the number of internal and external links that point to your site as a whole. “Rankings” measurements will show where in the natural search results your site appears for given search words or phrases. And “traffic and revenue” measurements will show the keywords used to find your site, revenue generated per keyword, the percentage of visitors that purchased products and so forth. This article will explore each of the measurements, which we refer to here as “metrics.”

Indexation Metrics

Indexation is the first critical step to natural search performance. Pages that aren’t indexed have zero chance of ranking in the search engines. However, more indexation isn’t necessarily better because that could indicate that identical pages in your site are duplicated in a search engine’s index, which will decrease a site’s ability to rank because the pages are, essentially, competing against themselves.

What is the “right” indexation number? Most ecommerce sites can only guesstimate based on the number of products they offer. For example, if a site offers 50,000 products but only has 5,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a barrier preventing a search engine from fully “crawling” a site. Conversely, if that same site has 500,000 pages indexed, there’s likely a duplication issue. The site will then have issues with self-competition and split-link popularity, both of which hinder a site’s ability to rank strongly.

Indexation is measured by performing a “site:” query in the major engines. For example, type [site:www.yourdomain.com] into the Google and MSN Live search boxes, without the [brackets]. For Yahoo!, just enter the URL into Yahoo! Site Explorer. These site queries measure how many URLs are indexed in each engine. Compare that number to the number of pages that should exist to determine actions required and progress made.

A complete list of the queries available in Google, some of which are also available on Yahoo! and MSN Live, can be found at http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html.

Backlink Metrics

Measuring “backlinks” will show the number of links pointing to various pages across a site. Generally, the more external links that point to your site, the higher your site will rank in natural search results. However, measuring backlinks varies among the search engines.

For Google, enter a “link:” query such as [link:www.yourdomain.com] in the search box. This is a measure of how many backlinks are coming into the entire domain. However, Google only gives the true measure of backlinks in its Webmaster Tools, which anyone can access once they have a Google account.

For Yahoo!, enter the domain into Yahoo! Site Explorer. Click on the “InLinks” tab and filter the results to show four different data sets: (1) all backlinks (internal & external), (2) only external backlinks, (3) only to the home page and (4) to the whole site.

For MSN, the “link:” query is currently disabled in MSN Live, so backlinks cannot be measured there.

How many backlinks should a site have? There is no way to estimate in the way we can for indexation, and the engines aren’t known for giving accurate, specific or detailed backlink data, unfortunately. The best advice for measuring backlinks is to watch the trend rather than be concerned about individual numbers. And more high quality links are always better.

Advanced Link Manager is a tool for scanning and reporting on backlink trends, including number and diversity of domains linking in, anchor text diversity, and a number of other reports.

Ranking Metrics

Rankings are a tricky metric to report on. Rankings (i.e. where your site appears in natural search listings) vary greatly between singular and plural versions of the same term. Moreover, personalized and blended search affect individual rankings so that no two people are likely to get the same ranking result. However, I suggest a couple of ways to attack this issue.

· Targeted. Choose a select set of keyword terms that you’ll target based on keyword research. These will probably include the trophy terms for which management aspires to rank. Use a subscription rank checker such as WebCEO or a free tool such as the Rank Checker plug in for Firefox to check the rankings for the terms you’re targeting. These tools will give you only the rankings for the terms you specify, for the domains you specify.

· Aggregate. Subscription tools like Enquisite offer the ability to track the page on which a term ranks for every keyword that drives natural search to your site. So, say that [widgets] drove 10 visits to mydomain.com. Enquisite would report which URLs on my site drove those 10 visits, and what page in the search results the rankings were on. The information can be sliced and sorted by keyword, URL, IP, date, engine, and more.

Traffic and Revenue Metrics

Natural search-referred traffic is a common measurement in most analytics programs. The “holy grail” for measuring SEO effectiveness is frequently a report combining URL, keyword, traffic, orders, and revenue. Such a report tells you which URLs are effective, and by omission, which are not. It tells you which keywords and keyword phrases drive traffic, and by omission which don’t. And it tells you which URLs and terms drive sales through natural search and which don’t.

Consider which pages were optimized and how, for which keywords. Those pages and keywords are the ones where you should expect to see growth. Only by performing large-scale programmatic optimizations, like title tags across the entire site, would you expect to see a site-wide increase in traffic. Most optimization efforts will improve performance for individual pages and keywords. Knowing which pages and keywords are most valuable to your business will guide those optimization efforts.

You can see the full article here

http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/1014-Measuring-SEO-Performance