Finding Traffic through Local-Search Marketing - Building Search Engine-Friendly Sites - SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)

Part II. Building Search Engine-Friendly Sites

Chapter 12. Finding Traffic through Local-Search Marketing

In This Chapter

arrow Discovering how local search works

arrow Optimizing your pages for local-search marketing

arrow Submitting to the major local-search systems

arrow Submitting to other local-search systems

arrow Working with the Review sites and Yellow Page sites

Increasingly, the Internet is being used as a tool for finding local resources. You can find not only information or buy online, but you can also find homes for sale in your neighborhood, compare local independent insurance agents, and shop at stores close to you that sell the products you need. Thus, it’s increasingly important to keep local-search marketing in mind when optimizing for search engines — that is, to target by not only a searcher’s keyword but also by the searcher’s geographic location (sometimes known as geo-targeting). Local search is the generic term given to the ability to search for information related to a particular location — a state, a city, or even a zip code.

Why You Shouldn’t Skip This Chapter

Wait! Before you skip this chapter because you have a purely online business, you need to understand the two basic reasons you should consider local-search marketing:

· You have a local business.

· Your prospects — your target customers — search locally.

Say you are a local business. You sell insurance in your town or own a local health-food store or are a personal trainer with clients within a 5-mile radius. Clearly, you don’t need to rank well on the terms insurance, health food, or personal training. You need to rank well on the termsinsurance denver, health food waco, or personal training paducah. There’s no point in competing for general terms against hundreds of thousands of other companies when you’re interested in a fraction of the searches; in fact, the really good news is that it’s much easier to rank for a local term than a nonlocal term. The work required to rank on Page 1 for the term personal training will be far more than the work required for personal training paducah.

But, say you’re not a local shop for local people. You sell to anyone, anywhere. You may find that the people you want to reach don’t search for generic terms — they search for generic terms in combination with local terms. You may discover this concept if you do a good keyword analysis, which I describe in Chapter 6. Most people don’t search for lawyers, for instance; they search for lawyers in a particular city. They don’t search for insurance; they search for insurance in a particular state or city. They don’t search for mortgages — they search for mortgages in a particular city.

You may find then, that if you want to reach the largest number of people, you have to consider the local aspect even if you sell nationally. Large online businesses targeting home buyers, for instance, often create local-search — targeted pages designed to reach people in thousands of different locales.

Understanding Local-Search Marketing’s Importance

The local aspect of search is hugely important. Remember, for all the e-commerce hype, e-commerce accounts for only a small portion of the overall economy; in other words, most sales are made offline. The Department of Commerce, for instance, estimated that in the fourth quarter of 2014, e-commerce accounted for just 6.5 percent of total retail sales.

So offline sales are still extremely important, but they undoubtedly are often affected by online activities. For instance, research has uncovered these gems about Internet users:

· Most are off-channel, Web-to-shop (W2S), or ROBO (Research Online, Buy Offline) buyers. That is, they research products online before buying offline.

· When in the brick-and-mortar stores, almost half of Internet users spend extra dollars on products they didn’t research.

· More money is spent offline after online research than is spent online after online research.

· A study released late in 2011 (GroupM Search & Kantar Media Compete) looked at retail sales in Automotive, Consumer Electronics and Entertainment areas; 93 percent of buyers surveyed had used Web search engines as part of their research process, and most buyers had clicked on organic-search links, rather than PPC links.

· The study also found that one of the most popular pages viewed by shoppers was the store-location page, showing that visitors are not doing idle window shopping; they are looking for stores to visit.

· Forrester Research estimates that “online influenced offline sales” are over $1 trillion a year.

When you search at a major search engine using keywords that indicate you are probably looking for a local business or service — mexican restaurant, attorney, pizza, and so on — the search engines will provide local results; search results pulled out of their local directory, along with a map.

Looking through Local Search

All the major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, and Bing — have local search features, incorporated into their map systems but still accessible from regular search. You can see an example of local-search results, from Google Maps, in Figure 12-1, and in Figure 12-2, you can see the type of results that can be displayed for a particular business.

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Figure 12-1: Google Maps provides local-search results, including business details, coupons, and menus.

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Figure 12-2: Detailed information is provided for each business — information that the business owner can add to.

Local searches are carried out if you include location information in your search: pizza denver or tax attorney rhode island, for example. However, the local search engines also have a good idea where you are (I explain how next), so for many types of searches, if they think it’s a local search they can provide local results even if you don’t tell them where you are. Search any of the big three search engines for pizza, for instance, and they’ll assume that you’re likely looking for a pizza place, so they include local search in the results. Search for car insurance, japanese restaurant, or hair salon, and you’ll get local results.

How Does Local Search Work?

Local search is based on several different methodologies, including the science known as geolocation, the science of trying to figure out where the heck a computer is, geographically speaking. Say, for example, that a computer contacts a search engine and says, “Hi, I’m computer67.176.77.58; can you search for information about rodent racing and send me the results?” How does the search engine figure out whether that computer is in Colorado and thus wants information about the famous Rocky Mountain prairie dog racing, or is in Florida and is interested in the famous African Gambian pouch rat races?

Well, local search generally works in a few basic ways. Different services use different combinations of these methods.

Search terms

If someone types dentist new york, the search engine can be pretty sure that the person is looking for a dentist in New York, not a dentist in Oklahoma City. Simple, eh? I can be in Denver, Colorado, but if I type dentist new york, the search engine will display a map of New York.

Partner and localized sites

Search services can guess at a location based on the Web site someone is using. If someone is searching at www.google.fr, it’s a good bet that the person is in France; if someone searches at www.yahoo.co.uk, that person is probably in the United Kingdom. In other cases, partner sites can be even more specific, and related to a particular region or even city.

IP numbers

Internet Protocol (IP) numbers identify computers on the Internet. Every computer connected to the Internet at any moment has a unique IP number.

With information being sent to and fro — from your computer to Web sites and back — there has to be a way for the information to be “addressed” so that various servers on the Internet know where to deliver the information. Thus, every computer connected to the Internet has an IP number, or IP address.

technicalstuff In some cases, two or more computers share an IP number, as in a situation in which a house or an apartment is using a cable or digital subscriber line (DSL) connection, with several computers connected through a single router; but for the purposes of figuring out location, this information isn’t important, of course.

In some cases, computers “own” a particular IP number: Turn the computer off now and turn it on next week, and it has the same number. This is known as a static IP number. Often, however, computers share IP numbers. Log out of a dialup account now and in five minutes dial back in, and your computer is assigned a different IP number (known as a dynamic IP number). That IP number is shared among many computers, but only one computer can use the number at any particular time.

Take a look at this IP number: 67.176.77.58. This number uniquely identifies a particular computer in Colorado. If a server sends a page to that address, the page can go to only one place because at that moment only one computer on the Internet is using that number to identify itself. It’s like a telephone number. Every telephone in the entire world has a unique number (when you include the country code). Pick up the phone and dial the full number, and there’s only one telephone in the world that you can possibly be connected to.

technicalstuff An IP number is a hierarchical system. A block of numbers is assigned to a particular organization or company; that organization or company then assigns blocks of numbers to other organizations or companies, which can then assign their numbers to different organizations or companies, or divisions within a company, and so on.

Consider, again, 67.176.77.58. This number is “owned” by Comcast Cable Communications, a large American cable-TV company. In fact, Comcast has a large block of numbers: 67.160.0.0–67.191.255.255. Within that large block lies another block that Comcast uses in Colorado: 67.176.0.0–67.176.127.255. Clearly, 67.176.77.58 lies within this block.

If you want to see this process at work, a number of sites tell you where you are, or at least where they think you are. I just visited IP2Location (www.ip2location.com), and it identified my city — though not my exact zip code, and it got my latitude and longitude wrong.

Local-search marketing with IP numbers isn’t perfect; it’s definitely an imprecise science, for a few reasons:

· You can’t assume that a number assigned to a company in a particular area is being used in that area. It’s possible for two computers using two IP numbers that are just one digit apart — 67.176.77.58 and 67.176.77.59, for instance — to be thousands of miles apart. An IP number block assigned to an organization in one area can be used by many different computers in many different locations. For example, a computer in San Francisco assigned a block of IP numbers may use those numbers for computers in branch offices in San Diego, Oklahoma City, and Seattle.

· Dynamic IP numbers are “here today, there tomorrow.” When you dial into a network and are assigned an IP number, you could be in California while the computer that assigned the number is in Virginia. When you log off and someone logs on and takes your number, the new computer might be in Wyoming. In particular, AOL messes up IP location because it assigns IP numbers to dialup users all around the country.

Still, geolocation is getting better all the time. Although the authorities that assign blocks of IP numbers provide very basic geographic information, this information can then be combined with other clues, such as hostnames. For example, it’s possible to trace the path taken by a communication from one computer to another and get the IP numbers and hostnames of the servers between the start and destination computers. Hostnames sometimes contain geographic names that help IP-location systems figure out where they are.

Another clue: Some major Internet service providers (ISPs) assign blocks of IP numbers geographically, so when you crack the code, you can figure out where people using that ISP actually live. Using clues such as these, geolocation engineers at various companies specializing in this science can fairly accurately locate IP numbers.

So the system isn’t perfect, but it’s close much of the time. In any case, it doesn’t usually need to be spot on. If you’re searching for pizza in your town, for instance, Google doesn’t need to know your exact address; it shows a map with pizza places, and you can zoom in to your specific location if you want.

tip Google lets searchers actually specify where they are. Click the cog icon at the bottom right of a Google Maps page, or at the top right of a search results page and select Search Settings. Click the Locations link in the left column, and you’ll see a box into which you can enter your street address. The only problem is that the vast majority of users don’t know about this setting (and it messes up your search results when you travel without remembering to change your location, of course).

There’s another way Google figures out your location; by tracking your location on your cell phone, if you’re using an Android phone with a Google account set up. Go to https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/ and prepared to be spooked by what Big Brother knows about you.

Two Ways to Reach People Locally

Let me summarize:

· Search engines are providing local search services, encouraging people to search locally.

· People often type location names with their keyword searches.

· If the searcher doesn’t provide a geographic term, but the search engine still thinks it’s likely to be a local search, the search engine will “guess” where the searcher is.

Now, it’s important to understand that when you do a local search, the major search engines pull data from two main indexes (ignoring the PPC index and the specialized indexes, of course — see Chapter 2). They have the regular organic search results, which are based on the keywordsand, to some degree, your location. (Even if you don’t use a geographic term in your search, Google is likely to find organic pages that it thinks are from businesses in your area.) But it also has a totally separate index to pull from, the Local results, providing the data such as that shown in Figures 12-1 and 12-2.

This type of data is both good and bad. It’s good, because it gives you an extra chance of ranking. Perhaps you’re not doing too well in the organic results, but you are doing well in the Local results, and your site appears high on the page next to the map. Or, if you do a really good job, your business can turn up in the local search results — up by the map — and in the organic results, probably lower down on the page (not always; sometimes the map and Local results are displayed before the organic results, sometimes embedded in them). The bad part is that you have more work to do: They are completely different indexes, so you need to do different things to rank well in each one.

So your job, if you want to rank well for local searches, is to know what to do for both of these indexes. I begin with the index I’ve been telling you about already, the organic-search index, and then I discuss the Local index.

“Localizing” Your Web Pages

I see this all the time with my consulting clients: Web sites that need to rank for local search terms but that haven’t the slightest hope of doing so. An example is my rodent-racing client in New York, the owner of the Big Apple Rodent Racing track. (Okay, I made up this client, but bear with me.) He came to me saying that he wanted to rank well for rodent racing new york, and in fact to rank well for various New York boroughs.

There was one big problem, though. He didn’t have a single page with the term rodent racing and the name New York. The only page that contained New York was his Contact Us page, and that page contained only contact information and a map … it didn’t contain the words rodent racing. So my client had not a single page that was a good match for rodent racing new york.

So the very first step to take if you want to rank locally is to make sure that you have local terms in your pages. Ideally, have these terms not just in a Contact Us page but on every page.

The problem with putting your location in only your Contact Us page is that while you’ve probably created dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of lovely keyword-rich pages, you have just removed one of the most important keywords and put it on a separate page. If you want Google to think a page is related to a particular location in addition to finding certain keywords, you need to make sure the location name and keywords appear on the same pages! So, here are a few things you can do:

· Include your full address in your Web pages. Include your street, city, state, and zip code. Although you can put the address in the footer, ideally it should be near the top of the page somewhere. (If you don’t know about prominence, see Chapter 7.)

If you have more than one address, put all the addresses on each page.

· Include in all your pages the names of all locations you’re interested in. Include a list of city names, for instance, in your footer or in a sidebar, ideally with links to pages with information about each of those cities.

· Create a Contact Us page for every location you have. If you have five office locations, you need five Contact Us pages.

· Put important keywords on your Contact Us pages.

· Find other reasons to mention the city and zip code in the body of your text. If possible, put them in <H> tags; use bold font on some of the references, too.

· Include location names in your filenames. Your URL should contain the name of the location for which you are trying to rank well. So, for instance, instead of yourdomain.com/pizza.html, you could use youdomain.com/pizza-phoenix-az.html.

· Include the city name in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta tags.

· Include city and state names in link text when linking from other sites to yours. See Chapter 16 for more information.

You should think carefully about what location names are truly important. Different types of searches use different types of location terms. For instance, when people search for insurance, they often search with a state name: car insurance colorado, renters insurance texas, and so on. For real estate, people usually search with city names or even neighborhood names. For attorneys, people often search using city names but rarely neighborhood names. So you should think about which terms are important and target those terms.

Getting a few keyworded links to your site with the location names in combination with the product or service keywords can be very powerful, so read Chapter 16 carefully. Consider also actually optimizing a few pages for specific locations, using the location and product or service keywords in the <TITLE> and <DESCRIPTION> tags, in H1 headers, several times in the body text, in links to the page, and so on. My rodent-racing client should probably have a page optimized for New York Rodent Racing, one for Brooklyn Rodent Racing, another for Manhattan Rodent Racing, and so on.

Use the Geo meta tags

You might want to also use geo meta tags at the top of your homepage and, if you have multiple locations, place the appropriate tags into each of your contact pages. These tags tell the search engines your exact location. Here’s an example:

<meta name="geo.placename" content="200 E Colfax Ave, Denver, CO 80203, USA" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="39.740037;-104.984418" />
<meta name="geo.region" content="US-CO" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="39.740037, -104.984418" />

Google doesn’t use geo tags; Google believes they are not reliable, because they often get copied from one Web site to another or are left in sites being created using page templates, by Web developers who are not paying attention. Reportedly Bing may use them, though, as they can be created very quickly and easily, so you might as well do so. There are various geo-tag sites that will create tags for you: You simply provide your location address, and the system will build the tags. Try these sites (or if they are not working search for geo meta tag):

· www.geo-tag.de/generator/en.html

· www.mygeoposition.com

Incidentally, talking of templates, you might also want to check whether your pages contain a content-language tag, like <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-gb">. You can just remove this; although common, it was never part of the HTTP specification, and had poor browser support. Instead, use the lang tag, like this: <html lang="en-US">. The first piece (in this case, en) specifies the language (English), and the second specifies the country (US). Search for html language codes and 2-character country codes to find the appropriate codes. If these codes are set for a different language or country, you may be telling the search engines that you are outside your actual location.

Google Webmaster (see Chapter 13) also has a Geographic target setting that lets you tell Google what country the site should target and a language setting, too (see the International Targeting settings). Registering for Local Search.

In Chapter 13, you read about how to get your site listed in search engine indexes. Let me quickly cover another form of search engine submission here: submitting your business to the search engine’s local-search indexes.

First note that your business may turn up in the results even if you take no action. The major search engines pull data from a lot of different sources. If you have a business that has been picked up by some kind of business directory, your business has likely ended up on the local-search indexes of the major search engines. For instance, if your business has a business phone listing, you are almost certainly included.

Being in the index doesn’t mean that you can rest on your laurels, though. Just because you are in the index doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily rank well. In any case, there are lots of local-search directories, not just the major ones, so you still have work to do. For instance, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing let you add information about your business directly to the local-search index, increasing the likelihood of being found during a local search and increasing the amount of information that’s seen when your information is viewed. Also, you may want to consider the upgrades that some of the search engines sell and that may help push you above your competitors. Table 12-1 summarizes the top three search engines’ local-search systems.

Table 12-1 The Big Three Go Local

Site

Description

URL

Google Maps/Google My Business

Free, including the ability to add video and pictures; if you have more than ten locations, you can submit a data file. To the user, the service appears to be called Google Maps. However, in communications with businesses, Google is branding the service Google My Business.

https://www.google.com/business

Yahoo! Local

Free or $9.95 per month if you want to add pictures, a “tagline,” and a business description.

Bing Places

Free, including photographs.

https://www.bingplaces.com

A quick word about Yahoo!. As I mention in Chapter 1, Yahoo! gets organic search results (and PPC ads) from Bing. However, Yahoo! still manages Yahoo! Local results itself. That is, the system is separate from Bing, and so your listing in Yahoo! is managed separately from your listing in Bing.

Grabbing control of (or adding) your business listing

In Table 12-1, in the previous section, I provide the URL of each local service’s “ground zero,” where you can go to start a new listing or take control of your current listing. You can also start a different way: at the search engine itself. Starting at the search engine shows you where you already stand in the local results, and from there you can grab control of your current listing or add a new one.

1. Go to the search engine and search for your product.

For instance, if you own a pizza parlor, search for pizza along with your town’s name (just to make sure that Google searches the correct locale).

If you see your business listed, that’s great!

2. If you don’t see your business listed, see whether it’s on the full page of results.

You should see a link to more local results. Google, for instance, at the time of writing, has a link under the local results that says More or sometimes More Results Near [Location] or Map Results, or you can click the map if one is shown.

3. If you still can’t find your business, add your business name to the search and search again.

Search Roddy’s Rodent Pie Shop pizza denver, for instance.

4. If you’re still not there, try searching for the business name and location, with no product or service keyword.

Search Roddy’s Rodent Pie Shop denver, for instance.

5. If you’re still not there, your business probably isn’t listed, so go to the appropriate link in Table 12-1 and add your listing.

If you do find your business, though, you need to find your way to the expanded data (see Figure 12-3 for an example). Click various places on the listing; if you end up in your business’s Web site, click the browser Back button and come back … try clicking something again. These systems all work a little differently, and differ across time, too. (At the time of writing, on Google you can click anything over the listing except the links; on Bing click anywhere except on the URL in the listing; and on Yahoo! click anywhere on the listing and you’ll see the expanded data.)

Take a look at what’s on your business page — a little sparse? Don’t worry, you’ll be able to change that soon. You need to look for a way to grab control of your business.

6. Look for a link or button that says something like Is this your business? Verify your listing; Do you own this business?; or Are you the business owner? (see Figure 12-4) and then click it.

You’re on your way to taking control of the listing.

The sort of information you provide depends on which system you’re submitting to, of course.

7. Select some kind of business category and then enter information such as these elements:

· Your street address

· Your phone and fax numbers

· A link to your Web site

· A business description

· The payment methods you accept

· Your operating hours

· The year your business was established

· The languages spoken by your staff

· The brands you sell

· Photos (of anything: your staff, your location, your products, and so on)

· Videos

I recommend that you add as much as possible. Add as much text — with keywords, of course! — as many product and brand names, as many photos as you can, as many videos as possible. Adding keywords helps your listing become a match for more possible search phrases, and in any case, adding content to your listing may give your listing a little oomph in the search results.

The major systems, such as Google, require, not surprisingly, some kind of verification that you really are authorized to manage the business listing. They typically do this authorization by either phone verification (they send a code to your business phone, which you must then enter into the Web account) or they send a postcard containing a code to your place of business. After you log back in to the system and enter the code, your information is accepted, and your changes will go live. (In other systems, such as the ones I talk about next … well, there seems to be a degree of trust about who you are.)

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Figure 12-3: A business page shown in Bing Local.

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Figure 12-4: Somewhere, somehow, you can take control of your business listing.

tip Google is now allowing business owners to post “live” to their business listings: messages about special promotions, new products, or whatever else you think might be useful to customers. You can also find a Google certified photographer to come to your location, photograph your business, and submit the photographs to Google My Business (http://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/businessview) and even request a Street View photography session of your business; this is intended for businesses that have large properties that Google Street View camera cars can’t reach, such as pedestrian malls, amusement parks, college campuses, race tracks, bike paths in parks, and so on (http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mapcontent/streetview). You can even submit interior maps of large buildings; you may have noticed that many malls, airports, department stores, and even theaters now display interior floor plans — showing each individual store within a mall, for example — on Google Maps (see https://www.google.com/maps/about/partners/indoormaps).

Google also pulls data about businesses from other locations. For instance, if you post events to Eventbrite.com and Eventful.com, your events may probably end up in your business listing. (Of course, both accounts need to have the exact same business name and address to make sure Google can match them up.)

Increasing the odds

Grabbing control of your listing is a great start and may even be a factor that helps your site rank a little higher. But what can you do to increase the odds that your site will rank well in the local results? Here are a few ideas:

· A huge part of the local-ranking algorithm is based on your location; it’s harder to rank for shoe shop denver if your shoe shop is somewhere in a suburb. Although many businesses can’t do anything about this, some service businesses actually get a mailbox as close to the center of town as possible and register that address as a business location. (It can’t be a Post Office box; you need a mail box that you can register as a “suite number.”)

· Get more local directory listings, from other business directories and Yellow Page sites, as I explain later in this chapter.

· Get links from various other sources directly to your Web site, especially with good location keywords in them (see Chapter 16).

· If you have multiple addresses, get multiple business listings.

tip Keep an eye on your local listings, to make sure things aren’t getting changed. Google has some real bugs in its Google Places service. If you respond to reviews, the responses sometimes disappear; competitors may post bad reviews; if you’ve changed your address recently (the last couple of years), you may find your address changing back to the old one, and so on. (See the section “The Other Side of Local: Review Sites,” later in this chapter.)

Finding More Local Systems

More local search systems are out there — many, many more. You may want to use a listing service to submit your data en masse to many of these directories. These services gather information about businesses and then distribute that information to dozens of different Web sites, such as Internet Yellow Page sites; various business directories such as MerchantCircle and HotFrog; map companies such as MapQuest; search engines; and review sites (such as Yelp).

warning Be careful with this strategy. Make sure to use a tool that will allow you to post your information to several of these in one go (I cover some in this chapter.) You’ll want to have a place you can come back to in the event you need to update or modify your contact information. If your location changes and you have listings created for both the new and old location, you could be hurting your local search ranking.

These services often also distribute data to Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take control of your listings on those services. You should, in fact, because these services don’t provide the search engines with as much information as the search engines allow you to upload directly. Also, it can take a couple of months for the data to work its way across the distribution network.

These services distribute to numerous other local search systems, such as iBegin, InfoUSA, InsiderPages, Judy’s Book, Kudzu, Localeze, MerchantCircle, MojoPages, Superpages/Switchboard, and YellowPages.com. It’s less important to contact these services directly, so you might just let a service submit data to these places.

One of the oldest of these services is Universal Business Listings (UBL; www.ubl.org). UBL currently has around 150 services on its distribution list, and has packages beginning at $79 a year.

Yahoo! even has one of these distribution services, Yahoo! LocalWorks (https://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/localworks), though it’s on the pricey side, currently set at $30 a month to distribute to 50 directories. There’s also Yext (www.Yext.com), which works with around 40 directories for $200 a year and up, and Synup (www.synup.com), which charges a monthly fee per directory (it has around 200), but also provides access to 50 directories for free.

You may want to compare options; these services come with such features as review reports (showing you reviews about your business being posted to these directories), reports showing you where you are already listed, and automatic upload of photos and videos.

Why do you need to be in all these directories? You’ll get links back to your site, and links are always good, especially from “trusted” sources, as many of these local directories are (see Chapter 16). In addition, some of these local directories sometimes come up in the search results, giving you another opportunity to be found even if your site hasn’t come up on the results for a particular search (or even if it has; see the Part III WebExtra, Grab More Page One Listings Using this Sneaky Technique, for a discussion of how to get multiple links on a single search-results page that lead to your site).

And another reason to get into as many directories as possible is that the major search engines are developing partnerships with many different types of local information companies, such as local directories, review sites, menu and coupon services, and so on.

Google, for example, has partnered with various different directory sites to provide reviews to Google Maps: sites such as UrbanSpoon.com, Yelp.com, OpenTable.com, Gayot.com, Zagat.com, Menutopia.com, Dimmi.com.au, and others.

In other words, the major search engines are pulling local data from a large variety of sources, and those sources vary between search engines, locations, and subjects. Do a few searches for your particular phrases and locations and figure out who’s feeding data to whom. Then go to those sources and see how you get listed.

If I ran a restaurant, for instance, I would want to get my menus into Zagat, Menutopia, and MenuPix.com; submit a listing to CitySearch; and figure out how to get reviews into Wcities.com, Zagat, 10Best.com, ViaMichelin, Gayot, and the local papers’ Web sites. Also, though of course I don’t condone this type of behavior, let’s be honest: Some of your competitors are dropping fake reviews into review sites, to prime the data pump, as it were. But I come to that subject in a moment.

Don’t Forget Local-Local Directories

Don’t forget local directories that perhaps don’t feed data to the major search engines but that are still likely to be important in their own right. For instance, if I owned a restaurant in Denver, I would want to know how to get a review into 5280 magazine, which maintains a popular restaurant guide at www.5280.com/restaurants. You get a link to your Web site, which the search engines like (see Chapter 16), and because it’s a popular site for locals looking for good eats, you will probably get real, live traffic, not just search engine traffic.

Yet another important category of local directories is what I call “local-local” directories. So far, I’ve looked at just the “local” directories, which cover the entire nation, or even multiple nations. But there are also “local local” directories that cover one particular locale.

For instance, if I had a business in Philadelphia, I’d be checking into sites such as these:

· www.visitphilly.com

· www.infoaroundphilly.com

· www.philadelphia-city-directory.com

· www.philadelphia.com/places

I’m sure there are others I haven’t found in my rather quick search. Again, getting listed in these sorts of directories is good because

· You’ll get links to your site, and search engines love links (or rather, they reward you for links; see Chapter 16).

· These directories will come up in local searches now and then, providing another avenue for people to find your site.

· These directories may have a few loyal users who go there looking for businesses.

The Other Side of Local: Review Sites

There’s a very important aspect that you have to know about many of these local sites: the reviews. Plenty of these sites allow anyone to post a review about your service. If you never have disgruntled customers and always have ecstatic clients, that’s great. But how many businesses can say that? See Figure 12-5, for instance. How would you like these reviews about your business? There’s nothing to complain about “I really loved the service,” but how about “Horrible experience” or “Hit or miss at best”?

image

Figure 12-5: Would you like these reviews pointing to your business?

And how about that psycho competitor? Think he might post bad reviews about your business just to get one over on you? It happens all the time.

Why is it important to have good reviews? A few reasons.

· I don’t know for sure, but the number of reviews, or your review star rating, may have some effect on your ranking in the search engines local results. It’s clearly not “best reviewed sites get ranked first,” but the ranking algorithm may at least take reviews into consideration to some degree.

· When a potential customer has to decide which business’s site to click, which one do you think will get the click? The business with 10 reviews and 1.5 stars, or the 5-star business with 50 reviews?

· To dilute any bad reviews you get. One or two bad reviews mixed in with a bunch of good reviews probably doesn’t do a lot of harm.

Now, it’s true that sometimes bad reviews are warranted. But it’s also true that sometimes

· A single disgruntled customer can start a feud, posting terrible reviews everywhere he can, sometimes using multiple accounts so that he can post multiple reviews to the same service. Remember, as the search engines pull data from various different sources, bad reviews at several sites could all end up posted on your business’s Google listing.

· Angry customers are more likely to complain about you publicly than happy customers are to praise you. Anger energizes people more than contentment, so one or two angry clients can totally mess up your review profile.

· People sometimes post fake reviews — in particular competitors, of course, but sometimes angry ex-employees (spouses, business partners, and so on).

· Some unscrupulous people are using the threat of bad reviews as a form of extortion, trying to get money, products, or services out of businesses in exchange for not posting bad reviews.

True Story: While working on this chapter, I got a call from a dental surgeon in California, who asked for help removing a bad review from his site. He told me that he has a client who owes him $8,000 and refuses to pay; the client told him that “if you keep calling me I’m going to ruin you in your online reviews … I have a big family!” It’s an unfortunate truth that many unscrupulous customers are now using reviews as a tool of extortion.

So it’s essential, even if your business is totally dedicated to customer service, that you keep control over the reviews process, and you do that by making sure that people who like you post reviews. Even if you have a few bad reviews, having enough good reviews will dilute the bad ones.

Go check your business in the local listings. Do you have bad reviews pulling your star rating down? If so, what can you do about it? There are two approaches: Get the reviews removed or dilute the bad reviews.

Removing bad reviews

Can you get rid of bad reviews? Probably not — well, sometimes. It’s extremely hard to get bad reviews removed from these review sites. The review sites themselves, in most cases, are protected from prosecution for libel or slander, so your threats probably won’t help! On the other hand, Yelp.com — one of the most important review sites — has been sued by a group of small businesses for extortion, the argument being that Yelp’s sales staff offers to remove bad reviews if a business pays for advertising. If, however, you have reason to believe the reviews are part of some kind of feud against you, or if they clearly violate the review site’s policies, you may be able to get them removed, but you would have to have a pretty good argument. (In the case of removing bad reviews from the major search engines, it helps if you have personal contacts inside the companies; if, for instance, you are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on PPC, you might get some assistance!)

One of my clients was being harassed by a crazy competitor, who was posting bad reviews to Google Maps. I complained to Google, and, after months and several complaints, they removed one of the fake reviews … but not the other, which was just as obviously fake.

To complain to Google about a review, log into your Google Places account, then go to your listing page in Google Maps, and use the Flag as inappropriate icon by the review (a little flag picture). This may not get their attention. So, after you’ve waited a while, log in to your Google Places account, select Help (top right), and look for the Contact Us area; you should find a link that says something like My Listing Has Incorrect Information. You can use this system to contact Google. After you’ve had a contact from Google once, you’ll have an e-mail address you can use next time!

Most review sites allow you to respond to reviews, by the way. You should always respond to bad reviews and (politely!) give your side of the story; apologize for dropping the ball, if necessary. Research shows that such responses can soften bad reviews, limiting the damage to your business.

Diluting bad reviews

By far the easier process is to dilute the reviews — that is, to make sure you have enough good reviews to overwhelm the bad ones. (Of course, this doesn’t work for you if everyone hates your business!) In fact, if you have a large number of good reviews, with a few bad reviews, that’s fine; nobody expects perfection. Getting lots of good reviews will, over time, bring your star rating up and make those pesky bad reviews less obvious. It doesn’t necessarily take much time. You can often turn things around in a month or two — I’ve seen a business go from 2.5 stars on Google to 5 stars in about six weeks.

tip So, how do you get those reviews? Ask your clients! Perhaps give out cards (maybe to the clients who are most clearly happy with your service) asking them to review your site at Google, Yahoo!, Yelp, and so on. (Most won’t, but some will.) Perhaps you could have a computer terminal actually at the point of sale and ask people whether they would write a review right there and then. Many reviews are now being posted from smart phones, so if you build strong rapport with customers, you may be able to get them to post reviews right away — especially your “locals” or regular customers (if they keep coming back, presumably they like you!). Remember, it doesn’t always take a lot of reviews to make a difference, so a little work here and there can really help.

One more thing: You can never get started creating positive reviews too early! If you have few (or no) reviews, a single bad review can cause huge problems. So it’s a good idea to “inoculate” your business against bad reviews before you get them, by building up good reviews now!

Identifying important review sites

Which review sites are most important? Clearly, the major search engines themselves are very important, perhaps the most important. But the other review sites that are important to you will depend on your business. For general retail, Yelp.com is hugely important. For many types of service business, Judy’s Book (www.judysbook.com) is critical. Medical clinics need to look into Vitals.com and HealthGrades.com. If you’re in the travel business — hotels and restaurants, for example — TripAdvisor.com is essential. Other popular sites include Kudzu.com, Local.com, andMerchantCircle.com.

tip Here’s how to figure out what review sites are really important to you. Search for businesses in your industry in Google and look at their reviews. Each review shows which review site it was pulled from; you’ll want to be reviewed in those sites.

Working with the Yellow Pages

Another form of directory to be considered is the Yellow Page Web sites, which are sites created by the old Yellow Pages companies. The Yellow Page business is in serious trouble, and by now, the Yellow Page companies must be worried.

Historically, the (paper) yellow page business has been incredibly profitable; the biggest companies make billions of dollars each year, with profits of many hundreds of millions. They’re real cash cows, but they’re being steamrolled by the Internet.

Millions of computer-literate, Internet-loving people never pick up a Yellow Pages book or, perhaps, pick one up just once or twice a year, compared with several times a month in the pre-Internet days. The number of people who use the book is declining precipitously as local searches move online. More and more, I hear from my small-business friends that they are giving up on advertising in the Yellow Pages. One friend, the owner of a small gym, stopped paying for Yellow Page ads probably a decade or more ago, telling me that “they just don’t work anymore”; he gets more business through his Web site than he ever did from the Yellow Pages.

The Yellow Page companies are definitely in trouble, but they do have one big advantage: feet on the street. They have huge armies of salespeople talking to businesses every day, and they’ve used this sales force to continue selling paper ads as well as to sell businesses online Yellow Pages ads.

You rarely hear much about the Yellow Pages sites in discussions about online search, but, of course, they are search systems — search directories, in effect. But how important are they?

YellowPages.com, probably the most important Yellow Page site, used to claim to have 170 million searches a month … a few years ago, I saw it was claiming 100 million a month; more recently, I saw a statement that it has 70 million users a month: a drop in the ocean when compared to the 21 billion searches a month considered in the comScore study I look at in Chapter 1.

Table 12-2 shows the largest Yellow Page sites and their Alexa traffic ranks, indicating the sites’ overall popularity (the Global Rank). Notice that the most popular of these sites, YellowPages.com, had an Alexa.com rank of 743 when I checked. Compare that with Google (1), Yahoo! (4), Bing (23), and Ask.com (41). (Alexa.com, an Amazon site, provides popularity information about Web sites.) Just for fun, I’ve included the ranks from the last time I revised this book; you can see that yellow-page sites are definitely in decline!

Table 12-2 Largest Yellow Pages Sites

Site

URL

Alexa Rank (2012 Rank)

AT&T YellowPages.com

www.yellowpages.com

908 (743)

SuperPages

www.superpages.com

5,624 (2,006)

Yellowbook.com

www.yellowbook.com

20,137 (5,082)

Dex

www.dexknows.com

15,407 (5,376)

Yell.com (in the UK)

www.yell.com

3,774 (3,129)

Yellow.com

www.yellow.com

148,465 (24,978)

tip Many other Yellow Page sites are not really Yellow Page sites. The term Yellow Pages is an old term — about 130 years old — and it’s not a copyrighted term. Thus, anyone can set up a Web site and call it a Yellow Pages Web site, and many people have done so (see, for instance, YellowUSA.com and MagicYellow.com). What I’m talking about here are the genuine Yellow Pages sites, owned by the real Yellow Pages companies — the guys who dump those huge, yellow books on your doorstep that you immediately throw into the trash (or, one hopes, the recycle bin).

According to Alexa, 908 sites are more popular than YellowPages.com, including a whole bunch you’ve probably never heard of. Google Singapore is more popular than all of these sites. (Singapore has a population of 5 million, by the way.) Even My Web Search (www.mywebsearch.com), a search engine that nobody seems to have heard of, is more popular than all of these sites but YellowPages.com.

These sites are, quite simply, not particularly popular and get relatively very few searches.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t be in the Yellow Page sites. You absolutely should if you can get in for free (maybe if you have to pay), and there are several ways to do that:

· Get a business phone line. A business line costs more than a residential line, but you get your free listing in the local Yellow Pages book, which also gets your listing in the online Yellow Pages. As with the book, this is just a simple listing with no extras.

· Sign up directly through the Web site. Some Yellow Page sites allow businesses to create free listings directly through their Web sites. Look for an Advertise With Us link or similar.

· Buy a listing or ad through your local Yellow Pages rep. This is the same guy selling you space in the paper book.

· Submit to to a directory listing service. UBL, for example, distributes its data to a number of Yellow Page sites, such as SuperPages.com, Verizon.com, YellowPages.com, and DexKnows.com. (I discuss UBL and other such services earlier in this chapter.)

The real question, though, is whether you should pay to be in the Yellow Pages, and that’s much harder for me to answer. The real disadvantage is that it’s expensive, sometimes very expensive.

Do the Yellow Pages work? Let’s just say that it’s a matter of record that many businesses are unhappy with the results of advertising in the online Yellow Pages. That doesn’t mean that no companies are happy with the service, though.

I recommend that if your company already buys Yellow Pages ads and your business is location specific — that is, you’re trying to attract buyers in a particular area — you should carefully research using the Yellow Pages. Talk to your rep. The rep should be able to tell you how many searches are carried out in the company’s online Yellow Pages, in a particular category and a particular region, each month. With that information, you may be able to decide whether purchasing an ad makes sense. However, based on what I have learned from customers of yellow page sites, I would recommend that you take with a grain of salt what you may be told by yellow-page salespeople about how much traffic you are likely to get from an online yellow-page ad and the value of that traffic.

The online Yellow Pages companies sell a variety of services, such as the following:

· A link from the listing in the online Yellow Pages to your Web site. However, in most cases, the search engines do not recognize it as a link to your site. Some of these directories use nofollow links, or they may use redirect links that forward people to your site through the Yellow Page’s server. (See Chapter 16 for information on links that are not really links.)

· An e-mail link.

· A page with detailed information, such as a map to your location, information about your products and services, payment options, and so on.

· A link to a picture of your ad that appears in the paper Yellow Pages.

· A pop-up promo box that appears when someone points at an icon and that can be modified through an online-management system.

· A link to a coupon that customers can print.