'Net Features : sem

Journey to the Top of the SERPs

Michael Garrity — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered why everyone seems to make such a big deal out of search engine optimization (SEO) and reaching that coveted top spot in the search engine results pages (SERPs)?

Well then, new data from Compete may just enlighten you, as a recent study of tens of millions of consumer-generated SERPs from Q4 of 2011 shows us just how massive the difference between a first and second place listing can be to a website.

According to the data, approximately 85 percent of all the listings shown are organic, with 15 percent appearing as paid search listings; they also found that 55 percent of all SERPs have ads.

But the more telling information comes from looking at the clicks on organic results. Compete says that 53 percent of those clicks go to the top organic listing, and the number decreases significantly from there. The second link gets 15 percent of the clicks, while the third gets nine percent, the fourth sees six percent and the fifth is clicked on just four percent of the time.

Being on top is also beneficial for paid listings, as well, though having the number one spot in the ad block is less important than simply appearing in the block at the top of the page. The study shows that about 61 percent of paid search ads show up on the right-hand sidebar, but they only account for 13 percent of the paid search clicks with the top listing getting just four percent of all paid search clicks. In contrast, the third listing in the top ad block receives around nine percent of all paid search clicks; in fact, the ads in the top block see an impressive 59 percent of all the paid clicks.

The report also shows that around 24 percent of the ads on a SERP appear at the top and make up an impressive 85 percent of the clicks, while 15 percent of them appear at the bottom of the page and get a paltry two percent of the clicks.

In other words, this report wants you to know that it pays off (big time) to invest in getting your site at the top of the SERPs. But as we all know, that's easier said than done.

Just a few weeks ago, Google released a list of 65 new changes to its search engine algorithm from August and September, many of which may have direct implications for how websites and pages will be able to move up in the SERPs. Here's a look at six of the most important updates; webmasters and SEOs take note.

The Role of Authority

One of the updates from August focuses on page quality and intends to help searchers find "more high-quality content" from sources that the search engine trusts. This means that building that kind of trust is crucial to improving your search ranking. You can do this by receiving (and giving) links from trusted and authoritative sites, creating a sitemap, lowering your bounce rate and not "over-optimizing" your content.

Matters of Location

Two updates now look more at location to determine a site's place in the SERPs. The first now determines relevancy of pages for queries containing locations, and the other "nearby" change improves the precision and coverage of relevant local Web results, helping it better identify results that are localized for each user (and ranks them appropriately). To better find these local, relevant searchers, optimize your site for local search by registering with a search engine's local business registry, getting links from local directories, developing location-specific landing pages and adding geographic keywords into landing page content, <h1> and <h2> tags and metadata.

The Return of Keyword Density

The changes also included an update to term-proximity scoring, which means it would behoove you to improve the keyword density on your site. You can do this by inserting keywords into page titles, headlines, ALT text, page URLs, rich footers and, of course, your copy.

The Importance of Freshness

Being fresh is crucial, and the last two months saw a number of changes aimed at rewarding sites with fresh content. Now, Google will apply a more granular function based on document age, and also seeks out and favors the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant to a search query. So make sure you're continually adding fresh content to your site, and if you're busy schedule makes that difficult, don't be afraid to ask for guest contributors or even press releases that you can publish. Anything to keep your site from just sitting there and getting stale.

Title Tags in Focus

It's difficult for Google to generate preview snippets for pages that it does not crawl because of robots.txt, so now a replacement snippet will be included that explains that there is no preview because of robots.txt. To prevent this, include titles and descriptions in the metadata of your Web pages.

Universal Intent

In addition to all of this, Google can now show improved Universal Search results through a better understanding of when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.

Take these key updates into consideration as you continue to optimize your site for the search engines (and maybe take a look at the other 59 changes, as well), and before you know it, you'll be movin' on up the SERPs.

Search Marketing Supercharged

Administrator — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Believe it or not, the Web is made up of math - lots and lots of math. And, by looking more closely at the math, we can learn a lot about how a website generates revenue and where there is hidden value.

The concept is really pretty simple. For example, Acme Website spends money to build a product or service, launches and hopes that people come to buy/use it. Ultimately, the site wants to earn more than it costs to build and operate. However, after months praying to the traffic gods to bless its site with users, and cycling through a few marketing campaigns and PR blitzes, Acme realizes it needs a little help. That’s when companies like Acme typically dip into an "Audience Development" budget to start buying traffic through things like Search Engine Optimization [SEO] and Search Engine Marketing [SEM].

Before you stop reading, let me preface my previous statement with this. One might argue that SEO isn’t "buying" traffic, but I believe it is. You’re essentially paying for an employee, consultant or company to achieve high search engine rankings that drive organic search visitors. Whereas SEM is an easier mental exercise, with website publishers simply paying for clicks to have people visit their site. Wash, rinse, repeat until the desired number of views is achieved. The math in this equation is simple, as long as websites make more money from each user’s visit than it costs to get them there, they are in the clear (well, mostly).

This cycle must be working because every year, billions of dollars are spent on SEO and SEM. The vast majority of these dollars are paid to SEO companies and consultants, in-house teams, search engines and traffic marketplaces. Simple economics would state that as long as the revenue per page view or profit per action is greater than the cost, the cycle continues. But why stop there?

By coupling SEO and SEM strategies with other ways to increase pages per visit, website owners can start thinking beyond the race to break-even. Let’s start by looking at what has arguably become the most overlooked and under appreciated element of a web page: text links.

Text Links – Overlooked and Under Appreciated

When most heat maps of Web pages are analyzed, they reveal the not-so-surprising fact that users still focus on content. The facts speak for themselves. At LinkSmart, we know this to be true because we’ve seen click-through rates on text links placed in articles reach 10 to 20 times the rate seen on other Web page elements, such as banner ads, related content widgets and side-rail elements.

But, despite the draw and popularity of content, many website operators don’t think about supercharging content with text links to boost engagement. It starts with a conscious understanding of the benefits, and developing a text linking optimization strategy to more efficiently manage and shape traffic flows through in-article text links. Every additional page view or visitor directed to a high-value location positively impacts the ROI of traffic generation programs, especially SEO and SEM.

Building out a text link optimization strategy can be difficult, and finding the right levers to pull on a website can be time consuming and expensive. With this challenge in mind, here are three things to keep in mind before getting started.

Links to Content – Finding the Right Ratio: Optimizing content isn’t about cramming as many hyperlinks into a page as possible. It’s about mastering the art of balancing relevant phrases and keyword text links with content that people naturally find interesting. Over hyperlinking will actually hinder interaction and the desire to read or click on a certain page or piece of content. Each site, content type and page has an optimal text-link structure that will lead to the highest average click-through rates. It’s really about customization and finding what works best for a particular audience. Again, pay attention to the math driving your site.

Engagement is Nirvana: Web publishers have learned that it’s not just the number of people that visit a site or page, it’s about the time and engagement each visitor has with it. Deeper engagement remains critical to revenue generation, and not all traffic is created equal. With organic search leading to users only visiting two pages per visit, text linking can help increase this metric by even one or two pages, thereby decreasing the cost-per-visit dramatically and increasing profit margins on investments like SEO and SEM.

Refreshing High Performance Pages: By linking to high-performance/value pages throughout their content, publishers can drive users back to these overlooked pages by keeping them relevant, both in context and on search engine results pages. Directing readers to high-performance pages is a dependable way to increase yield and boost traffic numbers and SEO.

Optimizing website pages with relevant links isn’t just a great way to boost a publisher’s return on their SEO or SEM investments, its’ a great way to better serve readers with relevant content that will keep them coming back for more.

About the Author:

Pete Sheinbaum is the Founder and CEO of LinkSmart, a provider of text linking optimization solutions for web publishers. He is also the former CEO of DailyCandy, Inc.

Google's Knowledge Graph Going Global

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:30:00 GMT

Google’s Knowledge Graph, a vast database of millions of people, places and things (with billions of attributes and connections included), has taken another rather significant step forward this week. If you’re interested in search marketing or search engine optimization on any level at all, consider Google's recent announcement one of the more exciting developments of the past few years.

The company just indicated that its Knowledge Graph results will now be available across every English-speaking country in the world. WM will example the Knowledge Graph more closely in upcoming issues, but we’ve included a few highlights from Google's official statement below:

- Google will begin providing different suggestions of real-world entities in the search box as users type (sort of a twist on its auto-suggestion feature). Enter “Rio” for example and the user may mean the animated movie, the city in Brazil or the hotel in Las Vegas. Google now offers these different suggestions as the user types the query.

- Often the best answer to a question is a list of things – not a single entity. Google has begun showing "lists" of grouped or connected things in the SERPs with its latest Knowledge Graph developments. For example, search for “things to do in Paris” and atop the search results will be a “list” as seen below.

- Perhaps the most interesting development is that Google is moving beyond the “public Web” and into your inbox. Google is currently testing the inclusion of Gmail right from the search box. Sign up (http://g.co/searchtrial) is required to test out this feature.

- Smartphones and tablets will enjoy the recent round of Knowledge Graph updates as well. Google has combined its expertise in speech recognition and in understanding of language and the Knowledge Graph in order to better interpret questions – Google may even speak the answers back in full sentences.

Google is calling these Knowledge Graph developments “baby steps” but without question they provide a rather important glance into the search engine of the future.

SEO Integration Comes to Kenshoo

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 19:00:00 GMT

Digital marketing software provider Kenshoo has launched a new version (4.7) of its Kenshoo Enterprise product. The platform now includes organic and paid search reporting, and new rules-based bidding policies for Chinese search portal Baidu.

Kenshoo Enterprise 4.6 integrates SEO metrics (through an integration with SEO technology providers including Rio SEO, BrightEdge and Covario) into SEM campaign performance reports. This will provide marketers a way to analyze organic and paid results in side-by-side comparisons, and take action to optimize search programs holistically.

Kenshoo also introduced new rules-based bidding policies for Baidu such as “Increase Profit” and “Control CPA”. The platform upgrade also now offers users mobile and tablet device targeting for Yahoo! Japan, additional adCenter keyword match type support for Bing/Yahoo, and quite a bitm more that is worth a closer look.

“Marketers are increasingly executing paid and organic search in an integrated fashion to improve overall results,” said William Martin-Gill, general manager, Kenshoo Enterprise. “With Kenshoo Enterprise 4.7, clients can determine the most cost-effective ways to manage individual keywords or portfolios through optimal paid and organic placement.”

8 Ways to Improve Your Site Over the Weekend

Michael Garrity — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:00:00 GMT

Everybody may be working for the weekend, but if you run a website, you already know that you’re almost always working on the weekend, as well.

In fact, most of the work of the everyday Web professional has to do with tweaking, analyzing, and generally optimizing the performance of their site(s), which can take up a lot of time.

So, if you don't want to spend your whole weekend working, here are eight quick ways to refine your website in two days, and still have time to go see the new Batman movie.

Offer social proof on your website.

While peer pressure is typically seen as negative, that is not the case in the marketing world. Web workers can display customer testimonials or case studies on their website to increase engagement and conversions. By doing this, your audience will be able to relate to other customers, and therefore learn how effective your services or products are from a trusted opinion. So, find some of the nicest things that consumers out there have said about you (and don't forget, you can encourage them) and share it with the world.

Test email subject lines.

Email marketing campaigns won’t be successful if emails aren’t delivered or opened, which is why it is always important to use best practices, such as testing, when creating email subject lines. One way that marketers can quickly test email subject lines is with subjectline.com. This free subject line scoring tool evaluates subject lines and provides users with scores, as well as deliverability and marketing tips and advice. Take some time - 15 minutes or so - to sit down and brainstorm great subject lines.

Generate a Fivesecondtest for your site to assess its usability/readability.

When you don’t have the time to conduct user tests, this handy Web-based tool lets Web workers upload a screenshot of their Web page and then creates two different five-second user tests, one for memory and one for descriptive feedback. And, you know, it only takes five seconds.

Insert dynamic meta descriptions into your HTML.

One of the easiest ways to improve your search marketing efforts is to include useful, compelling meta descriptions on your Web pages. Just be sure that they are relevant to the page’s content and are captivating enough inspire a user to click on the search result.

Monitor keywords on Twitter.

It is important to keep an eye on discussions that are relevant to your brand, because it can help social media managers better connect with their audience, as well as help publishers discover possible content ideas. While there are many tools that can be leveraged for monitoring social media mentions, two free Twitter-specific tools worth checking out are Monitter and Twitterfall. Take a few minutes every hour or so to see who is using your keywords in the Twitterverse.

Assess your forms.

Does your email subscription form ask for unnecessary information? If the answer is "yes," you may be scaring off potential subscribers. This is why removing unnecessary or less important information from your forms can prove to be beneficial in the long run. In fact, it is important to note that the only information really needed on a newsletter subscription form is a name and email address, especially because more targeted information can always be obtained at a later time. Should you have some time to spare, why not give one (or all?) of your forms a review to make sure they're not asking superfluous questions.

Fix up and customize your 404 page.

Obviously you never want your visitors to land on one of these, but it happens, and in those situations, it’s good to have a custom 404 page that will not only provide them with information, but also offers additional useful content and encourages them to continue exploring your awesome website. If your 404 page is uninformative and boring, why not take a few hours to create one that will be a little more meaningful to your site's visitors?

Adjust white space to improve readability.

Finding the right balance between too much and too little space around text is one of the essential aspects of a readable website. Remember that your chunks of text content need room to breathe so that your visitors can view them more easily, and they shouldn’t be adhered to other elements, particularly images. Spend a few minutes during your morning coffee looking over your website to make sure it's optimized for readability, and if you see any problems, try increasing your padding and margins.

New Backlink Analysis Tool from Searchmetrics

Linc Wonham — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:00:00 GMT

Search analytics software provider Searchmetrics has made an addition to its successful SEO + SEM and Social modules with the launch of a new backlinks analysis tool in open beta.

The new Links module gives global marketers instant access to the number and quality of a site’s backlinks, an important key to a site’s previous SEO strategies and current rankings. During the beta launch period, the new tool will be free for approximately three months to users who register.

While the total number of links in the database will initially be limited to allow for performance testing during the beta, Searchmetrics says it has worked to develop a tool that will provide detailed insights about a domain’s backlinks, bringing brand new analysis to the market. Some of the key features of the new Links module software include the ability to:

Identify new links

Determine the ratio between image links and text links

Identify IP addresses, TLD (Top Level Domain), geolocation information for links

Analyze which industries backlinks come from, identify link strategies by industry of competitors

Identify types of pages that links come from (e.g. blogs, news, forums, etc.)

The company has also introduced its own Searchmetrics Page Strength (SPS) measurement, similar to Google’s PageRank. SPS provides an immediate assessment of the strength of the backlinks pointing to a page using extensive Searchmetrics SEO data.

Searchmetrics Essentials Introduces Social Visibility

Michael Garrity — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

It's no surprise to anyone that social media is growing rapidly, and with that, it becomes increasingly intertwined with search.

Meanwhile, online marketing has been continually evolving to keep up with these trends, and today Searchmetrics, one of the world's leaders in search analytics software, is launching its new Searchmetrics Essentials data modules, which give global marketers across 15 countries instant access to competitive information in not just organic, paid and universal search, but also Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Delicious and StumbleUpon.

Searchmetrics has long been revered for it's search visibility standard, which shows the performance of a website on leading search engines, and now the Essentials data modules will expand upon that reputation with the introduction of their social visibility component, with powered by one of the fastest, largest databases available for both search and social media.

The new Searchmetrics Suite, which features Essentials, will allow companies the opportunity to instantly research the visibility of their website(s), market verticals and social media presence in the same place that they take care of all of their search activities, from domains and keyword analysis to link building and reporting. In the end, this means that they will have to spend less time switching between various tools and manually producing reports and can now shift their focus to activities that will help drive revenue.

According to the company, Searchmetrics Essentials has been designed with a wide-range of online marketers in mind, such as advertisers, marketers, public relations and agencies, as well as everyone from large business enterprises to small businesses.

Some of the key elements of Searchmetrics Essentials are:

- The ability to analyze domains and keywords by organic, paid and universal search results

- Users can now determine the most popular content on social networks and compare them amongst each other

- They can also identify opportunities to increase their marketing advantages online from competitive and industry analysis

- Essentials will also help predict return on investment by understanding the monetary value of organic, paid and universal traffic from search engines

- Finally, you can also quickly adjust to algorithm changes and competitor campaigns

Searchmetrics Essentials comes with two modules - SEO+SEM and Social - which can be purchased separately or are also offered as integrated aspects of the entire Searchmetrics Suite package.

Top Source of Traffic & Conversion

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 23 May 2011 14:25:00 GMT

: Email Dominates in Traffic & Conversion :

SeeWhy studied a sampling of 60,000 ecommerce transactions in February 2011 and found that not only is it the primary driver of traffic for Internet retailers, but does pretty well as a driver of conversions too.

Online marketers in all verticals go around and around as to the best source of converting traffic. While the SeeWhy study applies only to merchants (and furthermore only to those user sessions where an item was added into a shopping cart), it does clearly show how important email marketing is to the revenues of merchants - despite its often maligned reputation.

Email was responsible for 56.8 percent of traffic arriving at the shopping cart and 67 percent of the conversions. Compare that to the next largest segment in direct traffic (type-in, bookmark) which accounted for 17.9 percent of traffic and 23.68 percent of the conversions. Search marketing, referrals (presumably affiliates), social media, and display advertising rounded out the list and were collectively responsible for approximately 25% of the traffic and less than ten percent of the conversions. Not a good sign, particuarly with the influx in social media investment.

So Website Magazine reader, which source of your traffic has the best conversion rate? Share with others by commenting below.

CPC Campaigns - Best Time of Day

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:30:00 GMT

What is the best time of day to run your CPC campaigns?

A recent study conducted by online customer acquisition firm NetElixir examined the time of day that online orders and clicks peak. The findings indicate that there is a daily pattern for both behaviors with orders peaking during midday, while clicks (indicating people researching products) increase steadily throughout the day. These behaviors can provide guidance to retail marketers on the best times to run online ads.

The research reveals that online purchases peak during the midday hours between 2:00PM – 7:00PM, while clicks increase steadily throughout the day starting in the morning hours to about 10PM. Unique visitors to the site and on-site purchases followed a distinct hourly pattern based on the 32 retailers studies (see chart below with the amount of clicks on the left Y axis and orders on the right Y axis). Activity for both orders and clicks is at its lowest point in the early hours of the morning and rise over the course of the day, with clicks steadily increasing throughout the day and orders rising more sharply and peaking in the afternoon hours.

NetElixir makes several recommendations for improving SEM effectiveness based on the study including breaking down perforamnce by the hour to increase aggregate rturn on investment, and applying time-bound search tactics.

“The search advertising industry in 2011 is hyper-competitive. Retailers need to adopt smart optimization techniques and intelligent SEM technology in order to compete with increasingly sophisticated advertisers,” said Udayan Bose, CEO of NetElixir. “Analyzing and understanding when shoppers search and purchase can help to create more precise and effective search engine marketing strategies.”

Holiday Search Marketing Data

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 04:55:00 GMT

Search marketing and advertising provider Kenshoo released its 2010 Online Retail Holiday Shopping Report today.

Kenshoo aggregated search marketing data from the holiday shopping season across its U.S. Retail Index, analyzing over 3 billion ad impressions, 60 million clicks and 3 million online sales. Perhaps most notable in the report is that the economy is starting to get back on track - search ad budgets increased 54 percent in 2010, lifting online sales revenue 69 percent year over year.

The report identified several additional trends including:

- The online holiday shopping season is starting earlier and lasting longer
- Online shoppers are increasingly responsive to paid search advertising
- Consumers are buying more often with smaller basket sizes
- Retail search advertising competition peaks on Cyber Monday and the second shopping week in December

“When we released our first report after Cyber Monday, the state of the economy and search industry at large had already proven to be healthier in 2010 compared to 2009,” said Aaron Goldman, Chief Marketing Officer at Kenshoo. “But the upward trending of budgets, sales and revenue increased further in the weeks before Christmas, helping the Kenshoo U.S. Retail Index earn an average of USD 10.60 for every dollar spent on search ads. We’re excited to share these findings and the corresponding implications with the industry and hope retailers are able to leverage the insights to improve search marketing programs in the coming year.”

Bing/Yahoo Migration - In the Trenches

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 14:39:00 GMT

There has been a shortage of useful information for search marketers related to the Bing/Yahoo advertising migration - that fortunately is starting to change as agencies and advertisers dig in to the modified platform. Search marketing agency Performics has been tracking and evaluating the Bing/Yahoo paid search migration and has published some interested takeaways from its own data for the first week. On October 15th and 16th, approximately 60% of click traffic was running on Microsoft AdCenter (up from approximately 30% prior to the migration start). Other highlights include:

Impression Volume: A lower amount of impression volume is running through AdCenter (approximately 40%), suggesting that Bing is maintaining relatively higher click through rates when compared to Yahoo!, or that a stronger mix of brand terms have migrated first.

Cost per Click: Aggregate CPCs increased during the first few days of the migration, but they've come back down to normal seasonal expectations over the last few days.

Conversion Rates: Performics has conversion rates dip over the last couple of days, but this could also be an impact of seasonality/day of week.

Performic suggests setting up variance reports by campaign and for top keywords evaluating changes day over day, week over week and by day of week when managing during the transition. Performics does this through its Campaigns on Demand (CoD) Automated Goal Manager, which enables rules and alerts across programs with hundreds of thousands of keywords.

Facebook in Bing Search Results

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 20:04:00 GMT

You were told repeatedly that your participation on Facebook was no longer optional (but mandatory) and now you have proof.

Bing announced an expansion of its partnership with Facebook yesterday and it’s a doozy. Bing will be enhancing its search results with Facebook Likes. When you search for information on Bing, with “Liked Results” you will now see which of your Facebook friends liked that same result listing.

Bing will also be enhancing its index with Facebook profile search. By pulling in your Facebook friends, Bing is essentially narrow down your list to those included in your own social graph. Bing is even enabling users to take action and add the friend directly or send them a message.

Before the Web’s privacy advocates double-over with worry, Bing’s “Liked Results” surface content that is specifically designated as “public” and linked to a person’s Facebook friends. According to Bing, “This is the same information someone could access by viewing their Facebook network directly, except it adds relevancy by being presented alongside “traditional” Bing search results.” Users will also be notified when the feature goes live and have an opportunity to disable the functionality if they so choose.

The features will start rolling out this week with full features expected over the next few weeks – it will initially only be available in the U.S.

More on the Importance of Facebook available at Website Magazine:

Making All Search Local

Administrator — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:15:00 GMT

Three ways to optimize your Internet presence for local search queries

:: by John Faris, Red Door Interactive ::

Former U.S. Congressman Tip O’Neill famously coined the phrase, “All politics is local.” In much the same way, retail and service companies are quickly coming to realize that all marketing is local. With the recent rise — and soon to be explosion — in GPS/mapping-enabled smart phones as well as the drastic changes in the way Google searches trigger results, local search is rapidly becoming a critical marketing channel. If ignored, it may mean the difference for an organization being visible or invisible to potential customers.

The concept is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Most marketers are savvy enough to claim their listings in Google Places, but most don’t do anything beyond that. Instead they opt to focus their efforts on optimizing for general search queries.

However, claiming your listing is only the first step in a comprehensive strategy, since the majority of location-specific searches don’t even take place on Google. Many consumers use other outlets such as online yellow pages, local directories and city guides like CitySearch or Yelp, as well as search engines including Yahoo and Bing, to conduct their searches for local businesses. Even if Google were to start dominating local search like they dominate general search queries (and they probably will), their results are heavily influenced by these other local sources.

So before missing the boat entirely, here are three things marketers can do today to optimize their Internet presence for local search queries.

Stake Multiple Claims. Organizations should establish their local listings on all three major engines: Google, Bing and Yahoo! Maps. If a company has more than 10 locations, they can avoid Google’s postcard/phone verification process by submitting a spreadsheet for bulk upload. Once the listings are uploaded, the verification process can be initiated by submitting a request at http://bit.ly/GoogleVerification.

Be aware that this still triggers a manual process on Google’s side and doesn’t result in instantaneous verification. The process can be accelerated by registering your Google Places account using a company-owned email address, as opposed to a Gmail account or other third-party email address.

Beyond search engine map listings, marketers should increase the number of “citations”, or mentions of a company name in association with the location-specific phone number and address, on third-party sites. They are crucial in improving the rankings for your map listings. Google puts more weight on citations from trusted resources like Yelp, CitySearch, YellowPages.com and Local.com, but citation authority is industry-specific in many cases.

As an added benefit, top-tier Internet Yellow Pages and city guides get a fair amount of their own traffic and provide excellent outlets for consumer reviews. Google often pulls reviews from third-party sites into their listings and the number of reviews a location receives can impact the 10-pack rankings. Locations with high customer ratings typically see a lift in click-through rates as well.

Illustrate and Amplify. Optimizing for local search is a constant care and feeding process that will require marketers to keep on top of the latest developments by both mainstream and vertical search sites and enhance their listings accordingly. As far as Google Places is concerned, the first step after claiming and verifying your locations is to enhance your profiles by building out the listings with comprehensive information, including pictures and videos.

Companies can even add unique coupons to their listings that provide incentive to customers and helps with tracking. One of the most critical data points is the category that is associated with the business. Choosing the right one helps to ensure that your locations show up for the right search terms. The more complete the profile, the more trusted it becomes by both Google and the consumer. If you still aren’t showing up for your priority local search terms, consider advertising in the map results via Google Adwords Local Ad Extensions pay-per-click services or through Google Places Tags for a flat fee of $25 per month. Neither of these advertising options will push your listings into the 10-pack, but they will help your listing get a bit more exposure in the result pages in Google Maps.

Take Chances. There’s good reason to, so do experiment with incentivizing consumer actions through mobile applications like Twitter, far beyond simply chasing the latest fad. In July, Biz Stone, co-founder of the popular social media phenomenon boasted that Twitter now supports 800 million search queries per day, more than twice that of Yahoo! and Bing combined. Many of these searches have local intent and can be leveraged for both branding and direct response. And while it is nice to have a large following of engaged users that you can reach directly, Twitter search has the possibility of making the micro-blogging site a useful marketing vehicle independent of your communitybuilding skills.

In the same light, marketers should start considering location- based mobile applications like Foursquare and similar services like Double Dutch, as these services afford companies the opportunity to tap into users’ geographic locations. Companies can use that information to serve up offers and information for nearby businesses and points of interest. Some savvy marketers, like those at Tasti D-Lite, are even using social-local apps to power their loyalty programs, providing incentive for both social and financial transactions.

One thing’s for sure with local search marketing programs: consistent care, maintenance and optimization will not only increase online traffic, but offline sales at various locations. Make sure that you continually update your listings across the Web if and when any of your location details change. Keeping the information up-to-date and accurate is key to establishing credibility with the search engines. Such practices can be the difference between making noise and making it rain.

About the Author: John Faris is the Online Acquisition Supervisor at Red Door Interactive, an Internet Presence Management firm that helps organizations profit from their Web initiatives. Clients include Petco, Qualcomm, Overstock.com, Rubio’s Fresh Mexican Grill and Cricket Communications. He can be reached at jfaris@reddoor.biz.

The Perfect Domain (for SEO and SEM)

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:30:00 GMT

Should a business owner treat a domain name just as important as a physical business location or a carefully crafted logo?

A domain is, after all, a business’ own piece of Internet real estate. It reflects the brand and can even affect the website’s ultimate findability. Many business owners find themselves in a position to purchase that perfect domain, left to wonder about the value it could bring to the business as a whole ... and how much it might cost.

Read the Findability Makeover column "The Perfect Domain" by Website Magazine contributor Heather Lutze.

This article appears in the November 2010 edition of Website Magazine.

Paid Search Secrets of Top CPG Marketers

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 23:15:00 GMT

Online marketing intelligence and keyword tool provider AdGooroo and Experian® Hitwise® today unveiled findings from a fascinating study which explores how top consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands manage their paid search programs from the perspectives of keyword selection, coverage management and other important campaign management factors.

“Brand marketers that want to own conversations on the search engines are thinking about paid search, natural search, multimedia content and other concerns, and in paid search, advertisers absolutely need to consider both pre-click and post-click data,” said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. “This study is the first of its kind. It examines impressions, coverage, share of advertising and other pre-click data, as well as post-click or downstream data which highlights actual traffic originating from the engines. No other study to date has tackled such a tall order.”

The study discovered that the Top Ten CPG Websites receive 25 percent of their traffic from search engines (more than any other source) and that most top ten CPG Websites receive more than 80 percent of their search traffic from organic search or search engine optimization (SEO), not paid search. What's more, eight of the ten CPG websites maintain at least 50 percent coverage on Google for their paid search keywords, and maintain an average position of three or better on Google.

“Nearly every CPG brand studied is leaving a sizable amount of paid search traffic on the table,” said Heather Dougherty, Director of Research for Hitwise. “Most performed well in at least one paid search tactic, but the best CPG search marketers do well in multiple areas, such as keyword selection, coverage management, campaign structure and landing page design.”