Archive
You are currently browsing the archives for the Search Engines category.
By teamsf
“I have tried several times to edit my business local listing and it tells me Status Pending Review.”
“I’ve been trying to get my current address, phone number and website address updated in my local listing for months.”
“Recently, I have submitted my local business and had been waiting for my verification PIN. After 20 days I have received that PIN number, but my listing has been already verified by someone else.”
The above quotes are excerpts from postings at search engine local listing forums. Business owners are having difficulty updating their local business listings on their own. These are only a few examples of the problems business owners run into. Reviewing the forums of the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing, you will find many more questions and frustrations.
Certainly the search engines have tried very hard to make this process as easy as possible, however, the individual tasks can appear to raise more questions to someone who is not familiar with the information or the process.
The issue tends to go beyond the obvious request to answer questions on the computer screen. Each question may raise further questions in the mind of the business owner. These silent questions begin to focus on the business brand, the message, the marketing strategy. Question like “Am I entering the right information?”, “Am I entering the information correctly?” are only a couple of the higher level questions that come to mind when someone starts to ask you questions about your local business.
The local business owner wants to maximize the limited time resources they have. If they spend time to work on this information, they will want to be sure it benefits them and they probably don’t want to come back to do this again. The anxiety of insuring the information they enter helps their business far outweighs the questions being asked by the search engine local listing.
An additional burden comes from having to perform this task on all the major search engines along with many non-search engine websites like Local.com and Yelp. By the time you look through the process you will find at least six major locations to update and maintain. We have identified 60 websites for which business will want to have their local listing managed. As you can see, the local business with limited time resources will not be able to keep up.
If you’re wondering why you want to have your local listing updated with six or more websites you’re not alone. The answer lies with iPhone, Blackberry and Palm. The mobile application developers for these phones will be the ones to decide which database of local listing they will use. Since any of these databases can be used, it only makes sense to have the local business listing information updated in as many locations as possible.
The strategy of how the information is entered is certainly an additional challenge. Knowing the keywords to use and how they should be entered is only the beginning. If you add coupons, offers, discounts, videos, photos, products and services, it will be necessary to know how to title, describe and tag the individual items. After all, you want your listing to show up at the top of the list of local listings for various search terms related to your business and also on mobile devices.
As part of the local search marketing strategy you will want to maintain your listings and manage them regularly. Our recommendation is once a week. Local listings that are not maintained will not be of any benefit to the local consumer and therefore they have no reason to click on your listing. You may have a new menu or products, an event at your business or store, or other news worthy items that will require the listing to be updated at all locations.
Lastly, we have to be concerned about customer reviews. Consumers have the ability to write their positive thoughts and negative emotions. This raises the notion that we want to encourage customers to write their positive thoughts and also insure we have a process in place to handle customers that are not satisfied to avoid having them post their negative emotions. Of course this is also a second reason why so many local listing websites need to be maintain. Ultimately, the consumer will be the one to decide where they post their positive or negative reviews.
Utilizing a professional service to manage your local listings is no different than retaining a professional service to manage the search engine optimization of your website. Because the process is simpler than website search engine optimization, the fee structure is significantly lower.
Let us close out with two questions:
1. Do you know about your local listing?
2. Have you considered updating your local listing?
Contact SmartFinds Internet Marketing’s Local Business Listing Management Service and let our team help you with your local search marketing.
By teamsf
If you do a search on “local business listing hijacking” you will find information related to situations in which a competitor hijacked another businesses local listing to their benefit. As of December 7, 2009, Smart Company wrote an article about hijacking prevention. In New Zealand a florist is facing 7 years for hijacking local listings of competitors.
This is a real situation that can and does have an impact upon a business that is not paying attention to their local business listings. If your business relies on the local consumer market for its primary revenue and you are not clear about local business listings, then you need to get caught up real quick.
For one thing local business listings are the demise of the traditional yellow pages. If the traditional yellow pages have not already seen their coffin and at minimum a door stop, then free local business listings are the nails in the coffin. Certainly you will find that you can save money in this space.
Local business listings give a local business the ability to not only have their general information available, but photos, videos, coupons, offers, discounts, promotions to name a few items. Additionally these can be updated 24×7x365. Certainly none of these are features of the traditional yellow pages.
The process gets even better. Not only do these listings show up on the first page of Google for a search result in which a local listing is appropriate, but they show up on mobile devices while local consumers are driving around town. Studies have shown that there is an increase in local search and local search via mobile applications on mobile devices. We won’t get into all that detail here, but you can certainly read one of our previous articles about the statistics.
As you can imagine local listings have been evolving in the past few years and so have mobile devices and mobile applications. Starting in 2010 the two industries are merging even closer.
Just in case you’re still not convinced that you need to pay attention to your local business listing, think about the consumers walking through your store and writing reviews about their experience, products or services. If they don’t like something they can twitter or write a review in any local listing website before they even make it back to the car.
These consumer reviews are very important because in part they determine your ranking amongst other local listing websites for a web search (vs. mobile search). They also have a tremendous value to the search engines, which is one of the reasons Google wanted to acquire Yelp recently.
So, let’s get back to the issue of local business listing hijackings. To prevent this process the first action is to claim your business listing at multiple local listing websites. Certainly Google Local Business Listing will be your first stop, followed by Yahoo, Bing, Local.com, Ask.com and Yelp. You will find that there are many more locations, this is only a start.
Aside from getting involved in local business listings around the web here are a couple of other items to consider. Always be sure to have consistent and as much detailed information about your business as possible, particularly your address. Be sure your information is consistent amongst all locations on the web including your website.
Claiming, updating and managing the ongoing updates and reviews to your local business listing can become a time consuming process. It may at some point require more time than your website. Certainly the local business listings can become your website too.
Because there are multiple locations that have to be updated you may need to consider a service that will help you maintain and manage your local listing at multiple local listing websites. When it comes to the web, Google may be the 800lb gorilla, but in the mobile marketing space, the mobile application developer will ultimately decide what database they will use. Furthermore, the local consumer will be the one to decide which local listing they will use to write their reviews. Therefore, for both of these reasons, you will want to manage your local listing at multiple local listing websites.
Waiting to consider your local business listing is not really an option. You will want to be an early adopter as quickly as possible.
SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides Local Business Listing Management Services and can not only help you claim your local business listing, but also, manage the ongoing maintenance at multiple local listing websites. Not only to help you update the listings with your information, but also with promotions, coupons, QR-Codes, offers, videos and photos.
By teamsf
Global small businesses can use local business listings on the Internet as a yellow page alternative and to be more easily located by mobile local consumers.
BIRMINGHAM, MI – January 4, 2010 (SMARTFINDS INTERNET MARKETING) – An affordable local business listing package, offered by SmartFinds Internet Marketing, is allowing small businesses to reduce the cost of yellow page ads. Internet based Local business listings are free through the major search engines and display in search results, as well as on mobile devices. The additional benefits include adding coupons, offers, discounts, photos, videos while changing them anytime. – something you cannot do with your yellow page ad.
SmartFinds Internet Marketing launched the SmartFinds Local Listing website as an additional service offering which can be found at www.smartfindslocallisting.com
SmartFinds Internet Marketing CEO, Melih Oztalay, stated “this has been a long time coming to finally eliminate the yellow pages that we use as a door stop now-a-days. The benefits to small business are incredible to be available to their local customers when the customer is looking for them while being around town with their mobile device. The fact that the business can also update their offers anytime gives the local business the possibility to adapt to market changes.”
SmartFinds Internet Marketing offers a low priced one-time fee of $395 to update your local business listing with their 15 year Internet expertise. This includes the six primary websites that include Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Local.com and Yelp. Additional local listing locations can be added with their optional low $12.95/month fee. SmartFinds will help navigate the landscape and make it easy for you to update your local listing at all these local listing websites.
Oztalay, indicated that in 2010 the mobile device industry will grow exponentially. “We will have not only the iPhone, but also Blackberry and Palm are coming to market with new products and mobile applications. The wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon and Sprint are upgrading the cell tower to allow for 4G capabilities thereby increasing the bandwidth to the mobile devices. Since all of these platforms will not all use Google Maps, it will be necessary to have your local business listing updated in all possible locations”.
CEO Melih Oztalay has fifteen years experience with Internet and digital services in developing strategies that utilize all facets of the World Wide Web. As a digital marketing agency, SmartFinds Internet Marketing’s major focus is to develop multi-directional marketing campaigns to drive traffic to client web sites from more than just search engines.
SmartFinds Internet Marketing provides businesses with Internet marketing services and solutions that include all or a combination of the following to meet the business growth and revenue objectives: Research, Strategy and Planning; Creative and Technical Development; Website Development; Search Engine Optimization services; Content Marketing; Social Media Marketing; Internet advertising solutions; Local Business Listing Management Services; Management, Measurement and Analysis.
About SmartFinds Internet Marketing
The most critical element of SmartFinds Internet Marketing services is the creativity and imagination to apply the technological aspects of the digital marketplace to the marketing objectives of a particular business. Initial research provides SmartFinds the ability to develop a digital strategy that can be measured every step of the way to insure business growth and revenue generation. Some of SmartFinds’ clients have included Compuware, Delphi, Flagstar Bank, Guardian Industries, Soave Enterprises, Detroit Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, McCann Erickson, Wendy’s and others. You can learn more about SmartFinds at www.smartfindsmarketing.com.
Contact: Esther Lastacy, 330 E. Maple Road, Suite 503, Birmingham MI 48009, 866.501.5758, esther@smartfindsmarketing.com
By melih
Do you know if your website is optimized by page or based on the entire website? Over the past 20 years of the commercial Internet the process of how the search engines determine how relevant pages within our website are for a particular search has changed quite a bit.
For those that can remember programs like Archie and Veronica, you can appreciate that there were times searches would take hours. Since then the search engines send a spider to your website to learn what is on each page. This information is brought back to the search engine database and is used to display results to those seeking the information.
To take this discussion further, each search engines has its own algorithm that determines if a web page is relevant to a search request. The most important item you will notice in this discussion is about relevancy by each web page and therefore each web page address or URL. Since search engines do not like duplicate information within a website you have to consider how to optimize each page based on the information on that page. How you optimized your privacy statement web page has to be different from how you optimized your services web page.
Keywords are used by people seeking information to describe what they hope to find when using a search engine. Keyword searching is the most common form of text search on the Internet and the searcher uses their own experience and knowledge to determine what keyword or phrase they will type for their search. The good news is that over time, the search engines have tools that will let us know how people may be searching for information on a particular page of our website. Armed with this knowledge you can now make changes to your web pages.
The focus of our discussion relative to keywords and content relevancy is specifically about organic keyword ranking. We will not touch on paid sponsored search advertising that most know as pay-per-click (ppc). We will also focus our attention on key phrases instead of keywords. Keywords tend to be very broad, have a lot of competing web pages and make it difficult to get top rankings for searches. Key phrases are a much better Internet marketing strategy.
For search engine optimization (seo) by web page, keywords or phrases are defined as the exact phrases used by searchers to find their information. Unlike ppc, seo requires knowing the exact phrase because the page will rarely appear under similar keyword phrases.
As an example, if you had 100 keywords or phrases that you want people to find you under and your website only has 50 pages, you will have to consider building up to 50 more pages to your website.
Once you know how you are going to optimize each page of your website, you will have to consider both technical changes to the HTML code as well as visible changes to the text on that page. In addition to this, consider that the entry point to your website may no longer be your home page. For this reason you will need to consider a call-to-action on each page of your website or re-visit your website flow in order to convert the visitor to your home page.
It is difficult to explain all the various details of per page optimization (ppo), however, the minimum would be the title, meta description and visible text copy. Some of these changes you may be able to accomplish using a content management system (cms) or reach out to your Internet marketer. Your web designer may not be the best source for this as their mandate is to create a visibly appealing website, not necessarily to focus on the technical coding of the website.
One additional point to make is that search engine optimization of your web pages is only one factor in the overall search engine ranking process. Many other factors play a role that include but are not limited to links from the outside to pages within your website.
Does your firm have an Internet marketing firm to support your business objectives with your website?
