First Page Of Google Costs More Than $100

As a company that works with local businesses on bringing them online and helping them with online advertising and local SEO we spend quite a bit of our effort on educating the customers.

This is quite rewarding and our team enjoys showing customers how taking advantage of how the customer uses the web everyday actually helps them bring customers to their door that use the web in the same way they do.

We like to talk to our customers about more than their website and when building the website we like to start with some level of basic SEO. With most of our customers being local businesses and local search on the rise, most of our customers understand right away how important it is to show up when people search for local services.

Although many customers are still learning how to understand that just because they are found online does not mean people are buying from them online, they are understanding that they need to be there.

We have another set of customers that start to see the benefits of SEO and see that they can increase their market presence and expand their product reach nationally, if not globally. It is great once this realization sets in. But there is one issue.

Many customers have a look of disbelief once it is explained that it takes more than $100 in extra services to make the first page of Google for a one word term. One way that it is easy to explain this is by showing the number of results shown for a search term and the companies that are on the first page and showing some simple results of why they are there.

Another way of showing the value is equating it to something that customers are familiar with, things like paying more for higher eyeball having TV shows, larger reach radio stations, etc. If a term has 500 searches a month it is likely to be much less competitive than a term that has hundreds of thousands of searches a month.

If organic SEO cost is a concern it is typically a good plan to offer PPC help up front but as we all know it makes much more sense over the long term to have a solid organic SEO plan in place.

Large companies understand this and as time progresses smaller businesses will start to understand this as well. It is great when a prospective customer starts to see the potential, they start to think about how they use the internet. For those customers that realize that but do not have the budget in place for a larger marketing plan it is important to start them from a base they can build from in the future for a larger reach SEO plan. Sooner or later they will want, or NEED it.

SEO From a Mall Kiosk???

Recently I was at the West County Mall in St. Louis and ran into something that could only be described as amusing.

After leaving the Apple store I noticed a kiosk with a screen rotating the services the company offered, typically I do not pay much attention to these things but in this case as the screen switched from home computer setup, wireless networking, and other mundane services to something a bit more complex and something that was quite funny.

The company was asking if I wanted to be found on the first page of Google. Did you know you could buy local search engine optimization in a mall???

Since I like to instigate a bit I thought it would be fun to quiz the person in the booth about getting my business found on the first page of Google. My wife thought it best to walk away before it started for some reason...

After the person first did not even know about the sign that had just flashed that the company he was promoting offered such services and local SEO he then tried to sell me on coming to my house to setup my internet (I would of paid a million to hear him say interwebs). I then asked again as the slide flashed again, even after I had already explained my company did online advertising, web development, and we helped businesses get found online he asked if I needed a website.

I was done having fun at this point but he did then continue to tell me that "Josh" was good at this that or the other, literally everything on the board from anti-virus to local search was his "specialty".

So, next time you are in the mall beware of search engine optimization from a kiosk, but then again, maybe you can have your spyware removed at the same time.

Forget Hyperlocal Google Goes Statewide With Local Search

As much as I love all the hyperlocal buzz and things going more and more community focused I have reasons to love larger geographic regions as well, seems Google has some love for them too.

Over at SearchEngineJournal there was an interesting post analyzing Googles latest local search changes. Now they show local results for statewide searches, this is an interesting concept and one that I can already see ways to take advantage of for some of our customers.

Take a read of the linked post above, but here are a few quick tips they pointed out on how to take advantage of this:

1. Check and see if your Industry and State are showing local listings.
2. Make sure you aren’t stuffing location keywords into categories. If your category is city + keyword then what happens when someone does a search for state + keyword.
3. Do keyword research for city vs. state terms. Your business might benefit by trying to go after one or the other.
4. Look at citations from businesses in other areas of the state and see if you can use them.

I think number 2 is very important in this, in most cases people go straight to city level categories or keywords, but with Googles shift to show local search for statewide a business that is trying to take advantage of this is going to have to think a bit differently.

Yellow Pages 90 Percent Discount, Really?

Just a quick post to show you how the beginning of the year is going for the Yellow Page print business. So far in the first half of January I have had 3 customers tell me they have pulled their complete PRINT Yellow Page budget and a few more tell me that if they were in multiple Yellow Page (i.e. Yellowbook, etc) they have brought it down to one.

Well, today one of our really great customers came by to tell us something a bit interesting and I am sure if any of you have current Yellow Page spend and have not committed one way or the other for this years budget you will have happening soon, he got a call from his account manager stating they are offering a 90 PERCENT DISCOUNT for this year if he commits now.

He still said no.

I am not sure what different regions are being offered this type of discount or what level of customer, but WOW.  Aggressive.

Do you have any similar stories?

HyperlocalSEO.com Launches Today – Want to Write A Guest Blog Post?

I wanted to do a quick announcement concerning the "soft launch" of HyperlocalSEO.com. I had been contemplating launching a separate blog focused more on local seo and local search in general but wanted to make sure that I could put in the time necessary.

Well, the great news is thanks to George Pickering from LocalExperts.com I have a solid partner in this new blog who will be doing posts as well. George is a true success story in the development of geo targeted niche sites that generate real business for his customers.

Between the two of us plus a some articles some of my team will be doing I expect this blog to do quite well and provide valuable information to small businesses looking to grow their business online and take advantage of local search growth and the trend towards more hyperlocal content.

One of the problems with launching my initial blog on BruceMarler.com is I could not really have multiple writers on the site, with the launch of HyperlocalSEO.com I envision overtime having a group of contributors that all benefit from the successful site and I will just be one small piece of it.

There may not be much up there right now but look for tons more coming soon.

If you have interest in the local seo or geo targeted search market and would like to do a guest blog post or be an author on the site shoot me a message.

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

Local Search Thoughts

As we head into 2010 local search seems to be a hot topic. As search has continued to go more local it is more important than ever before to have  a plan for your business to be found when people search. One fact that brings this home is that in 2008 people searching for local businesses online grew by 58 percent, it will be real interesting to see what that number is in 2009 since so many have moved to the iPhone, with the ease of use of the current smart phones it is only natural that mobile searches will skew even more local.

I was reading a great post over at LocalSEOGuide.com and after preaching a lot of this over the last year to anyone who would listen it was great to see a leader in the space validate much of what we had been seeing.

A couple bullet points to point out:

SMB SEO Budgets Will Increase Dramatically
A number of misguided souls are predicting that personalized search renders SEO obsolete.  Bottom line: most SMBs don’t know what they are doing with search, are going nuts because some spammer or the guy down the street outranks them, want to spend more time with their kids and are ready to hire someone to make the problem go away.

And:

SEO Consultants Will Become Better Known as Marketers
2009 seemed like the year when a lot of SMBs woke up to the fact that SEO actually existed and could be an important part of the marketing mix.  In 2010 more businesses are going to start to realize that search and social media could be the biggest area of potential for their companies and they will pour more resources into these channels.  As a result search marketers are going to take on bigger roles helping drive comprehensive marketing strategies.

This last one is something I discuss often in my seminars to small business owners, when you start talking about search engines, the internet, or anything that relates to a computer most small business owners tune out immediately. To most people all of these topics are purely technical and seem to be of little consequence to them.

But after showing examples of businesses being found with local search and using real case studies it clicks with them that they are actually using the internet to find services and businesses JUST LIKE THEIR CUSTOMERS.

It clicks at that point.

The technology is suddenly a marketing tool.

We all know this, but to someone that is not involved on a day to day basis with this there is not an immediate link.

Once that link is created they understand that with the Yellow Pages print edition faltering they better start thinking about a plan to attract those that have went away, and to that great marketing tool called the internet.