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.

How Social Media Helps Website Marketing

One of the things I was curious to see was how much traffic I could get to my new Hyperlocal SEO site that I launched a few days back. As with any new site getting awareness and traffic to it can be a challenge unless you are putting an advertising budget in place.

With this site though I thought it would be a valuable tool to see what having an established blog along with Twitter and Facebook could do. As someone who has seen the benefits of what it can do for a site like this one and what I have witnessed on even small business sites in rural Missouri I knew social media can have quite the impact.

In reality I was hoping for something in the range of 50 visitors or so would be a good start for the first few days then build up links from there and continue to use Twitter and Facebook to promote new posts.

Well, I was wrong, WAY wrong.

Here is the number of visits per day:

Jan 18th (launch day, partial day) - 239

Jan 19th - 246

Jan 20th (partial, data as of 6:30 or so CST) - 155

Do you think that could of happened without the power of social media, and in this case I can see that Twitter was the larger portion of that?

The answer is no, to launch a new site in such a competitive niche as local search would of been a long process. I cannot wait to see what happens as new writers come on board.  A special thanks to George Pickering again for his commitment to contributing to the site, just wait until the blog gets put into the mix at TargetAudience.com which will have real small business owners reading it daily in their feed, nice name George is working with there, cannot wait to see how that goes!

How To Create The Perfect Powerpoint Presentation

Most people that have ever sat through a long presentation or sales pitch have a love/hate relationship with Powerpoint. Many of the reasons for this can be tied to a few specific things that the presenter may of done wrong in the creation of the presentation. In most cases with a few tweaks the Powerpoint presentation could of been both informative and entertaining while getting the results that the presenter wanted instead of the crowd tuning out.

Over a good portion of my career I have spent quite a bit of time giving presentations, in many cases the marketing team at the company I worked for had created the slide deck, and in others I had to create the material from scratch. What I find is that in almost all cases if a marketing team created the slide deck I would need to modify the presentation quite a bit to make it fit my customers needs. The reason being is people want to try to get as much information as possible on every slide and try to have the presenter remember as little as possible.

That is a big mistake, the more information you put on the slide the less likely the crowd is to pay attention to the content.

More recently I have had to create several Powerpoint presentations from scratch, and in the past month and a half I have been working heads down on one that has really made me spend a lot of time thinking about the best way to create something that is both pointed but full of information at the same time.

So, all that said, here are several tips to help you create a presentation that will keep your crowd interested until the very last slide:

• No more than 5 bullet points per slide. Period....
• A related graphic per slide helps draw attention to the slide from the crowd, do not use clip-art.
• Do not clutter the slides with to many graphics, typically I only have one graphic strategically placed to draw attention to something.
• Numbers and percentages are great, but do not over do it.
• DO NOT EVER be the person turning around staring at the screen to read the slides, know your material, the slides are talking points only. The crowd can read the slides, you are there to tell the story.
• What ever template you use it should NOT look like it came from the mid-90's. Clean and not to flashy should be what you shoot for. Colors that do not over power the message are important.
• In most cases you should shoot for less than 20 slides (including summary and intro slide). At one point in my career I had set a rule for when ever I start my own company the sales deck could never be more than 15 slides, I have broke that slightly but in most cases I can keep it right around there.
• As little slide animation as possible, marketing folks like to go crazy with slide animations and build outs, when done right they can have a great impact, when over done it just shows that someone read the latest book on Powerpoint tweaks.

Now for the flow of the presentation, and this works for both sales decks and seminar slide decks:

• Intro slide - This is the front slide, simple, it should contain your company name, presenters name, and title of the presentation or company tag line, that is it.
• Company slide - No more than 5 points, should include things like company vision and history.
• If needed, and it is NOT always needed, a media and partner slide could be put after this. If you have had success winning awards that the audience may be familiar with it is ok to show that off. As far as partners, if it is an audience that will be familiar with the partners you have then this is a great place to outline who they are and what they bring to the table.
• Create a problem - By create a problem I do not mean make something up, I am saying show market data of what is happening that you will be providing a solution too. You are setting the table for a solution to the problem...
• It may be useful to show some independent market data after that slide showing trends, graphs, etc. Not to many numbers but a few that make the point.
• Now is the time to setup for showing the solution to the problem, 5 points, generic ideas on how to create a solution.
• Now you get to show your greatness, now that you have shown generic solutions to the problem, show what you have to hit EACH of the points that you laid out. It is important that if you laid out a problem you show a solution.
• Examples, this is where many people fall apart, they either have no real successes to show, OR, they try to show too many. Done right you should be able to get the customers heads nodding with only one, maybe two, examples. If I had to pick only two slides from my whole presentation it would be my example slides.
• Products - after you have shown your examples show what products relate to those examples.
• Time for the summary, your summary slide should be the WOW slide. Show no more than 5 points that bring it all home.

Now, the one thing that should go without saying, when I keep hitting on 5 points, DO NOT try to fit a paragraph into each one. My goal is typically they should never line wrap around to be two lines. Sometimes that is necessary. Remember, the presenter should tell the story, the presentation is simply talking points.

Also, only if it is absolutely necessary should you use a slide for each and everyone of your products (unless you only have one product).

OK, now none of the above matters if you come in with a dry, no personality, pitch. You have to get there attention. When you first stand up it is ok to make some lighthearted comment to get a laugh or really anything to catch their attention. It is very important to do this. If you do not get their attention in the first 30 seconds it is very likely you will not get it the rest of the presentation either.

Every 15 minutes break it up, do something interactive, ask a question, do something not related directly to the slide. People will drift, it is built into the human brain (read the book Brain Rules by John Medina...).

Anyway, I hope some of these tips help. I have been trying to live by these for years and sometimes some of the rules have to be broke, but I always try to use these as my guidelines.

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 Review From 2009

As someone who spends the majority of his time thinking about local search and all things that pertain to small businesses taking advantage of all that the web has to offer I was absolutely overwhelmed by all the information linked to and provided in this great 2009 year in review post at SearchEngineLand.com:

SearchEngineLand.com Local Search Review

There is so much information linked to in that one article you could spend a week reading and analyzing it. We all know that geo domains are primed for success after the failure of newspapers and legacy media and Google is becoming the default "Yellow Pages" of today. 2009 will go down as the year the shift started full bore.

I highly recommend reading the story in the link and taking your time to read a good portion of the links within it.

New Website Advertising Fail

One of the themes that seems to come up fairly frequently when we talk to customers about their current website or plans for their new one is the lack of a plan for promoting it.

So many times we have spoke to customers and they indicate that they have never really thought about promoting their website, they buy it with no idea of what they are really going to do with it or how they can promote it to bring people into to see their message. This really came to mind today when we passed a billboard for a customer of ours who we had done a re-branding effort with and created a great looking new logo, a really nice e-commerce site and some other items that would help them move from their old image to new.

The customer had asked us to do this work for them so they could move forward on some other promotion initiatives they were working on that involved some offline marketing (billboards and also signs around their office complex). We did not have our hands in that part but I wish we had now.

My wife saw the billboard today, now keep in mind my wife is not a tech person, at all... But the first thing she said was "Why do they have their phone number but not their website on that new billboard?".

Good question.

We actually send out promotion tips to customers and give tips and advice but at times there is work done that we are not involved in, as mentioned above this is a case of that. As I mentioned in previous posts, more and more I hear people tell me that they do not even look for phone numbers on billboards or signs but they look for websites (DOMAIN NAMES).

Why?

Well, it is because they can go get the info they need from the site. Sure you need the phone number on there, but you also need your website on the billboard, driving people to the website allows a small business to promote more of their companies products. I would venture to guess most people can not remember 7 or 10 digits but most will remember a few words (I wish I could remember the book I read this in, but it was tested and proven).

Anyway, we will be reaching out to this customer just to let them know that they should also include their new website in any new marketing push that they do.

If you are looking for ways to promote a website offline check out my post called 10 Offline Ways To Promote Your New Website.

iSupportServices.com Launches NorthCarolina.me and Business Support Services

Localtek is proud to announce a partnership with iSupportServices.com, the company owns several state .ME names and after the success of Missouri.me had interest in using our state Geo development platform for the launch of their state names and also extend the partnership into other areas where we provide rural small business services.

NorthCarolina.me is the first of the states to launch, over the coming months iSupportServices will be working directly with small business customers to support their technical and marketing needs and we are proud to be a piece of that solution.

Here is the press release that went out today:

iSupport Services, LLC
Chris Poer, 877-228-9002
cpoer@isupportservices.com
www.isupportservices.com

Speaking Today To Farmington Business Leaders

Today is going to be booked from start to finish with the morning kicking off with a seminar speaking to the business leaders of Farmington, MO. Farmington is one of, if not the (depending who you ask) fastest growing areas in Missouri. Our partner Big River Telephone worked tirelessly in promoting the seminar and once again went offline to promote to businesses that need to start thinking about how to promote online.

I must say that spending time with medium and small business leaders in a group setting like this is about as good as it gets, I enjoy every minute and some of the questions and discussions are very insightful  as they can help me (and others) understand what the people not focused on the online world are really thinking about technology.

One of the things that really amazes me is the number of people using Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I always ask for a raise of hands before I start speaking to find out how many people use each of the services. Facebook always leads, Twitter is always second, and Linkedin third. No real surprise but what I do find interesting is that the crowd is typically not real tech savvy but a rough estimate would be 70 percent of most rooms have Facebook accounts.

As I type that I also realize more and more I am seeing people not even put their website in their commercials on TV, they just go straight to their Facebook page. What a coup for Facebook....

Now, I do spend a portion of the presentation talking about proper domain name selection and after seeing the acceptance of social networking there are very few people who even understand what  a domain name is. I am happy to help do that education.

Farmington is a very progressive area and I expect todays presentation to be a bit different than others and since I know some of the people in the room this time it should make for good back and forth.

Selecting A Small Business SEO Company

All SEO companies targeting small businesses are selling snake oil!

OK not really but there are many out there you need to watch for which I believe has given the industry a bad name. Search Engine Optimization is something every company with a website or developing a website should take into consideration as they develop their plan for implementation.

If you are not familiar with SEO the simplest explanation without getting technical is the following:

SEO is the process of building your website in a manner that allows it to show up in the search engines for specific items that people maybe searching for, and more importantly it is optimizing it in a way that draws in searches that are specifically targeted at the products you sell.

There are many more technical explanations but that one really is the gist of it.

Now, why did I say many companies are selling snake oil, well let me first say, my company is not an SEO company, I say that very specifically because we do more than just optimize sites. That said we do work with customers that do want some level of SEO work done on their websites and we do build every customer website with SEO in mind from day one. Our success getting customers the search traffic they want has been great but we never guarantee anything, period.

There are a few things that you need to pay attention to when selecting a search engine optimization partner.

If they promise you page one listings run away, here is why. In many businesses you can guarantee something, when it comes to the search engines you are always at Googles (or Bing, or Yahoo) mercy. The provider can do everything right but at the end of the day there is always a chance that Google may not rank the site on the first page number one listing.

If they guaranteed it there are a few things they may be doing that you need to ask about or be aware of, there are companies that will take advantage of the lack of awareness of how the search engines work and will sometimes do one of the following to show you a first page listing:

1. Paid submission directories or search engines - Many will pay a fee to have your site listed number one in a lesser search engine or website directory or possibly take advantage of pay per click advertising on a lesser search engine or directory. These listings are only there if you are paying, quit paying and the listings go away.
2. Black Hat SEO - When it comes to search engine optimization there are two main types without getting to technical, there is white hat which is the proper way to optimize the site, and there is something called black hat. Black hat is the process of trying to trick the search engines into ranking your site but doing things that Google and others frown on. It may work for a short period of time but sooner or later Google will catch on and your site will be banned from search and your competitors will be smiling.
3. Using very odd searches to rank - What this means is showing you a page one ranking for a term that really no one searches for, for instance if you are interested in showing up for Chicago Hair Salons they may work to optimize for Chicago Illinois Hair Salons On Rush Street. You can see how it changes the value of a first page ranking.

Those are just a few things, there are many more but after speaking with customers lately I have a concern that there are people still working down these paths with customers.

All that said, there are many very upstanding SEO companies out there, there are MANY MORE good than bad. Make sure you select one you are comfortable with and ask the right questions.

Small Business Who Gets Domain Name Brand Protection And Call To Action

Today I was working with a customer who had purchased a pretty extensive custom web development package and part of the kick off process was domain name selection and discussing branding, call to action and related topics.

It became a very interesting conversation based on the experience of the customer I was working with, his currently primary business is focused on selling a very niche product online and he has some very nice call to action and keyword domains to support his business and I must say we spent quite a bit of time discussing his thoughts on domain selection, domain investment in general and brand protection.

He was really concerned about brand protection due to the fact that after his initial site became successful people picked up what equates to typos or singular instead of plural versions (his original site was a generic one word with USA on the end). From the beginning he was open to a plan to buy up keyword domains to use as supporting sites to his primary site, this will work great from an SEO perspective if done right as well as keep his competitors from purchasing those, but since the site we are building is going to be done on a very nice call to action domain he also understood that there were certain phrasings he should pick up just to be safe.

There are not many small businesses that understand the value of having multiple domains, owning the .NET, .ORG and more when possible and overall planning of a strategy for a network of supporting sites. It was an absolute blast working with a customer who understood from the beginning and not only supported this effort but pushed us even deeper into the plan than we would of expected.

With the right education and experience businesses get it. I wish I could take credit for the education here, but I was just a small piece, unfortunately this customer learned through a bad experience but knows not to let it happen again.

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