Kara’s making some comparisons of how Wall St. thinks about local search v. Main Street.  The two think very differently.

Successful v. Struggling Companies:

• Organic traffic v. SEM only traffic
  If you don’t have organic traffic you will not be able to compete over time
• Unique distribution v. yet another local website
  Iphone apps like Urban Spoon which have a unique take on things v. just another directory with no brand
• Self-service products v. high cost of sales, high churn
  Merchant Circle has done a good job of creating business communities that generate sign-ups v. expensive direct sales forces.
• Direct access to merchant budget v. dependence on others
  
• Low cost burn v. high

Apocalypse Now or Soon…

The change in the economic enviroment has turned the focus for investment from ability to build audience to ability to generate $$ in the near term.  Businesses who raised $ at high prices not funded to break even will need to recap.

The Opportunity Remains Large…

• <36% of SMBs are online
• Print sales still takes up the majority of ad spend and that has to change

Local Market Poised for Consolidation

Locally oriented Web companies typically have either distribution or monetization so it makes sense that the two will come together at some point.

Clear leaders in verticals will likely emerge.

IAC Investment Focus

Businesses that target:

1. Merchant Budget
2. New Ad Products
3. Unique Publishers

The InsiderPages example:

they integrated performance ads, optimized remote billable leads and increased revenue dramatically (they say 100% but I bet it’s more like 1,000%)

they also improved the SEO (no they didn’t! - it was just the links from other IAC properties ) and increased traffic by 200%.

Marc Canon, President of New Media, The Yell Group:

Here’s his presentation basically unfiltered.  Some great quotes in there:

Marc has worked at Switchboard, AOL Search, AutoByTel and Yell, so presumably he knows something about local search business models.  According to Marc, $14.7 Billion has been spent in local search in 10 years but it’s still not clear we’ve cracked the code on local search.  Totally agree.

Received Wisdom & Self-Evident Truths:

1. We will understand our users better than the past
   Wrong - we still don’t know exactly why people do things
2. We will migrate our advertisers online without loss
   Wrong
3. Interactive local marketing will be more engaging and meaningful to users
   Who Knows? - ILM might be more useful but it’s not necessarily more engaging.
4. Content quality and accuracy will still be critical
   Wrong - “good enough” seems to be good enough.  Most users don’t know just how bad the data or compare it from one site to another
5. We will use traditional media to drive online usage
   Marc says he spent $40MM to disprove this one.  Use of local interactive media is “timeboxed”.  You need to do that search at a particular time to meet  a particular need.  When you are watching TV it doesn’t necessarily intersect with that timebox for the user.

Facts on the Ground:

1. Search engines are the new browsers
   and they are moving downstream (to local media and local directories).  How do you move upstream to compete?  (Hint: SEO could help)  We all need to get used to paying taxes (meaning sharing our revenue with Google).  Focus on engagement instead of ownership (very important)
2. Usage is agnostic and context is king
   your users are in a lot of different places - DA services, search engines, ad networks, mobile devices, etc. - the context is different depending on how the user is accessing your information.  You need to learn and accept the limitations of the platforma nd format your content and delivery to accommodate it.
3. Information is getting smarter
   The querying space and the content space are converging.  Content developers are getting better at packaging their content up to match queries or else someone is doing it for them - e.g. iGoogle, Kosmix (federated search). Content is getting broken up into small pieces so they can be served up in context and its changing the way people are accessing and digesting it.  Own the context, not the content. Let the information find you.  Don’t build it, rent the framework - you can save a lot of $, someone can do it better than you and it’s changing all of the time.
4. Publishers will sell what they don’t have
   He’s talking about Glam.com niche networks and how geo will be applied to all niche networks over time.  Create only what you need and sell what you can.  Manage capacity, not scarcity.  Advertisers are not impressed with scarcity anymore because their is not a lot of scarcity. Focus on conversion.

For most SMBs, yellow pages advertising is a yearly Dirty Harry experience where they ask themselved how lucky they feel?

Cultural Anthropology:

Phase 1: Islands
Sites owned data and exercised strict editorial control (e.g. Yellowpages sites, AOL, WSJ, etc.)

Phase 2: Archipelagos
Site aggregrated data (e.g. Google, TripAdvisor, etc.)

Phase 3: Ecologies
The data lives everywhere via APIs, RSS, etc. (e.g. iGoogle, Dogtime, Glam, Yelp, etc.)

Ballistic Exercises

1. Smart contexts, smarter content
   (e.g Huffington Post aggregation and prioritization of blog feeds)
2. Voice search and navigation
   (Google Voice Search is “a rich company’s hobby”)
   This could be biggest sea change in how we interact with content but it still seems far off.
3. Socially mediated content
   People will start to exert more control of businesses via social media (e.g. the Presidential Election)
4. Dimensional consumption
   It’s hard to match customer experience v. monetization across a variety of verticals which is why Google will have a hard time competing against focused verticals.  Marc talks of an experience at AOL Search where changing just a few pixels could = +- $10MM in revenue.  So you have to tread lightly when you create custom experiences by vertical less you screw your business model.

Jonah will be providing some razzle dazzle on how to use analytics to improve your organic traffic and conversion.  For all of you out there who paid for a fancy analytics package and use it only to track uniques and page views (and you know who you are) I think you’ll find Jonah’s advice of value.

Steve is going to show you how to turn a simple business profile page into a SEO machine.  Despite the fact that Steve is the World’s Biggest White Sox Fan, I think you’ll appreciate what he has to say.

So be there or be square, or whatever shape you are when you are not there.

Gyutae Park over at Winning The Web just built a cool list of the top marketing blogs on the Web.  Not sure how I did it but Local SEO Guide is ranked #75!

I’ll take it, but watch out Dave N, I am gunning for you.

I recently spoke with a small business that had turned off its SEO efforts in the summer.  They were impressed with the traffic growth - daily search engine traffic had doubled in about 30 days - but lead volume from their website had stayed flat.  I checked the terms that were driving traffic and they were good “qualified” search queries signaling purchase intent.

While their conclusion was that the SEO was not effective, although that may have been the case (perish the thought!), my take was slightly different.

1. Had they tested their site’s ability to convert?

Maybe their marketing messages had changed or were not well crafted to begin with.  Maybe the offer was not enticing enough.  Maybe the site was not designed to make it easy to generate leads.

2. Were they sure that site lead gen was flat?

Maybe they were getting more calls from the website, but because they were not using unique tracking phone numbers on the site, and they were not asking each caller how they got the number, they had no way of knowing if the site was generating more phone leads.  Too often companies are wed to their phone number and think that offering a different number will confuse people.  Ask yourself how many phone numbers of the businesses you frequent would you even recognize let alone memorize.

3. Is it possible the market had shrunk?

If fewer people are buying products in their niche, as is the case with a lot of industries these days, perhaps flat growth means they actually grew their business as the market shrunk.  If not for SEO, their leads may have been down by 50% instead of flat.

One thing is for sure, this economy ain’t old time hockey and Eddie Shore is long gone.  Flat may indeed be the new hockey stick.

BTW if you can believe it, according to Google Adwords someone has trademarked the term “hockey stick growth”

I just saw a press release that said something like “There’s more to life than Google - Try Zuula Search”.  So I had to check it out because the good lord knows that we need another search engine.  And while I can’t say that I’ll be using Zuula for everyday searching I do think it could be very useful for SEO.

Zuula provides searchers with results from eight search engines, including Google, Yahoo & Live (MSN).  The results are presented in a tabbed format so it’s pretty easy to click from one engine to another and compare results for a given search query.

Here’s an example for “local seo”.

For those of you obsessed with rankings across different engines you might want to add Zuula to your bookmarks.

In celebration of the election of Mr. Obama to the Presidency, I thought it would be fun to put together a list of articles that discuss the Obama campaign’s SEO:

(Note to the Obama web team - change the title tags on the homepage to say “President Elect Obama”!)

Barack Obama Presidential Campaign Website Success Secrets
by Michael Dorausch, DC

Obama SEO Wins & Losses
by Kate Kaye

7 SEO 2.0 Methods Obama Used To Score On The Web
by Tad Chef

SEO Showdown: Obama v. McCain
by Todd Zeigler

Google Predicts Obama For President
by nelson

10 Reasons Why SEO Can’t Help Obama
by Brian Carter

Obama Campaign: We Use SEO To Minimize Our PPC Spends
by TheFounder

Why Obama Kills It Online, McCain Not So Much
by The World’s Biggest Chicago White Sox Fan

All politics is local, right?

To those readers who are either undecided or who are planning to vote for McCain because they feel Obama lacks experience, I ask you to remember a once upon a time start up called Google.

What did Google know about advertising and the media business when it started?  All they knew how to do was to build a great service that got its customers so excited that they were happy to tell everyone else about it.

The “Obama lacks experience” thing is not entirely true - he has run an amazing campaign. He has proven to be a master not only of political strategy, but of social media marketing, search advertising, video game marketing and reputation management.  For a role that often seems like it is “marketer in chief”, Obama certainly appears qualified.

But a great marketing campaign does not necessarily make for a great product.  So how do we know if Obama will do a good job if elected? Of course we can’t know.  All we have to go on is what we know of Obama’s plan, his execution to date and our sense of what the country needs.  Sounds like betting on a start-up, right?

So which candidate do you think Mike Moritz at Sequoia Capital would invest in?

If you can buy that Google changed the world, you can buy that Obama can be your president.

Some Light Reading:

A President Not A Messiah

Top Ten Reasons Conservatives Should Vote For Obama

Obama Kept Law Review Balanced (This One Is Interesting For Those Looking For Insight On How He Will Govern)