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After my earth shattering post on using phone numbers for SEO, where I discovered that Merchant Circle had been using small business phone numbers in URLs, Kevin Leu of Merchant Circle pinged me to offer a bit more insight into their SEO strategy.Here’s what I found:
17.5 million page views on June (that’s some nice local search traffic)
June search engine referrals were driven by 844,000 keywords (nice keyword volume)
Phone number searches generate 15,000 to 25,000 page views per month.I am not sure if this equates to 15-25K organic referrals per month, but this shows that phone number searches are driving traffic.According to Merchant Circle offline promotions are driving the bulk of phone number searches. Apparently MC has been using phone numbers in their URLs for several years.It happened by accident – they were using them as unique identifiers for the businesses in their database.
There are certain categories that drive most of the phone number searches.Apparenly a massage therapist in Michigan gets a lot (Are you reading this Ellot Spitzer?) and other professions that do most of their business over the phone , like transportation consultants.
So the company is generating some impressive numbers. My initial reaction is:
Merchant Circle = Facebook + LinkedIn + Local
Besides the SEO strategy what really intrigues me about Merchant Circle is that they are slowly but surely on their way to becoming a LinkedIn for local.One of the key features of the site is to allow merchants to invite other merchants (and customers) into their network.They claim the average merchant on their system has three connections.That implies to me that they have been relatively successful in getting businesses to use their networking tools.
They relaunched their site back in December 2007 and they claim they have seen a 10x increase in merchants buying services.According to their reports, 80% of these merchants have no web presence and 85% of them have never purchased online advertising before. Even more interesting to me is that 25% of the merchants in their system are DIYers – people who are using their tools for free.I would suspect that a portion of the DIYers are very active social networkers and could be responsible for bringing in a number of paying customers for Merchant Circle.
While Merchant Circle could be a great marketing tool for small businesses, my point of view is that their system is a fantastic one for SEOs.It would seem to me to be fairly straightforward to set up your client sites with a free Merchant Circle account, network (in a non-spammy way please) with existing members and boost your MC site in the SERPs, which in turn can promote your own site.
More on Merchant Circle’s SEO strategy coming soon…
Matt’s post is from Sept. 2006 David so I am not sure it’s relevant to a discussion about them today. If you have any recent experiences with them I’d love to hear about it.
Andrew, check out the comments section. All but two of them are from May 15, 2008, or later. It seems to me that they are still pursuing these tactics…
I guess it couldn’t hurt If I actually read a page before I responded huh Dave?
My POV on MC is not so much about how evil or not evil they are. The thing about them that interests me is that they may have created a great platform for improving search engine rankings for small businesses. It might be in the best interests of your clients to test it out and see what it can do, even if you get a couple of annoying phone calls out of it.
I agree that MC has done an excellent job with their own SEO–they’re showing up for a lot more searches, and I am seeing their reviews pulled into Google Local with some reasonable frequency.
My take is that I am not ready to reward companies that do business in such a manner with my own content or my clients’ content, unless those clients are already listed and it is a matter of creating an accurate profile, or I am absolutely desperate for an additional citation.
I guess I don’t look at it as rewarding them - more like using them for your own purposes. That said, I totally get not wanting to be a part of something that you don’t agree with.
@Andrew, @David: This is an interesting discussion - I’ve been struggling with this issue too. I’ve used the Merchant Circle free listings to help boost several clients local search results.
But I’ve been hesitating using them lately because it involves giving them my clients phone number in the free profile, and then they start getting calls like described in some of the comments on Mike’s blog and Matt’s blog.
@Don (man Twitter is leaking into everything) chances are your client is getting a lot of DM calls anyhow - as long as you notify them re what to expect seems like a low risk proposition.
@Don Cambell Something you may want to consider is call tracked numbers for your clients. You can use them on sites like MC so if they create urls from them you can control the flow of calls (and gather marketing info). Andrew knows some good services.
“It happened by accident – they were using them as unique identifiers for the businesses in their database.”
I hope you didn’t actually believe that. As a programmer, that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. Either they had a naive programmer that didn’t think phone numbers ever change or (more likely) they used it for the purpose of SEO (which is a very smart move)
You know Mr. LSI, I asked them about that and they claimed it was not intentional. I didn’t really care if it was or it wasn’t. I just thought it was a good strategy.
Re the numbers changing, this actually works in their favor as long as you redirect to the new url with the new number.
[...] = “http://www.localseoguide.com/merchant-circle-com-marketing-update/”; My previous post on Merchant Circle’s SEO generated a bit of heat as some commenters had been the recipient of some of their aggressive [...]
13 responses so far ↓
1 David Mihm // Jul 22, 2008 at 9:34 am
Andrew, not sure if you have seen some of these posts / comments, but MerchantCircle seems to be a bit of sleazy company:
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/strange-goings-on-with-merchant-circle/236/
Not sure we’d see either LinkedIn or Facebook stooping to that level…
Nice graphic though
2 Andrew Shotland // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:11 am
Matt’s post is from Sept. 2006 David so I am not sure it’s relevant to a discussion about them today. If you have any recent experiences with them I’d love to hear about it.
3 David Mihm // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:15 am
Andrew, check out the comments section. All but two of them are from May 15, 2008, or later. It seems to me that they are still pursuing these tactics…
4 Andrew Shotland // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:33 am
I guess it couldn’t hurt If I actually read a page before I responded huh Dave?
My POV on MC is not so much about how evil or not evil they are. The thing about them that interests me is that they may have created a great platform for improving search engine rankings for small businesses. It might be in the best interests of your clients to test it out and see what it can do, even if you get a couple of annoying phone calls out of it.
5 David Mihm // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:44 am
I agree that MC has done an excellent job with their own SEO–they’re showing up for a lot more searches, and I am seeing their reviews pulled into Google Local with some reasonable frequency.
Mike Blumenthal has a similar POV to yours despite their tactics: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2007/12/06/merchantcirclefud-marketing-and-these-guys-get-10-mil/
My take is that I am not ready to reward companies that do business in such a manner with my own content or my clients’ content, unless those clients are already listed and it is a matter of creating an accurate profile, or I am absolutely desperate for an additional citation.
6 Andrew Shotland // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:47 am
I guess I don’t look at it as rewarding them - more like using them for your own purposes. That said, I totally get not wanting to be a part of something that you don’t agree with.
7 Don Campbell // Jul 22, 2008 at 11:02 am
@Andrew, @David: This is an interesting discussion - I’ve been struggling with this issue too. I’ve used the Merchant Circle free listings to help boost several clients local search results.
But I’ve been hesitating using them lately because it involves giving them my clients phone number in the free profile, and then they start getting calls like described in some of the comments on Mike’s blog and Matt’s blog.
8 Andrew Shotland // Jul 22, 2008 at 11:25 am
@Don (man Twitter is leaking into everything) chances are your client is getting a lot of DM calls anyhow - as long as you notify them re what to expect seems like a low risk proposition.
9 Michael D // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Same experience here. Clients reporting sleazy automated message calls from Merchant Circle regarding reviews (that did not exist).
I’m all for local SEO opportunities but some of the sites tactics turn me off.
10 Michael D // Jul 22, 2008 at 10:37 pm
@Don Cambell Something you may want to consider is call tracked numbers for your clients. You can use them on sites like MC so if they create urls from them you can control the flow of calls (and gather marketing info). Andrew knows some good services.
11 Mr. LSI KeyWord // Jul 23, 2008 at 7:55 am
“It happened by accident – they were using them as unique identifiers for the businesses in their database.”
I hope you didn’t actually believe that. As a programmer, that’s the lamest thing I’ve ever heard. Either they had a naive programmer that didn’t think phone numbers ever change or (more likely) they used it for the purpose of SEO (which is a very smart move)
12 Andrew Shotland // Jul 23, 2008 at 8:22 am
You know Mr. LSI, I asked them about that and they claimed it was not intentional. I didn’t really care if it was or it wasn’t. I just thought it was a good strategy.
Re the numbers changing, this actually works in their favor as long as you redirect to the new url with the new number.
13 Merchant Circle Com Marketing Update // Jul 23, 2008 at 4:56 pm
[...] = “http://www.localseoguide.com/merchant-circle-com-marketing-update/”; My previous post on Merchant Circle’s SEO generated a bit of heat as some commenters had been the recipient of some of their aggressive [...]
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