LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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I have received a bunch of requests for the presentation I gave at Friday’s morning session at the Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local Conference so I thought I would post it here.

Thanks again to Peter, Mike, Matt, Neal, John, Pam, Bobbi and the rest of the Kelsey gang for putting on a great conference and for including me in their party. Check out their blog for more on the conference.

Just wanted to finish off the week by thanking the Kelsey Group for putting on another great local search show.  I took away four big points:

1. SMB video is hot and while it’s still in its infancy a lot of people think it’s going to be a big winner

2. Search marketing is still a huge pain in the ass for SMBs but demand is still growing like crazy.

3. A number of big media companies are starting to get local on the brain

4. I am schmoozed out.

Have a great weekend.

I just gave a talk on top SEO tricks and now Erik Jorgensen of Microsoft Local is going to blow our minds with some great mapping tricks.  Here’s the stream of consciousness:

One size does not fit all when it comes to local. 3 modes of website use:

1. Find - looking for quick answers

2. Research - specific search intent but exploring to find answers. Long time investment and emotional investment.

3. Explore - Having fun. Seeing where information takes you.

Search engines provide entry for 70% of local queries v. portals but it’s hard to distinguish the mode of the user based on how they ente.

The user task happens across devices and beyond sessions. If you’re at Best Buy you want access via your mobile device to the comparison shopping data you were looking at on your PC at home.

MSN uses NetPromoter to measure how likely your users are to recommend your site. Focus on how to turn your users into evangelists.

Evolution of Local Search

Early focus on speed evolved to focus on speed and accomplishment: They have made a huge investment in helping users figure out traffic patterns and offering tips on routes to take.

Breadth evolves to breadth and depth:
Depth of data without requiring work. If you are looking for a business they add one click directions, related businesses, etc. Adding these features has resulted in 40% increase in click-through off these pages.

10x growth in “Collections” (UGC). Over 18 million comments on the listings - greater than the their total business listings.

Utility

3D Maps. Erik is now showing us a very cool 3d view of the Space Needle. They now have 270 cities in full 3-D. Time to add some memory and horsepower to your computer. Now looking at Dallas with meta data/UGC. You can look at the building from where JFK was shot and click on meta data that tells about the history. You can capture your experience and turn it into a video which you can then show on YouTube. Pretty cool. So Gib Olander could put together a tour of Seattle dive bars and instantly broadcast.

Coming down the pike: “street-side quality” 3D models of street views. We are looking at an external view of a movie theater. It looks sort of what Main Street would look like if Pixar did it. They can dynamically add movie times, ticket purchase, ads, etc.

Mobile: Real time location based search is the killer app. If I am a restaurant I can broadcast a promotion that hits people walking by my place. It needs to be automated so that it does not require a lot of work by a business.

Ok, this is cool. They are working on adding “smart gesture recognition” to the phone. Think of your phone as a Wii controller so if you have it in camera mode you can use a gesture to zoom or pan, etc.

Microsoft wants Virtual Earth to be the platform that other companies build there businesses on.  Showing examples of RedFin, FedEx, City of Miami, Washington State Tourism, Yellowpages.com, the Harley Davidson Ride Planner.

Performance is still an issue but Microsoft is betting that performance will improve exponentially over the next couple of years. I am wondering once the fun of trying these types of tools out how practical they will be in helping users accomplish their tasks.  Who knows?

It’s great that there are companies out there that can afford to make these huge bets to develop these amazing technologies.  Very cool stuff.

Just walked in on the tail end of Paul Levine’s presentation at the Kelsey Conference on Adbrite and its local targeting capabilities.  Apparently Adbrite has a lot more local inventory than the last time I checked, which was about a year or so ago.  And they have a lot more media options and there are some bargain CPMs so you may want to check it out.

Spotmixer, a new SMB make-your-own online video service, launched today and I sat down with the team to find out more about their service.

Like Mixpo,  Spotmixer provides simple templates (based on industry and emotion - I saw the “hip” template) and editing tools that allow a business to upload photos to create a slick video.  The user can add voice-overs and pre-recorded music along with text that displays their marketing messages.  You can basically make an ad in 60 seconds.  Pretty cool.

Spotmixer evolved out of OneTrueMedia, a huge video/photo/slideshow service. They claimed they got the idea from seeing businesses creating videos on their service.  So they get points for being creative with evolving their technology to where the money is.

At this point their strategy is to partner with companies with local sales channels like IYPs. I can see a real appeal for this kind of technology as a nifty item in your average yellow pages sales rep’s toolkit.  And Spotmixer can upload your videos to Youtube, etc and to your Adwords account, so you can run a Google video ad.  The video is also TV ready so now instead of a crappy local cable ad you can run your Spotmixer ad.  It may be just as crappy (unless you use their “hip” template) but it might be a lot cheaper to create.

Their pricing seems pretty good.  All you can eat (ads & downloads) $79 for 1 month, $69/mth for 3, $59/mth for 6.

My sense is six months from now there are going to be a large number of companies in this space so as usual Spotmixer’s success is going to be based on differentiation and execution.

If you’re a SMB and you are looking to do something “cool” for your website you may want to check these guys out.

Sorry guys.  Putting out some fires.  Should be back this afternoon.

Coming into this one late unfortunately.  Mixpo is provides an easy way to create web videos for marketing.

Mixpo provides a dashboard to help measure the effectiveness of the video.  You can click on a video from a campaign to get impressions, views and conversions for specific time periods.  You can see a map that shows where the views are coming from.   They show you where in the video the interactions are happening, e.g. when did someone click on the coupon.   If someone watches 90% of a video and then clicks on the coupon or fills out a lead form that’s a sign that you are getting a highly qualified lead.  Agreed.

You can make changes to the ads based on the data using a drag and drop UI.  For example you can change how long the coupon is displayed, color of the coupon, voice narration, music, etc.

You can auto submit the video to the search engines to help with video SEO.

Anupam talks about using his system to optimize the video campaign.

Overall a very impressive service.  Nice work Anupam.  I’ll try to catch up with him later.

Like most other SMBs, spas could give a flying $@!%$* (did I spell that right?) about technology, SEO, search engine advertising, anything with the word “click”, SERPs, etc.  “Sticky” is never a good term in the spa industry.

1/3 of avg. spa revenue from gift certificates.  SpaBoom’s pay for performance private labeled online gift certificate model enabled them to pick up 10% of the market in 2 years.  About 2300 active clients.

New clients add 20-30% to total sales

40% avg increase in online sales y-o-y

combined network has sold $23MM using SpaBoom

Many average over $1,000 per month

Just did a partnership with SpaFinder.

Going into restaurants next with Entreeboom.  Partnering with Zagat.  That’s pretty cool.

I like this business.

Just saw this on Techcrunch while spacing out to a local search presentation.