Ideas for Business

Small Business online marketing is vital to a successful profit margin.  The right website can push a small business over the threshold of “making enough to pay the bills” and into the often fantasized realm of “actually making a profit.” Because of this, most small business owners either throw up a website as quickly as they can to capitalize on potential profits now, or they blow their entire budget on flashy enhancements to make their site pop, only to find their online sales fizzle.

Building a website for a small business can be a simple, organic process if you take the time to think about some very key answers to some very key questions.

The first question is straightforward and classic, and yet without asking it, you risk failing from the start.

What is the purpose of your website?

The answer to this question will determine the direction that your small business will take on your website.

Will your website be used to:

• Provide Information about your business
• Sell products or services
• Generate a Business Brand and Reputation
• Generate Leads

A small business that offers local services will most likely not be using their website to sell products, but to provide information on the business and it’s services and to generate leads and quotes for customers interested in those services. In this case, the website must be used heavily towards those ends.

A small business that offers products for sale must rely more heavily on products, pictures and descriptions as well as a smooth process for sales, exchange of funds and purchase tracking purposes.

Building a website for the online presence of a small business needs to be tailored to the business purpose for successful online marketing.

It’s been fairly interesting to watch, and I’ve been doing some more digging around to better understand both cause and effect of Google Local Business Center listings appearing in the one box area on Irish SERPs.

A Brief Recap

In November 2007 I first noticed that Google had added Ireland to it’s Local Business Center. At the time I thought this was big news as it seemed to indicate the imminent release of Google Local listings in Irish SERPs. As per Google’s online docs:

You can check if it’s available for your country by looking through the drop-down menu in the Local Business Center.

Forward to today

Well imminent is certainly wasn’t, but last week we started seeing the first Google Local business listings for Irish searches.

It’s certainly early days, and Google will need to iron out plenty of teething issues, but I decided to take a look into some of the features of local listings, and some of the potential signals Google uses to rank the local businesses listed. I had some very good help from Michael Wall based on his experience with Google Local in Northern Ireland. Michael runs a web design company up North. I’ll come back to Michael’s observations a little later, but for now look focus on a little more background to how Local listings work.

3 Flavours of One Box

First thing I noticed was that there is some variety of One Box Local displays - 3 that I’ve seen - and the type your business is displayed in can make quite a difference. (The “One Box” is a general purpose area directly above the organic listings in Google’s SERPs.)

The “10 Pack”

The 10 Pack is a Google Map with 10 adjacent business listings. This type of one box takes up the most space, and ads quite a number of additional links for searchers to hit prior to getting to the organic SERP results. Here’s an example of some 10-pack results:

[hotel dublin] with 10 Pack local listing

The interesting thing about that particular SERP is that it is giving power back to the individual hotels over the aggregators that generally rule the organics. I wonder will the hotels cop onto this and push their local listings now? I’d say there’s quite a lot of fee revenue that the hotels can reclaim from affiliates/aggregators if they can crack Local Search. Here’s another example of local listings pushing power back to individual sites from another form of aggregator - the review site:

[restaurants dublin] with 10 Pack Local listing.

Now in this case MenuPages.ie has been pushed down by a local listing containing 10 Dublin restaurants. Here’s another interesting feature of Local listings - the inclusion of structured data, in this case reviews. It’s difficult to see in the small image, but beside each restaurant local listing there’s a link to reviews. The reviews are coming from a number of very large and trusted seed sites, such as TripAdvisor.com, and I don’t believe that Irish review sites data is used by Google. If you run a restaurant maybe you should prompt your clientelle to go create reviews if they are happy with your service?

Finally here’s a more regular example - without aggregator sites - of a local listing that’s going to hurt the previous king of the castle:

[pizza dublin] with 10 Pack local listing

This one is a good example of how previous dominance of the SERPs for your top keyword can really get hurt if you’re not in Local. Apache Pizza were sitting golden with their sitelinks. Those sitelinks are a pretty good indicator that the site is seen as authoritative for the generic search term [pizza dublin]. But now 10 of Apache’s competitors are sitting sweet above them, with both phone numbers and visual indication of location. This particualr local listing is going to hurt Apache, of that I’m sure.

The 3 Pack Local Listing

In some cases Google will only show 3 local results, with extended listings. Seems most likely to occur when they either don’t know of enough local sites or no one site is seen as authoritative. Here’s a topical example for me personally:

[seo dublin] with 3 Pack local listing

In this case each local listing takes up 3 lines - the business name and URL, address and link to more info. I registered for Google Local back when it was launched. I did so to see how the system worked so that I could write my blog post all those months ago, and not particularly for any ranking advantage (I travel a lot, so I added my Dublin home address to my listing back then).

When local listings went live last week I wasn’t in the top 3 local sites. So I ‘tweaked’ my company name and categories to see what would happen (take care the guidelines though - I might be breaking them). Lo-and-behold there I am now, so there’s a small tip to one of the factors used to rank sites for local. Also note the the distance from the median point in Dublin city seems less relevant than my business name and categories. There’s a very interesting post by Bill Slawski over at seobythesea.com discussing location sensitivity - basically some queries may respond with a larger geographical spread of businesses then others.

Authoritative One Box Local Listing - The Holy Grail

Now if I were Apache Pizza (or their SEO) right now this is what I’d be aiming for. This is a local One Box listing where only one business is listed - otherwise referred to as the Authority Listing. I’m still digging into this to find out how difficult it is to achieve, and what factors trigger it’s appearance, but regardless of how you get the Authoritative Local One Box it certainly looks nice, and I imagine works very well:

[sat nav dublin] with Authoritative One Box Local Listing

The One Box, the #1 in organic with site links, plus number #2 in organic for deep page. Augmented with an Adwords ad and you have a SERP dominated in every way by a single website. It’s important to note that many SERPs are going to be far more competitive making this difficult if not impossible to achieve, but there’s no harm in setting your goals high.

Ranking Factors for Google Local Search

If you’re still reading this now then it’s about time I mentioned some of the signals I’ve found that can help to get your site ranked in Local Search…

Inclusion - Creating your Local Business Lisiting

Obviously the first step is to get yourself listed - you need to sign up at www.google.com/localbusinesscenter, and then:

1. Click “Add new listing” and start by adding your basic business details - business name, website URL, address, phone numbers etc. All listings have to be verified, and the fastest way to do so is via SMS, so you might want to include your mobile number at this stage.
2. The next step is to write a business description. I’m not sure if the content of this is used for ranking, but I’d try to make this short, descriptive and searcher friendly. Not unlike an extended META description.
3. You’ll then have to fix the map pin to point at your location before you can get to the next step.
4. Next you’ll be requested to enter the business categories appropriate to you. This seems to be very important, and something that Michael Wall also found made a big difference. When you enter a category Google might make suggestions. The experience I’ve had to date is that your categories should match primary keywords, rather than what Google suggests. So check out your site stats to see what makes you money and use those keywords to create your category list. You can add up to 5 categories, and you don’t need to include geographic qualifiers into these.
5. You can enter opening times, payment options, and an interesting feature - photos and video from YouTube. None of these will impact your ranking (AFAIK), but rich media is never going to hurt when people click through to your business listing.
6. The last data you can add are custom key-value pairs. Can be useful for any data that fits well into a definition list, and as of this writing I have no indication that it affects ranking.
7. The final step is to verify your listing, and I’ve found this can be troublesome. SMS seems like the easiest way, but just today I found bugs in the system that prevented me from doing so. You can also have Google call your listed number and their automated system will read your PIN number to you.

Ranking in Local Search

Here’s the bit most people will be interested in. It seems that ranking signals include many of the primary signals used for organic ranking - links seem to have a large impact (especially in the case of Authoritative Listings). But the actual listing and business location are strong factors also. An interesting survey compiled by David Mihn that I came across lists the following factors as most important (score out of 5 in brackets):

1. Local Business Listing (LBL) address in city being searched (4.13)
2. Proper categorization of LBL (4.00)
3. Product / service keyword in LBL title (3.78)
4. Proximity of business address to city centroid (3.59)
5. Validation of business information with third-party providers (3.57)

I doubt number 5 above is used for Irish listings, or maybe I should say that I hope Google wont use GoldenPages.ie or similar, as I feel that their (GP) business practices are sharp to say the least. Number 4 above may also be query-dependent as per the Bill Slawski reference previously. But certainly 1-3 are very much in your own control, and as such you should consider these items carefully when creating your Local Business Listing.

In a separate blog post titled “10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm” Mike Magee mentions amongst others [my notes in square brackets]:

• Availability/Trust of other business data [note: Google may use third party data, but as of writing I'm not sure they have providers here in Ireland]
• Listings in 2nd-tier Local Directories [note: again in Ireland Google may have nothing to work with]
• Listings in Vertical Directories [note: this one is something I like also for organic ranking boosts]
• References from other Web sites [note: Dmoz local listings unfortuantely come to mind, and both Dmoz and Yahoo were mentioned by Matt Magee]

Matt has some other interesting items in his post also, and it’s worth a read.

Another good post I found was titled “Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics” by Chris Silver Smith of KeyRelevance. One or two of the more interesting tactics he mentions [again my notes in square brackets]:

• Change your business name so that the first characters will be earliest in the alphabet for your locality.
• Move your business so that you can have presence closer to your city’s center.
• Get a separate directory listing for every city in your area for which you provide services. [Note: you'll need PO boxes or separate physical addresses for this one]
• Customize your address by having your street renamed to include beneficial keywords. [Note: I'm constantly amazed by the US :)]
• Lightly influence user ratings to your benefit. [Note: not sure that this might now be illegal in the EU?]

Back Link Impact on Local Search Results

I do think that links will be a strong signal for local results, and it might be useful to research the backlinks of sites listed in local search with a view to replicating their strategy. This has long been one of the more useful tactics for organic SEO, and I feel it will also be useful for local rankings. I’d also imagine that anchor text may be the primary factor in achieving the Authority One Box Local listing mentioned above.

Lastly - A Quick Summary

Wow. If you’re still here then well done. This was a rather mammoth post, but I feel Local Search is the biggest change to happen to Irish SEO in a long time.

To summarise:
You need to get your business listed asap, giving due consideration to the profile you create as it will impact how you rank. Then you need to consider citations (links) to your site - they need to include references to your address and location where possible. Anchor text may also be very useful for ranking and getting that Authority Listing.

The very last thing I’ll mention is that Google have a pretty good Local Business Center User Guide. It’s buried in Google’s help center (which is fast becoming a mess IMO), but very well worth a read/watch.

I’d love to hear any experience people are having with Google Local Search here in Ireland, so don’t be afraid to leave a comment below!

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Local small businesses have some great opportunities for TV advertising in the last 50 years. But the opportunities have been even better in the last 20 years as cable and satellite TV have entered the competitive market. TV advertising has become more affordable for small businesses and continues to offer great opportunities. With Google TV ads, it gets even better.

According to WebProNews, the Google offering is growing. While the search engine nixed radio and newspaper advertising, it seems that TV advertising through Google is growing. That means, if you are a small business owner and you currently market your business through TV, you can manage your TV advertising through Google.

That means you can use one central account to manage all of your local TV campaigns. You can set your budget and track your results. I think this is one great product from Google and local small business owners who want to get the most out of TV advertising can turn to Google to help make that happen.

I’ve been listening to Made to Stick on audiobook and it’s inspiring me in the way I blog. This book is already being called one of the best business books ever written because it shows clearly how to make you ideas memorable, or sticky (as the authors call it).

One of the things the authors state is that simplicity is very important if you want to create memorable ideas. When they simplicity, they mean finding your core message and cutting out the extraneous elements. By doing this, it makes it much easier for people to remember your idea.

This principle is definitely a great idea when working online, because - let’s face it - most people going online are very busy and have tons of distractions. If you communicate more than one core message, your messages will probably get lost in the noise of online information.

Let’s apply this principle to blogging. If you want your posts to be memorable, to be remembered even months later, you need to be able to just say one thing. Have a central theme for each of your posts.

Remember from English college class when the professor gave you the first step for creating a good term paper: come up with a great thesis statement - not two or more. And then as you write your paper, make sure the rest of your paper supports that statement.

Sadly, too often my posts don’t have a clear thesis statement but go into many different tangents and are hard to follow. Also, I find myself covering too many topics in a single post.

The Inverted Pyramid Journalism Technique

One of the tools that’s helped me write more focused posts comes from the world of journalism. I found out about it in Made to Stick. It’s called the inverted pyramid and it helps journalists craft their stories.

It’s called the inverted pyramid because at the top of an inverted pyramid is the widest part, which represents the most important part of the story. This is like a thesis statement and should go at the beginning of the story. You want the most crucial information at the beginning of the post to “hook” your reader and get them to read more of your post. For the rest of the story, savvy journalists will share details supporting the core message. Each succeeding paragraph is less and less important than the opening paragraph that contains the core message.

Sometimes the most crucial information is not the apparent right away so don’t be afraid to take some time to think of the most important info and then craft a relevant title and opening paragraph based on that info.

Also, this technique also works for non-writers. If your preferred medium is something like audio or video, you can get a lot of value from the technique. In your audio podcast or video, start it off with the most important info to grab the attention of your audience. Then craft the rest of your audio or video content with material that supports that info.

Many small business owners and entrepreneurs are using Twitter as a marketing tool. It is a powerful marketing tool, but that is not the only function the application can perform. One British rail company is notifying its passengers of train delays. This is a great example of how you can use Twitter to better your customers service.

Twitter can make a great customer service tool. You can use it to send out specific notifications to customers regarding your service, billing information such as changes to policy, packaging and shipping notices, and any of several other customer service functions.

What makes Twitter so unique in its nature is the simplicity model for mass communication. While Facebook and MySpace both allow users to send out mass communications to fans, that’s not their primary purpose or function. It IS Twitter’s primary purpose, which means that your followers follow your stream precisely because they want to receive your mass communications. And that’s what makes Twitter a useful customer service tool.

In your print materials - on your invoices, bills of laden, stationery, e-mails, and other marketing collateral - you can include your Twitter account and encourage current customers to follow you. Then you can simply tweet your changes and updates or write a blog post and link to it from Twitter. You can even take customer questions on Twitter.

Where Twitter will be in 5 or 10 years is anybody’s guess, but where it is today is a new mass communication tool with flexibility and simplicity. With Twitter, customer service is a lot better for a lot of companies.