For the past year Google has been pushing through “Panda” updates to their ranking algorithm in order to clean up their search results and “provide a better user experience”.
The first “Panda” went after low value or “thin” content such as sites like eHow.com and livestrong.com that were continually clogging up search results with low value pages designed to simply sell advertising to those who clicked through in the hopes of getting valuable insights.
Here’s a good infographic that is fairly up to date:
Thanks for the Graphic SearchEngineLand
The most recent, but likely not the last Panda update was pushed thru on April 19th, 2012 and waddling in, hot on its heels was their newest update the Penguin
Enter the Penguin
While the rumors are still flying, it appears that the main focus of the Penguin update appears to have been to penalize sites who have been ”over optimizing” in Google’s eyes as well as sites that contain, within the site itself, duplicate content.
If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.
Detailed Analysis of Penguin’s Over Optimization Penalty
Over the coming months, three things will undoubtedly be true.
We will all learn more insights into what makes Penguin tick
Google will roll-out additional versions of Penguin
FetchLocalCustomers will be on the case and making sure our clients not only survive, but thrive in the new reality!
Things are really heating up! Now, more than ever you need to have a professional on-board to make sure that your online empire doesn’t run aground! Isn’t it time you had a professional navigator on board? Call or email to learn what we can do to bring you those new customers you want and deserve! 888-505-6162
For years we here at FetchLocalCustomers have been preaching from the Mobile Mountain Top that mobile users are more apt to take immediate action if you make it convenient for them. Whether it’s someone maximizing a few free minutes on the train to request a free house painting quote or a business traveler booking a hotel room today’s smartphone users are becoming an economic force to be reckoned with. You simply cannot ignore this growing consumer segment if you want to remain at the top of your competitive niche.
Enter the Marriot Data
At the Mobile Shopping Spring Summit in San Diego a Marriot International executive revealed some startling statistics regarding smartphones and room reservations.
Percentage of Room Bookings Made Within 24 Hours of Arrival
Smartphones 50%
Tablets 19%
PC 7%
Hello! That’s a 7 fold Mobile to PC advantage!
Lessons Learned
Sure, last minute hotel bookings may be the perfect application for smartphone commerce and in your business, as they say, “results may vary” but there is no denying that mobile use for research and interaction with local service providers is rapidly increasing WHERE THAT MOBILE INTERACTION IS EASY TO DO!
That means having a website that can be found thru mobile search, can be easily viewed and navigated on a smartphone and has simple but effective features such as click to call phone numbers.
So what is your next step? How can you put the power of mobile to work for you? Give us a ring and we’ll help guide you on your path to creating your own mobile monopoly. FetchLocalCustomers 888-505-6162
It’s always nice to have your thoughts and predictions supported by some big-time thinkers so when I opened my email this morning and found the latest trendwatching.com briefing it put a big smile on my face.
Their brief titled Point-Know-Buy gives examples of exactly what we described in our late 2010 video “5 Mega-Trends in Consumer Behavior“. Smartphones are allowing consumers (your prospects) to access and act upon decision supporting information instantly.
As trendwatching.com explains it:
Smartphone-toting consumers are embracing a world in which they can find out about (if not buy) almost anything they encounter out in the real world, anytime. Learn from the brands already capitalizing on this trend, then get going!
Now, that consumers crave information is nothing new. Information and knowledge give consumers power, control and certainty (or at least the illusion thereof). Therefore they will forever be in demand by consumers searching for the best of the best. Equally important, the discovery aspect of information adds a fun factor too.
As you read their brief and look at all of the cool tools they highlight ask yourself “How can I make my site more engaging?” Video? QR Codes?
Remember, getting traffic to your site is just the first step. The second step is to provide your prospect with the decision supporting information they need to feel comfortable taking the next step with you and ultimately moving along the buying continuum from “research to purchase”.
Of course, that’s exactly what we help our clients to do everyday, so if you need help getting your online marketing machine to go from seized up to running like a Swiss watch, just pick up the phone and call us at 888-505-6162.
To the uneducated and uninformed, there appear to be two valid approaches to gaining a high degree of online commercial
When it Comes to Generating $$ Local SEO is More Effective
effectiveness.
The first is Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising which is primarily available to local businesses through the Adwords self-serve model or through one of the many resellers of Adwords out there (most notably Dex).
The second is by coupling high quality website content with organic search engine optimization – the preferred approach utilized by FetchLocalCustomers.
Let me pause here and stress two important statements mentioned above:
“To the uneducated and uninformed”
“the preferred approach”
Let me explain #1 above because this explanation will make #2 above crystal clear without spending pages and pages of explanation and comparison between the merits of SEO and PPC.
It’s all About Click-Through Rates
- Pay-Per-Click CTR
It is pretty well documented that the average click-through-rates (CTR) for Adwords advertisers is 2%. Now, by definition, the average suggests that some advertisers will do better than 2% and some will do worse. The reality for most local businesses is that CTRs are lower than 2%, but this reality is lost in the reports of what is average because of the spending distribution of Adwords advertising. As the folks at Kantar Media just reported, the top 20 Adwords advertisers accounted for an estimated $1.4 billion of Google’s $18 Billion search advertising in the same period (a whopping 7.3%). So in other words, the CTRs of these professionally managed accounts are skewing the average UP to 2%.
So, for arguments sake, let’s just say that you’re every bit as good as this skewed average and your campaign pulls a respectable 2%.
- Organic CTRs
It is also pretty well documented (I’ve seen no less than 3 separate studies) that organic click-through-rates follow a distribution that looks like this
#1 Position = 42.1% CTR
#2 Position = 11.9% CTR
#3 Position = 8.5% CTR
Or, in other words, if you hold the #1 Position in Google for your most important buying phrases you will welcome 21X more interested prospects to your site than if you run a well managed PPC campaign!
Now do you see why I described our approach as “the preferred approach”?
Well, hopefully this has helped you move beyond being “uneducated and uninformed”. Also, hopefully, it will help you resist the siren’s song of some of the PPC peddlers that are constantly hounding you and the rest of Main Street. The facts are clear. You simply cannot get anywhere near the same amount of new customers from PPC as you can from a properly constructed local online marketing system that uses Local SEO as its traffic generation machine.
Want new customers? Call us at 888.505.6162 and let one of our friendly and knowledgeable business advocates help you determine if the FetchLocalCustomers approach is right for you.
So as the major media heralds the record breaking Black Friday and Cyber Mondays of 2011 I thought I’d share some of the news coming out regarding the major role that mobile devices played in this year’s record breaking shopping spree.
Mobile Rocked Black Friday 2011
Sears Sees Double Digit Growth
The once stodgy old Sears has been pushing the mobile envelope for the past couple of years and this years Black Friday and Cyber Monday performance continued the trend. MobileCommerceDaily’s entire interview with Sears Chief Marketing Officer, Michael Murray is worth the 5 minutes to read so I’ll just excerpt this piece which makes TOTAL sense…
Did any mobile services or activities stand out in terms of consumer engagement during the holiday weekend?
We continue to see really strong performance in our buy online and pick up in-store solutions.
We are seeing a strong performance for this service in mobile. If you can, on your mobile device, be able to identify a product, select that product and go from wherever you are to buy it in-store – we are seeing that connection become stronger for us.
This is creating customer ease, specifically around Black Friday. What’s easier than being able to buy on Thursday and make that shopping experience faster and easier on Black Friday.
News from PayPal and Ebay
According to PayPal this 2011′s Cyber Monday showed a 552% increase in mobile purchases vs. 2010
Ebay indicated that their top mobile categories (excluding automobiles) were:
clothing, shoes and accessories
computers and networking
jewelry and watches
collectibles and sporting goods.
Interesting Facts and Consumer Views
According to the consumer behavior analysis firm Tealeaf “The big takeaway is that 41 percent of the consumers who tweeted about mobile shopping were frustrated,” said Geoff Galat, vice president of worldwide marketing.
But not all mobile experiences are bad and perennial mobile good-guys Sears, Amazon and Dell had the highest-ranking mobile sites in terms of performance on Cyber Monday, according to Compuware, Detroit.
Typical complaints included:
the inability to complete transactions
poor search functionality
inconsistencies between the online and mobile channels
And yet, their analysis of social media feeds such as Twitter showed that a large number of physical, in-stores shoppers were shopping on their mobile devices while standing in line!!
What’s your plan for mobile?
No matter what your business you need to make sure that you are delivering a positive mobile experience through your website and Apps so that you keep the customers engaged that you fought so hard to get in the first place. In an age when your competitor is just one “back arrow” away, getting this right is extremely important!
Read more about the basics of local mobile marketing and don’t forget to download our free report!
QR codes continue to be one of the best ways of bridging the printed and digital. Here at FetchLocalCustomers we have been getting more and more requests to create custom QR codes for clients for use in printed collateral.
Make Your Business Card Useful
Business cards continue to be the most popular way to transfer contact information. But, let’s face it, in the world of digital they do nothing but create needless data entry tasks. A QR code customized to deliver your contact information in one “snap” of a smartphone scanner and whooosh, your contact information is instantly added to your new networking buddy’s contact system.
Try it Yourself
More Uses Too Of Course
Recently Starbucks has been back on the bandwagon using QR codes to promote their new fall coffee line and their mobile app which has been allowing mobile phone payments for quite awhile now. Pizza king Papa John has been using QR codes on pizza boxes to tell the Papa John story and deepen the brand to customer relationship.
How Will You Use QR Codes?
The reasons and techniques for using QR codes to bridge the digital divide are only limited by your imagination. If you find yourself in need of a QR code strategy or just a custom QR code itself, use the contact information in the QR code above to reach out to us and get the FetchLocalCustomers team working for you!
So few business people, web designers and people in general understand how search engines such as Google work, I find myself constantly in the role of educator. Thankfully, I love to educate, teach and explain things. The problem I find is that when I try to explain the details of how a search engine such as Google decides who gets displayed at the top, I find that I lose people.
Lately, I’ve changed my approach to clearing up the search mystery. I’ve taken to telling the following story and I am pleased to report that everyone get’s it! I hope this helps clear things up for you!
Starbucks, Doctors and How Google Works
Imagine it’s 3:30 in the afternoon and you find yourself needing that little extra jolt to get you through your afternoon and the upcoming evening’s networking event.
You pull into your local Starbucks and seeing that there is a huge line at the drive-through you get out of your car and walk inside. Unfortunately, you realize that the line inside is also moving pretty slowly so you whip out your smart phone, check your mail, look at Facebook and STILL the line is not moving.
Enter Doctor #1
"I'm a Geriatric Doctor"
At this point you begin taking notice of your fellow patrons and think “well my sales coach is always preaching to me about the 3 foot rule” so you catch the eye of the gentleman in front of you in line and you say “So, when you aren’t standing in line growing old, what do you do for a living?”
He replies “I’m a Doctor.” For the next minute or two he tells you he’s a general practitioner who specializes in geriatrics (old folks), where his office is located and other tidbits. He seems credible, seems to know what he is talking about but quite frankly you have NO way of knowing if he really is a Doctor or not!
Search Lesson 1 – The Doctor’s story is analagous to a website. As a website owner you can tell any story you want on your website but Google, Yahoo and BING have no way to know from your site alone whether or not your story is true.
Enter Doctor #2
"Hey Dr. Jones..."
Thankfully the line is moving again! You are just 3 people away from getting that shot of afternoon motivation you originally came for! You continue to exchange pleasantries with the your new Doctor friend when all of the sudden a second person who actually looks like a Doctor comes in the door and greets your Doctor friend. They talk shop about a recent referral your Doctor friend made to Doctor #2.
Search Lesson #2 This second Doctor is analagous to a “relevant back link”. If you had any doubts as to whether or not your new friend really is a Doctor, having this independent verification has helped remove it. In the eyes of the search engines, having a totally separate, relevant site reference your website helps them to believe that your website is telling the truth.
Enter A Group of Senior Citizens
Hi Dr. Jones!
At this point your Doctor friend has paid and you’ve placed your order! As he turns to leave he hands you a business card and you say goodbye. You then notice that a shuttle bus from a local retirement complex has arrived and a half dozen older men and women shuffle in. Each of them says “Hi Doctor Jones” as the Doctor walks out the door. You have no idea who these people are, but now with 7 separate, independent verifications you have no doubts that the person you spoke to is really a Doctor.
Search Lesson #3 These 6 senior citizen are analagous to “back links” from non-relevant sites. Google, Yahoo and BING looks for these types of verifying links to help them understand whether or not your site is being truthful and to help them identify how popular your site is and how much of an authority it is.
1 Week Later
You find yourself talking to a friend who mentions that her Mom is looking for a new Doctor. It seems her old Doctor has retired and moved to Florida. She mentions that she is looking for a geriatric specialist. You tell her that you just met a really nice geriatric specialist named Dr. Jones and you pass along his contact information.
On-Site and Off-Site Authority
Hopefully my explanation above clears up just how the search engines work. You need to make sure that your website is designed to sell, has good content and has been fully optimized. If you get these “on-site factors” right you will tell the best story possible to the search engines. Most experts agree that getting this right will account for 10 -30% of your site’s ability to rank highly.
The remaining 70 -90% of your site’s ability to rank comes from consistently building your site’s “off-site” authority. The more consistently you gain “votes of confidence” the more likely you are to be the #1 ranking site for your most important buying phrases.
At FetchLocalCustomers we conduct research, craft content, build websites that are designed to sell and are fully optimized to tell your story in as a compelling fashion as possible to both your human visitors and the search engines. We can also work our magic with your existing site. In fact, nearly half our clients use sites that we did not design!
Our systematic and professional authority building program drives your website to the top of the search engines, consistently building authority and popularity using totally “white hat” methods.
The result is a flood of highly targeted and qualified new customers. That’s why we say that “We Do What Our Name Says”.
So pick up the phone and call 888-505-6162. Let’s talk about your particular situation and see if we can help you get the new customers that you deserve!
SEO Phone ScamProbably just like you I often find myself on the receiving end of emails, voice broadcasts and cold-calls from scammers who claim something like “Hi, we’re with Google and we can get you on the first page…..”
It’s gotten so bad that when a real Google rep called us last month to discuss one of their new Adwords programs the first thing the poor guy had to say was “Really, I’m not kidding, I really am with Google!”
So… I couldn’t resist sharing this recording that we got at the FetchLocalCustomers office last night. Please take a listen and then I’ll point out why this is a scam and how you can protect yourself from these types of charlatans.
What’s Wrong With This Scam
1. Google, Yahoo and BING do not use or need “data providers”. They fill their search results with all the pages that their spiders deem worthy 24x7x365. I suppose by the most loose definition, I suppose you, me and anyone else who ever posts a web page is a “data provider”
2. The suggestion that the caller is somehow associated with Google, Yahoo or BING is an outright misrepresentation. It’s interesting that “Phil” didn’t name a Company (I didn’t bother to call Phil back). But… in the past when I have called back or “pressed 1″ and learned the company name a quick Google search yielded hundreds of scam complaints.
The fact of the matter is that you can’t “buy” one of the top organic spots in the major search engines. You can work hard to optimize your site or hire experts like us who work hard for you and that can lead to top positioning but you can’t swipe a credit card and outright purchase a spot.
Think about it. If that were true the search engines would instantly be discredited, people would stop using them and all of their paid advertisers (think AdWords) would stop paying them billions of dollars! That is NOT going to happen!
So beware of the scammers who call you claiming to be part of the Big 3 and promising to sell you a top spot.
And, if you are interested in really getting new customers from a world-class online presence, by all means give us a call at 888-505-6162. The call is free, our advice is invaluable and we might just determine together that our service has a good fit for your business.
As we’ve been shouting from the mountain top for quite some time now, the mobile Internet is growing at a rate far faster than its older brother, the wired web.
And, since mobile devices, especially smartphones, are especially well suited to accessing local content it only makes sense that more and more of your customers and potential customers will be looking for your local products and services via the mobile web.
As detailed previously, all this is being driven by the surge in smartphone usage and the coming ubiquity of 3G and 4G network access.
The Numbers
According to a July 2011 study from the Local Search Association in the period January 2010 – January 2011:
The number of respondents accessing local content via Apps rose from 42% to 56%
The number of respondents accessing local content via Browser fell from 75% to 72%
The number of respondents accessing local content via SMS fell from 30 % to 25%
Overall, local content users accounted for 33% of mobile subscribers, with 87 percent owning a GPS-capable handset (up 9 percent from the previous year).
What This Means For You
While the good old browser remains the big dog in the local content department, Apps are becoming more widely accepted. Therefore, your local web dominance strategy might very well benefit from the creation of an App.
At FetchLocalCustomers we can help you develop an App for your business that will have your product and service up-front and center with your customers and prospects.
Give us a call at 888.505.6162 or shoot us an email to get the ball rolling.
Recently, luxury car builder Audi launched an innovative advertising campaign to support the introduction of their new A7 model. The campaign is a great example of melding off-line advertising with mobile and social marketing.
Here is a quick look at how it works…
Offline Component
The offline marketing anchor is a series of mega-size interactive billboards prominently displayed in Times Square. The billboards feature a prominent QR code that takes the smartphone user to the mobile piece of the campaign.
Mobile Component
The QR code takes you directly to the mobile site www.a7bolddesign.com where you can visit locations throughout NYC (for example the Brooklyn Bridge) that have been deemed “bold” by the campaign architects and other Audi enthusiasts. This last piece, enthusiast participation, takes us to the social marketing component.
Social Component
To further engage the audience the campaign has set up the Twitter hashtag #BoldDesign. People milling about Time Square are encouraged to tweet their thoughts, ideas and musings as well as their recommended “bold” places. Of course the campaign will also be supported on Audi’s YouTube channel (YouTube.com/audiusa) and Facebook page (Facebook.com/audiusa).
The Local Business Marketing Lessons
While you may never be in a position to or have the desire to have an interactive billboard in Times Square, there are a number of things you can learn from this campaign:
Mobile is often most powerful when integrated into off line efforts. Postcards, signage, business cards and good old fashioned sales letters can all be made more powerful by integrating mobile.
Get your audience engaged. Audi’s quest for boldness gets their audience’s attention and interaction by allowing people to express their opinions. Let’s face it, everyone has an opinion.
Use multiple medias to support the message. Use your website, Facebook page, Twitter and YouTube channel to support your message and further drive engagement with the campaign.
Call us at: 888.505.6162
Connect with Us