Blogs

Local SEO stats of interest to business owners

I came across two interesting stats today that are worth noting if you’re a business owner focusing on a defined geographic market.

  • According to Google 50% of all searches have a local focus.
  • 87% of consumers research online before buying in person at a store.

 

Bing Yahoo Search Alliance

At SES Toronto last week we had the chance to chat to the folks at the Bing booth. The talk was mostly about the alliance between Bing and yahoo and what that will mean to advertisers when this all happens later this year.

The Bing algorithm will be powering the platform and your campaigns will be running across all the Yahoo and Microsoft sites. I don’t have a massive dataset but I can say that the conversion rates we get from our Bing campaigns are higher than the equivalent adwords conversion rates.

Blooming Conversion Rates with CRO

A business website: a portal by which the customer can experience the corporate persona. Sadly, this fundamental definition has been discarded in favor of gargantuan website traffic figures, which look impressive on html charts but fail to perform at shareholder meetings. Meaningful website traffic requires customers to engage by purchasing a product, asking for information, or some other experience. Without this traffic conversion, mushrooming website traffic is only a lame joke and a parlor trick. Enter conversion rate optimization (CRO), the conversion rate’s savior.

Google Mayday Algorithm Update

It seems like, lately, Google algorithms have been changing more frequently than they’ve been staying the same. With between 350 and 550 changes in 2009 alone, it’s fair to say that the site’s algorithms are in constant flux. The most recent change, however, is substantial enough for even those who don’t follow algorithmic changes to take notice. Called “Mayday,” the rankings change focuses on impacting long tail traffic to improve the quality of the sites it pulls in any given search.

Google Places - Local Business Centre Upgrade

This week Google upgraded the Local Business Center to Google Places, their portal for local search. Google Places pages let business owners manage their online presence and also have some control over how they will appear in Google maps searches.

Place Pages connect people to information from the best sources across the web, displaying photos, reviews and essential facts, as well as real-time updates and offers from business owners.

Online Reputation Management

Do you know what people are finding when looking for your company or your products?

A client called us last week with a fairly unusual request. It seems that when searching for an extremely specific service they offer, a very adult site was ranking at the top of the first page. What made this even more unusual was that the client’s name and service was in the adult site’s title, headers and meta description tags.

Is this the right time to market my business online?

The question really should be “Can I afford not to market my business online?”

The current economic situation is certainly increasing awareness of Search Engine Marketing and online advertising. Just recently survey results indicated that 25% of the total UK advertising spend is now online.

It is probably a good time to re-assess where you’re spending your advertising budget. Money spent on Search Engine Optimization will keep paying off and bringing in clients for years to come. Unlike other forms of advertising the benefits of SEO remain after you’ve spent the money.

What should you expect from a Search Engine Optimization campaign?

It’s a good idea to be very clear on what you can, and cannot, expect from your website once it has been optimized.

Keep your Landing Pages up to date

Keep your landing pages up to date or your conversion rates will drop!

Twice in the last week I’ve had clients ask me why their conversion rates where suffering and both causes were almost identical.

Why should you optimise your web site?

Customers in your local area should be able to find your website even if they don’t know that you exist.

If you own a hardware store in London, people who don’t know that you exist should still be able to find your website by searching for “hardware store London Ontario”. If your site hasn’t been optimized for your local market though, they probably won’t find you and will end up somewhere else.

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