Why Local Search Has My Attention

I’ve had a growing interest in the mobile space- particularly around mobile search and developing a business that caters to local searchers in a useful way.

First, a bit of context on Why it has my attention and interest.

Stay with me while I share some tidbits on local search and some of the current goings-on.

Local Search Statistics

Here are a few quick stats I’ve read:

• Microsoft’s Bing search estimate 53% of mobile users search for local purposes
• Google estimates that 20% of ALL SEARCHES have a local intent
• The SERP’s (Search Results) on Google are prioritizing local content more and more

Around this last point regarding the changes at Google, if you haven’t seen the recent changes to Google’s SERP’s then take a look these screen shots below that were taken today 11/16/10…

Changes to Local Search Results on Google

This first image below is a Google search query simply for “lawyers.” Google immediately assumes that the searches intent is local, they automatically read my IP address and geo-target my search… and then display a map and loads the left hand column results with location/places with alphabetical Place Pins. In this case those denote lawyers by location.

screenshot of localized search results at Google

This second image is a search for “San Francisco coffee shops.” You’ll see how the entire left column of natural search results is filled by location/Places content instead of simply links to top ranking websites for this keyword phrase.

Google Local Search Results including City Name

The focus on localized search results and local content by many of the biggest companies including Google and Facebook (with Facebook Places), and hence the growth in this space in terms of the aggregation and serving of localized ads/content is pretty fascinating.

So that explains a little bit about Why I’m interested in the space.

Seeing Opportunities In Local Search & Mobile Users

Of course, being a tinkerer with tech and systems and an entrepreneur, I couldn’t help but start to think about what new and better ways there might be of providing value to users on the go when they search with their mobile device in a specific location and want to search or discover something new.

And after taking in what I’ve just thrown at you and more for the last 6 months or so, an idea has stuck in my head for a new business in the space.

Here’s where it’s getting interesting though:

How do you go from big messy idea to implementing a real strategy for not just providing the product/service but for growing your business with users, engagement and revenue? And in this new space – can the same strategies I usually employ to test and launch startups be applied?

Well, in you haven’t ready my blog before I guess I could sum up my philosophy with launching new online businesses in the past as “Choose & Determine Your Market First.”

As in… you need to first test to determine what the existing and CURRENT demand is for what you’re doing, and do it in one or more specific marketing or advertising channels that has the potential to scale the growth of your business to where you’d want to grow it to.

For example, in my Mixergy interview with Andrew Warner on Ensuring Success Before You Launch I discuss evaluating your idea/product by testing it with Google search ads and using the results there in terms of Cost per Conversion and how many Searches and Clicks are available for qualified keywords.

So in the interests of taking my own medicine, one of the first places I’ve started is by seeing how the idea and concept of what I would build might do by first TESTING a vary simple version of my idea. Long story short, I’ve boiled down the idea to it’s simplest form and have begun testing it on the actual CHANNELS where people would discover and want to use my idea – on mobile devices.

To do so I’ve started using a variety of the mobile ad platforms out there including in app advertisements (location and phone platform specific)… as well as using local search results ads (primarily Google)… all in an effort to learn some of the following:

• In paid ads, what are the average CPM’s and CPC’s out there?
• How hard is it to rank for key terms in local areas on Google given location-targeted content?
• How do mobile users/searches behave differently and what do they respond to and not respond to?
• If I had a mobile site, or mobile app – how much would it cost on average to drive a new visitor, subscriber or app install?
• What are the most efffective revenue models in this space?

These are just a few of the very rudimentary questions I’ve started to answer and am testing for. I might share more as things evolve, but I’m busy and this is a part time “pet project” for now.

If you’re doing anything interesting in the mobile or local space and want to connect post a Comment here please. I’m looking for learning resources and to get to know some smart people in the local search, local SEO and mobile space.

Talk soon~

Chance

Twitter Search & The Twitter Spam Problem

Are you interested in or using Twitter some way for your business?

If so, then you’ve hopefully been paying attention to some of the great development going on around Twitter’s API and Twitter Search.

I’m doing some work and thinking around Twitter right now, but when I saw this article I was glad to see someone talking about it:

Search Enginge Land: Twitter’s Real-Time Spam Problem

I had some thoughts that I wanted to share of my own and posted a Comment with one possible solution to what could keep growing into an even bigger spam problem for Twitter.

Crowdsourcing.

I think that if Twitter introduced a small button to allow users to tag a Tweet as spam, it could help. Enough tags and a Tweet is deleted and/or the account is frozen.

I love the elegance of letting the community do the work.

I also shared in my Comment on Search Engine Land why I compare Twitter Search to “A Free Google AdWords System.” Go check out the article if you want to read more.

Again, it’s here: Twitter’s Real-Time Spam Problem

What do you think?

Landing Pages That Convert

Hey- if you’re interested in learning about how to get your online business off the ground and convert visitors to your site into customers, then you need to check out a video interview I did with Andrew Warner over at Mixergy on How To Ensure Success Before You Launch.

Now, I also want to share some things I didn’t share on the call- one of which is an easy Landing Page Formula. With the theory and insights and tips I gave about Positioning your business, finding your market online and “framing” your product to a hungry crowd… when it comes to actually sitting down and deciding what’s on your landing page, it can be a challenge knowing where to start.

Before I show you where to start, you should remember what I said in the interview-

Creating a great landing page (given time) is not all about being a great copywriter or designer. It’s also a function of being a great tester. (Although talent and experience are the ultimate time savers and leverage – considering time and expense)

So… with that, here’s a quick formula to follow as you’re developing your landing page and the elements to include and test within:

Element #1: Lead With “Finished Story” Benefits

Every page needs a place where the visitors eyes are initially drawn that focuses their attention. Traditionally this is a headline, image or tag line. Make sure that you have this initial element be an attention grabber that let’s your visitor know what they’re going to get out of staying and engaging with you. Remember, you only have a few seconds for a user to decide if your page (and your site/service/product) is or isn’t for them.

The way to make sure that this initial attention element has the result of making your visitor stay and then convert is to talk about what I call “Finished Story” Benefits. These are benefits about what the finished story will be for the visitor after they engage and/or take the action you’re suggesting with your product.

Making your visitor visualize and imagine what they will get and how they will feel after using your product is your goal.

Again, on our call I talked about the company I helped with their business plan template marketing. The “finished story” here wasn’t the obvious – a finished business plan. It was farther removed than that. It was having raised money successfully with the polished and professional business plan.

Long story short, make sure you’re not talking about all the work that might go into your visitor getting the result they’re after. Make sure you’re getting them to connect then ultimate end goal – the finished result and REWARD.

Do this well, and you end up tying the purchase of your product directly to their desire for that end result. Once this happens, most resistance and objections from your visitor will have been removed.

Element #2: Social Proof

I’ll run through these quickly. There are LOTS of examples out on the web of each of these you can find if you just do some Google searched and click on the Paid Adwords ads and see the landing pages there.

Bottom line- new visitors to your site don’t know who you are. Make it easier for them to take the risky move of sharing something with you and inviting you into their world.

Element #4: Offer/Value

You can write great copy on your landing page, and design a great layout… but if what you’re asking for and offering on your landing page doesn’t boil down to a great offer then you’re wasting your time.

A lot of people these days are trying to build their list, or build their social friendships or “followers.” If you’re asking for anything like this, let alone asking for a sale, on your landing page, you better make you’re visitor feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

So what do I mean by a great offer, and what does one look like?

A bad offer, if you’re looking to drive email signups from your page, is essentially offering nothing but the chance to “sign up” in exchange for the visitor giving up their precious email and expose their inbox to you.

Arguably, that’s not an “offer” at all. But the crazy thing is, most people’s email sign up forms on their landing pages are framed in this manner.

Instead, what can you create and provide in exchange for a user putting in their email? And how can you tie this directly into their “finished story.”

This question is exactly what I love the “free report” give away or white paper type free line content. It creates an instant “offer” that makes a visitor feel like simply sharing their email address in exchange for this information is giving them the better end of the deal.

Element #5: Call To Action

This is what inexperienced copywriters and marketers have the most problems with. They either don’t even use a call to action, or they make it so weak and passive that they might as well not have one.

A great call to action does the following:

Gives specific instructions on exactly what action you want the visitor to take
Tells the visitor exactly how to do this
Uses the already “anchored” benefits you’ve put in your visitors mind and reminds the visitor of what they’ll get by taking this action

Here’s a bad call to action if you’re trying to drive email subscribers-

“Sign Up Here And Get Our Emails.”

Just what we all want, more email. No thanks!

Ok, now go out and get on the web and look at 30 or more landing pages by doing all kinds of searches and clicking on paid ads. This will start to bring some of these 5 elements into your awareness and give you ideas on how to go about writing and designing your landing page.

And don’t forget to test, test, test.

Let me know how it goes.

And here’s some Recommended Reading:

To better understand how and where to “frame” and place your business in your market, read Position by Al Reis and Jack Trout.

For a great overview of the psychological principles and operators to be aware of and use in your landing page copy and offer read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Cialdini

For design guidance and insights, go get Universal Principles of Design (design insights with the psychology behind them) by Lidwell, Holden & Butler.

For your copywriting bootcamp, get all 3 of these books and study them regularly as you’re writing copy: Ogilvy On Advertising, Tested Advertising Methods and The Ultimate Sales Letter.

Landing Page Tests and Search Marketing

My friend Susan Bratton has an amazing Dishymix Podcast and interviews the brightest and most interesting people you’d want to meet in business and technology. Susan and her husband Tim Bratton are Personal Life Media

Susan emailed and asked me to come up with a few questions for her upcoming guest Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com. Tim has written a book called Landing Page Optimizations: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.

Knowing that Susan is a great interviewer, and having a particular fascination on the subject and a lot of current and future testing focused on landing page optimzation going on in my businesses, I came up with the following questions for Tim:

1) Page Focus: SEO or PPC? (The new answer: Both)

Are you seeing many online marketers developing landing pages that are both SEO and PPC optimized?

Meaning this- in the past, most direct and online marketers created targeted landing pages for keywords “in a vacuum”  with the sole goal of optimizing subscribe or sale conversion.

Now, with the growing and continued importance of quality score, page rank, domain authority, and the like from Google, things like your Minimum CPC (cost per click) can be lowered dramatically not just from boosting your CTR (click thru rate) on ads, but from on-page and site-wide factors.

Tim – have you been addressing the need for SEO “friendly” PPC landing pages? What are your favorite tips and techniques for this?

2) “Social Proof” Elements

The more I test elements of Social Proof, the more I find these as critical to include in any good marketing, including landing pages.

Examples of social proof elements are:

• Written testimonials
• Video testimonials
• “As seen on” and similar endorsements lending credibility
• Social/user generated content – communicating and demonstrating the value/experience of your site or service

An important reality in search marketing today is that consumers online have grown savvier, and thus it seems you can’t just throw up plain text copy and hope for high conversion based on people believing or trusting you.

People want PROOF, and they want it from other people than you- the site owner.

Tim- what are your favorite examples of success stories of using Social Proof elements on landing pages?

3) The Importance of Keyword Targeting

Some keywords perform. Other don’t. You’ll never really know which are which until you test and measure. But getting down to the single keyword level (both broad and exact match) is not easy, especially if you’re running thousands or tens of thousands of keywords.

I believe keyword targeting is where one of the top level leverage points in PPC marketing- and am reminded of it all the times when I see and hear people rebuilding campaigns and finding new profitable keywords.

Tim – how do you deal with the challenge of trying to drive your focus down the the keyword level, and customize landing pages for each given keyword?

What are your favorite tools and time savers?

Do you use any thing like a CMS (content management system) to help shorten the process of testing and iterating new pages.

Ok.

I’ll post answers to these questions if Tim addresses any of these on the show with Susan, and link to the show.

If they don’t get to the questions, then I’ll answer these in my own experience for you.

By the way- what questions do you have?

Bad Marketing: Build It, And They Won’t Come

A common mistake I hear experienced business people and newbies alike is building what seems like the “killer app”… and expecting users to show up in droves.

Spend tens or hundreds of thousands on a site that’s the perfect solution and the greatest thing since sliced bread, then sit around checking your web stats wondering why no one is subscribing.

The opposite end of the spectrum? The Iterative Approach.

The Iterative Approach to business building when looking at the marketing online (in Search) goes something like this.

1. Identify a market.
2. Do your keyword research. (If you see that Search Marketing would be an important part of your Marketing strategy)
3. Get a sense for what the top keywords are in your market, how much traffic those terms get, how much bidding for Paid Search visitors in those categories will cost you… and then estimate how much it will cost you to get a single visitor to your site, and a single subscriber.

Here are some relative associations for you-

(Cost Per Visitor = Average Cost Per Click)

(Cost Per Subscriber = Average Cost Per Click/ Visitor to Subscriber $)

Now… over a given period of time, here’s the real question. In fact, the one question you need to focus obsessively and endlessly over at ever moment you can steal away for-

Can you make MORE MONEY BACK from a visitor or subscriber than you paid to get them there?

I know this sounds like an oversimplification, but you’d be surprised how many smart complex businesses and projects find creative and imaginative ways to believe they don’t have to obey this simple rule. And that rule is that, in the medium to long term….

Customers should cost less to get than they do to acquire.

So do yourself a favor and find the answers to these few simple questions-

• What is your average cost to bring a single visitor to your site?
• What is your average cost to bring a new subscriber to your site?
• What is the average revenue you get back from a visitor or a subscriber over a given time period.

Focus on these, and you’ll be forced how to identify and create and REAL BUSINESS MODEL.

Oh, and don’t think that any significant percentage of your first-time visitors, or relatively new subscribers are going to buy a single thing from you unless you’re REALLY good at writing sales copy.

And even when you’re good… writing good copy is still a function of “test and measure.”

So what are your numbers?

Would love your feedback on your favorite metrics and important numbers in your business.

What are they?

Confessions of a Long Tail Prosthelytizer

How many times have you used the term “Long Tail”?

Some new data has come out around whether the Long Tail Theory proposed by Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine holds water.

Or if it’s just been another buzz phrase consultants, strategists, advisors, and those paid for activities not too closely tied with revenue generation have enjoyed espousing and collecting fees for.

Doing some thinking recently, and looking back, I’m realizing that I’ve used the phrase “Long Tail” in reference to something that isn’t exactly what the theory was really about.

In short, having been so squarely focused on direct response and internet marketing (display, search, email) over the last 6 years… I realize that I’m not a believer in the Long Tail Theory as it applies to Business Models.

I’m a user of the phrase “long tail” to communicate something else important about marketing, and especially Search Marketing.

What I recognize is that the long tail, from the perspective of marketing and advertising, simply contains a great set of exact words and phrases through which to attract potential customers, and to use in crafting personal and relevant communications in order to get a desired outcome.

So, when set against a business model,  the long tail IS valuable, in the sense that there are real humans the tail is representing… and the cost of reaching these versus others in the Head is not only equal, but often LESS EXPENSIVE.

The beauty of the Tail as a marketer is that we can use it AND the Head and test to find how and where we can compete in ALL TERMS that relate to our market as well. Head or Tail. It doesn’t matter – although search volume and competition are 2 of the first considerations Search Marketers look for.

As Seth Godin said and named a book after, “All Marketers Are Liars”

I find this to be most true when anyone in marketing or advertising tells you that they know exactly what will work best for your business.

If they were honest, and good at what they do, then they would tell you that they have ideas of what could work… but they’ll never know until they test a few different things, and do a few iterations to improve and learn.

The same goes for whether the Tail of search marketing terms, or the Head, is the area that’s the best to target and go after- you never know until you test.

Therefore, I see the “long tail” as simple a source of information and data for us through which to target and acquire a broader set of users. Not to solely depend on.

Traditionally, the Head terms (highly popular that have the purchasing of millions behind them) are intensely competitive from the standpoint of Search Marketing, and therefore expensive to try and compete in on a keyword level.

By competing across the smaller tail of keywords, and having some targeting and success/revenue from these at a lower cost… companies can get their act together (know the value of an average visitor or subscriber or customer) and then gradually afford to compete in the more highly competitive (expensive to compete) areas and place bids on the higher minimum bid keywords.

The long tail of search marketing is alive and well. As a snarky bit of proof, I know many marketers who’s success in long tail terms have bought them cars fancy enough to make them feel confident approaching women they otherwise wouldn’t.