Google Is At It Again!

this time their target is local search results.  Google recently started rolling out their latest updates reducing the local search listings from 7 to 3.

What used to be known as the 7-pack is now turned into a 3-pack.

negatively affecting millions of businesses across the country.
In addition, you will also notice that Google in their infinite wisdom has removed addresses and phone numbers, as well as Google+ links. And now, when you click the name, instead of going to the business website or Google Plus page, it will redirect you to what looks like Google Maps.

WTH?

Why did Google do this?

Well we never know for sure why Google does what Google does, but I certainly can make some educated guesses. 

1. Google Wants More Pay Per Click (Adwords) Revenue to Keep Investors Happy

Being included in the local search results was free adverting, and being shown on the 7 pack on page one gave 7 lucky enterprises high visibility for their business for free.  That means no earnings for Google.

2. The 3-Packs Fit Perfectly on a Mobile Screen 
Thus giving mobile users the same experience as desktop or laptop users.

3. Google Wants Visitors to Stay Longer on Google to Generate More Revenue

Understand this, Google makes money by keeping users in the search results clicking their ads. Allowing searchers to click on links which then takes them to another website means they are no longer a captive audience for Google

Check out this case study by Casey Meraz at Juris Digital where it shows where users are clicking.

From this heat map you can see that 46% of searchers click on the business name, giving Google the opportunity to redirect them to another page on Google, thus keeping them on Google.

4. Google Wants a Piece of The Local Services Market

Other big players like Amazon are getting in the local service market game, launching Amazon Home Services. And just recently, Google invested $100 million into Thumbtack. 

Given those 2 scenarios, one has to guess that Google wants a piece of the local service market, which brings me to the next point:

5. Google Is Paving the Way for More Paid For Ad Types

Google has been testing the home services ad types, which look like this:

Google’s new local services pack (ads) looks very similar to the new snack pack (non-ads)

Looks pretty close to the new local 3 pack, right? But you will note they all say "sponsored", meaning paid for. Can you smell the money now?

It is important to note that this recent change was not an algorithm change, which means if you previously enjoyed the #1, #2 or #3 position, you will still be there.  What it does mean however, you must strive to be in the top 3 to still enjoy the benefit of free advertising.

So What Should You Be Doing Now?

Revisit Your Page One Ranking Strategy

• Where the map listing is concerned build your citation portfolio with pertinent local citations, and make sure your listing is correctly categorized and optimized.
• Actively drive reviews to your map listing
• Develop a social media and a content strategy. In addition to Adwords, Organic Search and Map Rankings, you can also be found on page one through Social Media, Video, Articles and Press Releases. Not only will these help to give you another shot at being on page one, they will also build enhance your business status.
• Find other ways to drive traffic to your website or blog.

In my experience, whatever Google does other search engines will follow suit. Keeping up with the constant changes can be daunting and appear a mission impossible for most business owners and marketing executives.  A better way is to focus on what you do best and let online marketing specialists do the rest. 

Cheers!

How to Boost the Online Presence for a Local Business

Having a strong online visibility should be a crucial marketing component for any local business! And here is why:  

Google, Bing, Yahoo and the other search engines have revolutionized how we we shop and interact within our local communities. 

Today, Google alone handles more than 100 billion searches per month around the world. Of those searches*, 

• 4 billion desktop queries per month in the United States alone have local intent .
• 50%+ of mobile queries have local intent.
• Roughly 15-20% of all searches are mobile .

From these numbers, we can safely assume that there are approximately seven billion unique local searches per month on Google in the United States.

Currently, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are returning local results that have challenged traditional print Yellow Pages. They have become--in most areas, and most certainly for the younger generation--the preferred method for discovering local businesses and local information. Knowing this, starting March 9, 2009, Google began showing local results for generic queries, meaning that Internet users no longer need to include any city or geographic terms in their search to be shown results that are local to their location.

Additionally, mobile search is absolutely exploding. Leading analyst firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that mobile local search volume will surpass desktop local search volume in 2015. Mobile searches primarily pull their results from local search engines.

What this means for your business:

The potential to attract new customers via local search is enormous.

The core of any local search marketing campaign is the creation of local business listings. Consumers search for local service and product providers from within many different venues, such as Yelp, Yellow Pages Online, Kudzu, Angie's List, etc.

A local business listing is simply an online profile that contains the business name, address, phone number, (often referred to as NAP) and other details. There are thousands of websites and directories on which local business owners are allowed to create free business listings. The most important places a business should be listed in is Google My Business, Google Map, Google+ Local, Yelp, Bing Places, Internet Yellow Pages, and Yahoo! Local.

In order to qualify for a local business listing, the business must meet all four of the following criteria:

1. Have a business name or DBA
2. Have a local phone number that matches the city of location (not a shared phone number, toll-free number, or call tracking number)
3. Have a dedicated physical street address (not a shared address, PO box, or virtual office, although a home office is permitted)
4. Make face-to-face contact with your customers (business is not conducted virtually)

The purpose of creating local listings is to make your business visible all over the Internet. Each new listing created increases the chances of being found by a potential customers. In principal, the more places a business is listed the more visible it becomes! 

Most business directories and search engines require you to verify each listing you create and many will only allow you to add more details about your business, such as business hours, website link, business category, images, video, etc. once you have claimed the listing. Each directory is unique and has their own rules.  If you do not claim your business listing you stand the risk of being removed.

In my experience, many businesses have multiple listings in directories, especially if the moved the business to a different location.  The result, their listing will not be shown or shown with a wrong address. Claiming your listing will allow you to "clean" things up.

Some local search engines and directories allow you to place your business into a number of categories—usually between two and five—that help further describe the nature of the business. This is an important step in creating your local business listing and should not be overlooked. The search engines use category data when deciding which businesses to show for particular searches. The search engines will not display a business that is uncategorized—or even worse, miscategorized—for particular sets of keywords. This usually happens among keywords and phrases that are the most competitive—where there are already a number of businesses associated with a particular category that might satisfy what the searcher is looking for.

Before you create your listing you should always search for your business first to see if it already exists to avoid duplications. 

Creating business listings is not difficult and can be done by any business owner or employee. However, it does take a lot of time and patients since it is a three-step process.  Beware of "easy solutions" provided for a fee by many vendors such as Yext.  They require a monthly or annual fee to create your listing but as soon as you stop paying them, your listing will be deleted and you are back to square one.

It is far better to either do it yourself or hire someone that manually submits your listings on your behalf and provides you with a spreadsheet of all log-in information, once the work is done. That way you are in control of your listing and can keep it updated as needed.  At Results Marketing we provide this service. Just give us a call at (707) 853-0702 or request your free online visibility report.

* (Sources: Comscore, Searchengine Land and Moz)

The End of Organic Reach on Facebook

I have been anticipating this since Facebook went public.  On June 5, 2014, Facebook's Ads Product lead, Brian Boland, wrote a lengthy post explaining why organic reach is declining and what we should be doing to effectively use Facebook for business. 

For more than a year, Facebook has been adjusting their Edge Rank, which is their unique algorithm, dictating what and how many of your fan page posts users see in their News Feed on Facebook. Brands and Social Media Consultants like myself who manage clients' Fan Pages have been concerned with the declining organic reach. 

What Is the Definition of Organic Reach?

Facebook defines organic reach as “how many people you can reach for free on Facebook by posting to your Page.” The article from Brian Boland acknowledges that this declining organic reach on Facebook is a major pain point for many businesses and social media managers. However, he assures us that Facebook is committed to helping us “understand what’s driving this change so your business can succeed on Facebook.”

What do You Think: Is Declining Organic Reach Related To Facebook Ad Revenue?

Of course it is! The declining organic reach is pressuring brands and businesses to spend money on Facebook advertising, thus increasing their advertising revenues.  

Of course Facebook says this is absolutely not true and that slashing organic reach has nothing to do with money. Do they really think that we buy that?

Instead, Facebook says they need to control the content any user sees in their News Feed because: “On average, there are 1,500 stories that could appear in a person’s News Feed each time they log onto Facebook. As a result, competition in News Feed — the place on Facebook where people view content from their family and friends, as well as businesses — is increasing, and it’s becoming harder for any story to gain exposure in News Feed.”

Boland goes on to say that in order to give it's users the best experience, Facebook needs to look at thousands of ranking factors that are relative to each user. He confirms that 300 or so of the most relevant stories get fed into a users News Feed.

Regardless of Facebook's denial about the declining organic reach not being tied to ad revenue, they will still end up benefiting, don't they? Brands and businesses are essentially forced to pay-to-play on Facebook and invest in a paid advertising campaign.  Granted, it's still cheaper than Google Adwords, but for how much longer? We shall see.

Facebook knows that a brand still values their fans and that a fan can still drive engagement and revenue. Boland wrote: “when an ad has social context — in other words, when a person sees their friend likes your business — your ads drive, on average, 50% more recall and 35% higher online sales lift…”

How Can You Use Facebook For Your Business Now?

It all starts with a comprehensive social media marketing strategy, which includes building communities on other valuable social networks like Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, and any other relevant social network beneficial to the clients' business. Create a social media marketing plan if you will. Create your fan page with interesting images and content.  Then spend a little money on Facebook advertising to get more people to like your page. Creating compelling relevant content that gets liked and shared must be your focus from then on out. It’s pretty much the only way for your likes aka fans to engage and share your content.  Boland's states:

“Like TV, search, newspapers, radio and virtually every other marketing platform, Facebook is far more effective when businesses use paid media to help meet their goals. Your business won’t always appear on the first page of a search result unless you’re paying to be part of that space. Similarly, paid media on Facebook allows businesses to reach broader audiences more predictably, and with much greater accuracy than organic content.”

I have to strongly disagree!  A solid and on-going SEO strategy will do wonders with keeping your business on the first page of a search result. Doing it right will get you there and stay there without a paid Google AdWords PPC campaign!

In Closing

Results Marketing has rolled out several successful Facebook advertising campaigns for clients that helped them reach their goals. Facebook's targeting options and the custom audience features make this an incredibly useful advertising medium....for a reasonable budget.

If you’re looking to expand your Facebook organic reach and let Facebook start working for you, call me at (707) 853-0702 and request a social media marketing consultation. 

Adding Google +1 to Your Website or Blog

Google Plus is gaining momentum and the +1 feature is an incredibly useful feature of Google+. It works similarly to the “Like” feature of Facebook, and allows others to easily share links. Quite obviously, the more people who +1 a particular link, the more exposure it will receive. Therefore, it’s important to make it as easy as possible for people to +1 your content.

First, you will want to +1 your own content. Some of the people who see your post may also add a +1 to it, thus automatically getting the link some additional exposure to their contacts.
However, you can greatly increase the number of people who give you a +1 by adding a +1 button to your website pages and blog posts. You can do this by inserting a +1 button via http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Select a size. 
You can choose from 4 different sizes, Pick one that will look best on your page while grabbing attention.

2. Select a width and annotation type if you’d like to include one. 
The annotation is the note that pops up when someone mouses over the +1 button. By default, it says, “Click here to publicly +1 this as Your Name.”

3. Copy the code for the button and paste it into your website wherever you’d like the +1 button to show.
If you have a blog, you may wish to use a plugin to make it easy to insert the code in the right spot without having to mess around with code. There are a couple of different plugins available for WordPress, including http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-plus-one and http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-plus-one-google1. Simply install the plugin and follow the instructions to have a +1 button show up in all of your blog posts.

It really is quite simple but what a powerful way to attract more attention and visitors to your website or blog. For more information on Google Plus you can visit here

Track your Local Business Keywords using Google Analytics


One of the little known features of Google Analytics is the Auto-Tagging feature, which helps measure the performance of your keywords. This is especially useful if you use PPC marketing methods since it will help you see which of your keywords are resulting in the most conversions.

Auto tagging allows you to tag each of your keywords. Google Analytics then tracks each keyword and gives you a keyword performance report.

Here is how to set up the Auto-tagging feature in your Analytics account:

1. Sign into your Google Adwords account
2. Click on the My Account Tab
3. Look for where it says Tracking and click on Edit
4. Check the box for Destination Url Auto-tagging
5. Click on save changes

With these 5 simple steps, your analytics account will be updated with the auto-tagging feature and you can now receive reports about your Adwords campaigns and how each of your keywords is converting.

Armed with this information:
• You will know how much traffic each keyword is generating
• Which keywords are converting the best
• Help you to modify your PPC ads to include the best converting keywords and to remove the poor performance keywords.
• You can improve your search engine optimization by revising your web and article content to include high-traffic and high conversion keywords and using these keywords in your title tags, meta tags and descriptions across your articles, videos, podcasts and other content.

As you can see Google Analytics can provide very useful information about your website that you could not possibly extract on your own. This free tool can definitely be used to improve your site design, SEO, marketing strategies and boost overall sales.

Beyond Google: Learn How to Dominate Page One on Bing

Owning the first page of Google is a great first step to a powerful online visibility; however, Google isn't the only game in town. Next up, you'll want to monopolize the entire first page of Bing. Here's how to do it.

Why Bing?

According to the May comScore rankings, Bing is second to Google in market share with 17.4 percent. This is up 13 percent compared to May 2012.

Microsoft has money (duh) and is spending it successfully to market Bing. Recently Apple announced that Bing will be the "default search engine" for Siri. According to Microsoft this feature will work as follows:


When users ask Siri a question either the specific answer or web search links will now be delivered automatically so users can find information even faster.

Aggressive marketing and business decisions leading to increased market share are one reason to focus on Bing. Another is their unique demographics. According to Alexa, users age 45-65+ are over representing on Bing as compared with Google. This same age demographic is also the fastest growing on Facebook.

What does it all mean? If you're trying to market to seniors you need to start paying attention to Bing.

As with Google, dominating the first page of Bing requires an understanding of how data is displayed on their SERP and how to take advantage.

Paid Search

Bing is slightly behind the times when it comes to paid search extensions for advertisers. Although they don't have as many features as Google, there is still plenty of opportunity to increase the visibility and size of your paid search listings.

Make sure you're utilizing the following features when buying ads on Bing:
•Enhanced site link extensions
•Call extensions
•Locations extensions
•RAIS – Rich Ads in Search

Note that recently Bing started adding company logos by default. This feature used to only be available through RAIS. As of now there isn't an official name for this feature.

Bing Image Search

Those who've watched TV over the past few months have undoubtedly seen Microsoft's "Bing It On" campaign. If you watch these commercials the users will always choose the SERP that includes more images.

Bing is going "all in" on images and isn't showing any signs of slowing down. On July 1st Microsoft announced an upgrade to their image search allowing users to browse images by usage rights.

Ranking images on Bing is fairly easy. Make sure your target keywords are included in the file name and alt tag of each image. Internal and external links to the target image also help tremendously.

Bing Places for Business

As Josh McCoy alluded to last month, Bing Places for Business is releasing various upgrades that will make it a better option than Google+ Local. Similar to Google, Bing heavily incorporates local/maps into their search results. Make sure you have verified locations and optimize listings within your feed.

The review system on Bing is powered by Yelp. Managing your location on Yelp and soliciting reviews (positive or negative) will help increase your maps rankings for non-brand terms.

Remember to take advantage of features commonly not available on Google+ Local. Bing provides business owners the ability to display images within maps as well as provide custom URLs to send additional traffic.

As they say, it's never to late to start. For a free Bing visibility assessment, call our office at (707) 853-0702 or email birgit@resultsmarketing.biz.

5 Tips on How to Effectively Use Location Based Marketing

You can no longer ignore the fact that business is heading to where you live. You prove it to yourself every day you head out of the house equipped with your smartphone, ready, willing and able to find and conduct business and pleasure while on the go. So, since this is where the business is, it makes sense to make sure your business is planted firmly in the path of this wave, and also profit from location based marketing.

5 Ways you can profit with Location Based Marketing

1. Complete your local listings - According to Yext, businesses are losing at least $10.3 billion dollars a year simply by neglecting to get their business information updated and available on their profiles and sites. This is a cardinal sin, and something that should be addressed immediately. If your company is not being found, your competition will be! Make sure you get your listings correct on sites like Google Local, Foursquare, Yelp, Facebook, MapQuest and any others you are using.
2. Incentivize reviews - Nothing makes someone want to help you like you providing them with a reason to! Rewarding people who review you can be an easy, cost-effective way to engender social proof, and a number of happy customers as well!
3. Shower your customers with perks - Related to the above, make sure it is worth their while to return repeatedly. There are numerous ways to do this including coupons, a loyalty program, backlinks and more.
4. Use coupons and daily deals - According to Entrepreneur, location-based marketing works by not only pushing ads out to your existing customers, but by allowing new customers to find out about you. This is easily carried out by daily deal sites, as well as simple coupons sent via messaging.
5. Engage with your customers - Don't make the error of failing to talk back to customers or prospects who are enquiring. If you do, you will most definitely reap the negative feedback you deserve! Take the few minutes necessary to answer, particularly when it pertains to customer service, and avoid a social media meltdown!

Location-based marketing is a marvelous way to develop your presence in your local market. Schedule a Free Location Based Marketing Evaluation and start using it today!