Broadband Evolved » Inbound Marketing

Local Search for SMBs: It’s About Being There and Being Found (Less About SEO)

matt — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 04:58:33 +0000

For consumers, local search is about finding things we want (need) that are tangible and near by. It’s not about finding sites spread across the vast open web that have the best SEO, the most inbound links, and the highest google page rank.

Local search is impatient. It’s directional in nature. It’s not exploratory. It’s more about the physical facts, and less about qualitative information.

Therefore, for small business owners, local search is about being there and being found — wherever consumers might be looking.

Imagine yourself as a consumer and you’re late to a dinner party in Leesburg, Virginia. You’re driving around an unfamiliar town looking for a wine store to pick up a nice bottle of French white wine. At this moment, you simply don’t care about who’s content has position 1, 3, or 5 in organic search results. You only care about what’s there in the real world, whether it’s close to you, and whether they’re open at 7:00 pm on Saturday.

Google, of course, understands this dynamic. They know that search is not always about “ranking” and they understand that “relevance” itself is contextual to one’s circumstance. For example, depending on your situation, you might be:

>relaxing on a lazy sunday afternoon searching for things that entertain you
>shopping for a friend’s birthday gift and searching for a particular product
>interested in learning more about the conflict in the Gaza and searching for the latest news
>driving around an unfamiliar town desperately searching for a wine store

Therefore, to facilitate search experiences Google continues to refine their universal search algorithm by blending different types of content into search results. Depending upon the query, Google will present not only organic results based on page rank — but they will also blend in videos, images, news clips, product info and a variety of other content types. For queries involving business service and locality, Google will blend in the so-called 10 pak – a list of 10 local businesses in town, plotted on a map, that might be relevant to your needs. BTW, below is a screen shot of the 10 Pak results for wine stores in Leesburg, VA:

Consumers are constantly searching in Google, in Yahoo, in MSN, in the phone book, in GPS navigational systems, over the phone with 411 operators, on their mobile phones via search-based apps. In addition to practicing basic SEO hygiene, it is critical that SMBs take additional (different) steps so consumers will find them in the context of local search.

In the coming days I will be authoring a follow-up post that will cover (a) specific steps that SMBs can take on their own to get found, and (b) the emergence of business profiling platforms designed to help SMBs create, maintain, enhance and openly distribute their content to any and all services where consumers might be looking to find them.

Outbound Advertising is Dying: The Future is Inbound

matt — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 13:18:17 +0000

Below you will find two of my favorite videos.

Both highlight the gradual demise of outbound advertising/marketing and emphasize the importance of participating thoughtfully in the conversational web as a mechanism for attracting prospects through inbound channels.

The first video is from Scholz & Friends.

Scholz & Friends from BUBBLECLOT on Vimeo.

The second video (my true favorite) is from the clever folks at HubSpot.

Inbound Marketing/You Ought To Know from Oscar Rylin on Vimeo.

Now, more than ever, markets are conversations. Consumers are increasingly in control. They decide which marketing messages they will consume. Everything else they ignore.

As a result, one way monologues (adverts) are less effective. Two way dialogues (conversations) are the future of marketing.

Are you ready?

Value Added Internet Connections: The Name of the Game is Inbound Leads

matt — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:41:00 +0000

The #1 challenge facing SMBs is getting new customers.

Therefore, any product or service delivered to the SMB mass market would be greatly enhanced if it were capable of helping business owners get online and generate inbound sales leads.

The statement is especially true as it relates to the dumb pipes sold by telcos and cablecos — and yet they continue to battle each other in an effort to sell commodity connectivity services.

Are you found on Google?

Don’t get me wrong, voice lines and high speed internet connections are critically important services for millions of SMB. The point I am making is that there is a latent and powerful value hidden inside of these pipes that has yet to be exposed by either side.

Telco or cableco — high speed pipes have the ability to incorporate simple services to help SMBs get online, get found in search engines, and generate inbound sales leads.

It’s a value that SMBs are desperate for. If either side can expose it, there is no doubt they will sell more pipes, reduce churn, and increase ARPU.

Why Local Search is Like Raking Leaves

matt — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 10:23:00 +0000

Over the past 10 years a large number of very smart people have said a lot of very wise things about the science and art behind search engine optimization (SEO). In most cases, these wiSE-O-men and women have honed their skills in support of medium and large businesses seeking optimal exposure to consumers (natural and paid) within Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

A smaller number of very smart people have developed similar, but specialized, SEO expertise in support of small businesses seeking to be found by consumers who increasingly search the web, and not the print yellow pages, for local products and services.

In summary, there is a subtle, but significant, difference between SEO for bigger businesses and Local-SEO for smaller businesses. In an attempt to explain the differences, I’ve come up with an analogy that I hope most people can relate to.

Imagine the following:

The world is one huge yard which is owned by an individual named Mr. Google.

The yard is covered in leaves and Mr. Google is motivated to collect every single one of them.

Big leaves represent big business — small leaves represent small business.

Big, heavy-weight leaves are well behaved, perched perfectly in the grass, patiently awaiting Mr. Google’s rake.

Tiny, light-weight leaves are poorly behaved, fickle, unorganized, fluttering in the breeze not quite sure where to go.

Mr. Google lets out a big sigh and wishes the small leaves behaved like the big ones.

If you’re like me, and you’ve had (have) the unfortunate and painful responsibility of collecting leaves, then you know for a fact that small ones simply don’t behave like big ones.

Raking Leaves

The point is that getting small businesses to comply with Mr. Google’s wishes is a very difficult task. There are too many of them. Here one moment, gone the next. While some have purpose and focus, most are distracted and inconsistent.

In my opinion, it’s one of the major reasons why local-SEO for SMBs is so much harder than traditional SEO for medium and large businesses. It’s also why a huge commercial opportunity remains wide open to help millions of SMBs get discovered in local search in a manner that is immune to their inherently fickle, distracted and “leaf-like” behavior.