Industry’s Web Sites Have Small Audiences, and Economic Downturn Has Eroded Ad Dollars; Hearst Unit Throws In With Google

It does raise a good question though – what industries most gain value from the Yellow pages? I can see that plumbers probably get good value from them but how about real estate agents or car service professionals?

I have a client who used to spend a small fortune on Yellow Pages advertising but now puts his advertising budget into Pay Per Click and is seeing a much better ROI. Targeted, local search terms are delivering motivated clients to his site for a cost of about 45 cents per visit. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that his cost per acquisition is going to be very low. It is also going to be very easy to measure, and that is the important thing. Checking his website stats on a Monday morning will tell him exactly how many clients visited his site and contacted him via his Search Engine Advertising campaign.

It’s a new advertising and marketing landscape out there and small businesses need to give some serious thought to where they will get the best ROI from their advertising dollar. Yellow pages is definitely not dead, and can without a doubt remain relevant for some time, but it isn’t for everyone any more.

If you’d like to know what we can do to optimise your website for the London Ontario market, give us a call (1.519.777.0257) or contact us at Ontario SEO (details below)

Ontario SEO

64 Paperbirch Cr London, ON N6G 1L7 Canada

1 519 777 0257

http://www.ontarioseo.ca

 

Those of you running paid search (or Pay Per Click) campaigns will have noticed a pleasant new feature in your Google Adwords account. Your keyword research tool now gives you numbers for Local search in addition to the standard Global metrics.

This should be really helpful for small businesses who regularly change or experiment with their ads. Quite often you’ll need to change them based on performance that doesn’t come anywhere close to what the keyword research would lead you to believe SHOULD be the better of the ads to run. The ability to see the which key phrases perfrom better locally should at least reduce the false starts.

Try it. I’ve run a few of my less popular phrases and have been surprised at the results, especially when you factor in spelling variations between US and Canadian English.

In case you missed the link to the keyword tool above, here it is again – Google Keyword tool.

Do it yourself and learn on the job. Squeeze in the time when the rest of the world hasn’t woken up yet or they’ve already gone to sleep. If you know what you’re doing this can be effective. The danger here is that “you don’t know what you don’t know”.
OR
Find another small business specialist who will do it for you at a reasonable price. This is a nice middle route to take. If that business is local to you and knows your market it will save you tons of time and get done properly. The cost/benefit factor varies but should be affordable if you have set reasonable, measurable goals and your marketing specialist shows a good understanding of your business and is able to demonstrate to you how your goals will be achieved and what you can expect in terms of results.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing , there is a free, safe first step that you can take. Doing some on-page optimization of your web site’s most important pages can bring modest results without getting you into trouble (option 1 above) or costing you anything. Once you’ve seen that Search Engine Optimization works for you I would recommend contacting a Search Engine Optimization company,specializing in Local Search Engine Optimization , to finish the job.

The basic free things that you can do are as follows:

1. Check your page titles – are they relevant to your customers and what they are looking for online (this is marketing remember?). Will “Bobs wholesale services” or “Bobs plumbing Wholesale London Ontario” be more relevant to a contractor who needs thirty new toilets today?
2. Description tags – Put a short description of each page in the description meta tag. Make it relevant and not spammy.
3. Keyword tags – put in a max of 25 keywords that describe your product/service, company name and perhaps a mis-spelling or two.
4. Heading tags (H1,H2,H3) – Put the heading of key page sections into the H tags. These are ranked in order of importance.
5. Images – rename your images to make sense and give them alt tags. An image named image.png does you no good because search engines can’t see that it’s an air conditioner. An image called airconditioner.png with an alt tag of “air conditioner” ensures your page makes more sense.
6. Link to your other pages – if your plumbing section leads into your water damage section (who doesn’t like plumbing humor) then add a link to the next page with anchor text that looks something like “Water damage” or whatever the page is called.
7. Put your full contact details, in text form, on your contact page. Even better, put it on every page.

A word of caution though -if you didn’t understand any of the above – Don’t Do It! This is primarily aimed at those small business owners or employees who put up a small site themselves without any thought to Search Engine Optimization or search engine visibility.

If you do the basics above, your site will be more effective and you should fare better in local search results.

If you’ve done this and you’re now aware of the results a professional Local Search Engine Optimization campaign could bring to your business, contact Ontario SEO. We’ll give your site a free audit and send you a written report with an assessment of your site’s current level of optimization as well as recommendations on how you can rank better and be found more often when potential customers are looking for your services. Don’t let them find your competitors first.

If you’re a small business owner in London or Southwestern Ontario, talk to us about internet marketing, website promotion and Search Engine Optimization. We can ensure that you will be found when local customers are searching the web for products or services that you can supply.

SEMPO have released their 2000 State of the Market report and there are some nuggets that should be of interest to small businesses in London, Ontario.

You can grab the summarized version of the report here and have a quick look. To me there were a few points that stood out:

• Almost a third of respondents has tried locally targeted search ads and thinks “it works great”
• More than three out of five marketers (62%) are willing to pay a premium of 1%-5% for local targeting, up from two in five advertisers last year.

None of this should come as a surprise but it does confirm the increasing focus on local Search Engine Marketing by non local companies. This really reinforces the need for local businesses to get a foothold in their local market. Even if its not as part of a larger marketing campaign, at least do it so that searchers are not finding your competition after 15 seconds of easy searching.

Also not surprising were the dominant players in the local SEO/SEM market:

• Google AdWords Local Targeting has solidified its lead as the most popular local search advertising program, used by 80% of advertiser respondents.
• Some 56% of advertisers reported using Yahoo! Search’s Local Match paid placement program.

With the way local search is trending it still surprises me that most of the small businesses I discuss local search marketing with are still spending their local advertising budget with the yellow pages or printed classified ads.

If you’re a small business owner in London or Southwestern Ontario, talk to us about internet marketing, website promotion and Search Engine Optimization. We can ensure that you will be found when local customers are searching the web for products or services that you can supply.