More Changes for Google Local Business Places

Talking the time to make it as easy as possible for customers to review your business on a variety of sources just got a big shot in the arm. Google made the decision to place the third party reviews above the fold and above Google’s own reviews. Most people do not scroll so reviews that are placed directly on Google may not be seen. Potentially, your best reviews on Google will be hidden behind old content from years ago on third party sites. On the positive side, a review on Yahoo shows not only on Yahoo local, but in Google as well. Total exposure is the goal, not just showing well on Google.

The first third party site displayed is the review site that has the most reviews (opentable.com above), then up to two other third party sites (yelp.com & tripadvisor.com) are displayed.

It is somewhat technical, but Google has also announced the development of “Rich Snippets” for local search which means that testimonials placed on your website could be aggregated on Google Places and treated as a review.

Key take home points

• Create a review page to make it easy for people to see and review your business
• Consider updating testimonials on your website so Google will capture and place them on Google Places
• Do not concentrate on Google as the only place to direct good customers to review you.

My guess is that Google is continuing to develop Google places as the prime access point for smart phones to use for local business.  So keep up and continue to provide and link information about your business on a variety of local third party websites.

You & Stephen Cobert can put Yellow Pages on Notice!

In 2010, the properly informed Yellow Pages customer  has all the advantage in negotiating with any of the Yellow Pages Providers. Today advertising in Yellow Pages is only one of many ways new customers can learn about your products and services. You have strong alternatives and Yellow Pages knows it.

Yellow Page Providers need your business – Negotiate early & smartly and you will save big.

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With the use of the internet, the value of  that Dog Eared Yellow Pages Book by your customer’s phone has diminished (Is it still there?).  To create more value for their customers, Yellow Page Providers  have been creating a large variety of advertising services for the internet. With the attention Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are giving to local businesses, all the Yellow Pages Providers are fighting to maintain revenue.

The Yellow Pages Sales Person will provide proposals that seem to show tremendous value that Yellow Pages can deliver to a business on the internet, but without some basic knowledge of Local Search and Local Business Listings you cannot understand the real value of advertising services that Yellow Pages is offering. It is important not to take the information in Yellow Page Proposals at face value. You must analyze the information yourself. My observations in evaluating these proposals are:

• The Yellow Pages sales person has a lot of flexibility in pricing and services. You can push for a better deal than last year and get it.
• Yellow Page proposals can be a large list of services, but the cost is not broken down. This makes it hard to determine the value of any single part of the proposal.
• Even if you do not pay to advertise in the Yellow Pages, they need your listing and will not delete it.
• The statistical information presented in Yellow Page proposals can be out dated and skewed to increase the value of Yellow Pages.
• If the proposal includes paid search, the cost of having Yellow Pages administer the program costs 2 to 8 times the direct cost of using Google, Bing, Yahoo or Ask pay per click services.

The most important point is that in 2010, no matter what, re-negotiate your Yellow Page contract as soon as possible. At a minimum you should either pay less for the same level of advertising or get a whole lot more from your Yellow Page Provider than last year.

Below is an analysis I did for a client.  The client was presented a proposal from Yellow Pages that cost $600 per month and had three elements where we saw value; Yellow Page Book, YP.com, and PPC YP.  We included in our analysis our our best guess of the cost of each element  and placed the value for each element against the other Internet efforts that were being done for the client.  We doubled the value (Probability of Sale Factor) for Yellow Book and Local Search as customers that are looking to those places are more likely (more valuable) to call or purchase than just visitors to a website or people that click on PPC Ads.

The analysis above is in 4 parts (Cost Ranking, Initial Analysis, Refined Budget, Total Cost).  You can see each sheet by clicking on the item in the spreadsheet above.  Other than the ATT&T YP (Yellow Book), which was an educated guess, the other # of search actions were measured by Google Analytics.

The client’s final decision (As shown on Tab – Refined Budget) was to:

• Drop Yellow Pages (Save $600)
• Increase PPC Google ($90 to $250) to increase Customer Search Actions by 52 per month
• Overall reduced their marketing budget by $440 per month.

This reduced the cost per Search Action from an average of $0.24 per action to $0.12 per action or looking at it another way – Save 50% per customer action.

The current use of the Yellow Page book is way down, but some portion of consumers still use the Yellow Pages book to find products and services. I do believe that the Yellow Book and YP.com can increase calls and walk ins to a business. The question is at what cost?  In the example above, the client saw no value to the Yellow Page Book and decided to opt out of all paid promotion through Yellow Pages. I am not recommending that all businesses do this, each situation is unique, and there are good reasons to maintain ads in the Yellow Pages.

To evaluate, adjust or eliminate your yellow pages expenditure you need to look at each aspect of the proposal and determine that value of each part. Start with answering the question, “When I want to buy something the first thing I reach for is (the Yellow Pages, my computer, my smartphone, or ?????).” Do a gut check to determine your bottom line value of the Yellow Book to your customers.  Ask new customers how they found your business and when was the last time they took out their hard copy of the Yellow Pages.

Then use a spreadsheet like the one above to determine some relative value for each effort.  Here is a link to the spreadsheet I used above.  Use it to analyze your advertising program or call me to do it for you.

Have you been able to reduce your your Yellow Page cost and increase the value you get? Tell us your experience with Yellow Pages.

Get one - Use it like a Customer

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I saved $150 on Sunday (covering the cost of my Droid)  using my Smartphone in the purchase of a new washer and dryer. My wife and I started our search  at our local retailers. We wanted to make a decision right away. We learned about models and availability from the stores and sales people,  I used my Droid  to find other stores close by and had the same product, in stock at a much lower price.

So why should you care? In the old days before my Droid I would have purchased my washer and dryer at the second place we went to.   They would have the  product in a few days, but they were selling it slightly above the price I saw in Consumer Report. If I were a retail salesman who saw a customer openly tapping away on his Droid, I would have liked to know what information came up on that smartphone to drive the customer away. I am happy; I saved money and got the washer sooner, but that salesman was not so glad, he lost a sale!

The good news is that if you have been developing your local business web presence (As I have been suggesting), all that effort will be reflected in the information customers will find when they are surfing the internet on their smartphone. And when they are doing that research at a competitive store they may  leave your competitor and come to you.

Each year since 2008 has been touted as the “Year of Mobility” and it has not come, I am thinking that 2010 may finally be “THE YEAR” , but whether or not, it is definitely the year that retailers need to understand how 32% (65 Million) of cell phone customers are starting to use their Smart phones in the US.

Every retailer needs to get a smart phone and use it like a customer. Retail store owners need to be aware of what is showing up on potential customers’ iPhones, Blackberrys or Droids. Your competition is being channeled through smartphones. The worst part is when potential customers are routed to your competition right in front of you by these evil phones. On the other hand, if you see your customer bringing up information on their smart phone, and you know what they’re seeing  about your local competition , you have an opportunity to develop your strategy to sell against this situation.  This is another situation where a failure to understand the changing technology landscape can hurt your business, while knowledge of the technology can give you a leg up.

This is the first of a series of posts regarding the impact of Smartphones to the small business.  Stay tuned for discussions on:

• How to shop with a Smartphone
• What applications customers are using on Smart Phones
• How to discover what Smartphones are providing about your products and services
• Smartphones and restaurants
• Using Foursquare and Gowalla for fun and profit
• Strategies to take advantage of customers using smartphones

What is your experienced with customers with Smartphones? Have you been effective in dealing with the situation?

Google’s control is highlighted by the latest change of your Local Business Listing – The addition of “Nearby Places you might like”. This feature could have both positive and negative effects on your business.

Google’s Nearby Places could give your established customers the idea to go to a competitor, or you could be the competitor and steal their customer.

Top 7 list for Google Search "Upholstery Carlsbad, CA"

So what has Google done? In the middle of your Local Business Listing Google has placed a section that list other business that may be of interest to someone who is looking at your business. As an example I am going to look at Upholstery in Carlsbad.

Round 1 – Fanco’s Upholstery gets the attention

In the example, Francos Upholstery is the top of the list of Google local places for the search Upholstery near Carlsbad, CA.  Learn more about how to get on the top of Google Places here.

It is on the top so most people will click on it to find out more… It is clear Franco’s owners are  taking an active participation in embellishing their local business listing, they have a review and have created a coupon

Where would you click next?

But look what is below that – My favorite Upholstery store, La Costa Upholstery, with 15 reviews and a 5 star rating. My guess is most people will click on La Costa Upholstery at this point.

Round 2 – La Costa Upholstery steals attention

So now let’s look at La Costa Upholstery’s situation with the roles reversed. La Costa Upholstery does not have a coupon (They need to work on that), but if you look at the competitors in Nearby places (including Franco’s Upholstery) you would not click on any of them (Maybe We-R-Fabrics).

Would you click away from La Costa Upholstery?

So Google addition of Nearby places should help La Costa Upholstery and hurt Franco’s Upholstery.

So what does Google say about Nearby Places?

Here is Google’s description of what they are doing in Nearby Places in a local business listing:

You’ll notice that we do not limit these suggestions to places sharing any specific characteristic; instead, we use a broad set of signals to come up with what are hopefully the most interesting suggestions. We’re still working on refining these signals, so bear with us if your serendipitous discovery of a new place is even more unexpected than you’d anticipated.

The reality is that  most of the businesses listed in this section of your Google Places are going to be competitors to your business. Like all things on the internet, Google Places is going to continue to change, so you need to keep vigilant of those changes and benefit from those changes and make your competitors suffer.

What is a Local Business to do?

Given that you are not in control, what can you do?  The answer is to push the Nearby Places section as far down your page as possible. This means adding content, pictures, video and REVIEWS.  Here is the complete Local Business listing for La Costa Upholstery.  You have to read a lot of very positive info about La Costa Upholstery before you see the competition in Nearby Places.

Push the competition down the page

Round 3 – La Costa Upholstery keeps attention and get the phone call from the customer.

What are your first impressions of “Nearby places you may like?” Tell us if you you share our concern by leaving a comment below.

Make Google your friend - Steal Mcdonald's business

It is clear that my efforts have been helping the bike shop, but the great thing is this week I have been filling in for a friend and client at his Upholstery Shop, while he takes a long deserved vacation. It has been fun being dropped into a new business, but the real gratification is that I am seeing people calling and coming into the upholstery shop who found the business searching on the internet.

Dave doing the real work of Retail?

My clients tell me every day that new customers are finding them through our joint efforts on the internet, but I am always one person removed from the activity. Taking over the upholstery shop for a few days is validating the variety of people that use Search as their main way of finding businesses and services.

I thought it would be useful to discuss how all the Guerilla Marketing tools come together for the local bike shop. The example below was for the promotion of a bi-annual bike swap meet.

Bring new Customers to your Shop

Results:
More than 200 people came to the swap meet. People traveled up to 100 miles to participate. Present customers were able to sell old bikes themselves or consign bikes to the shop for the day. For the day (Sunday) sales were up almost 100% compared to the average Sunday during the Fall season. ~50% of the customers that consigned their used bikes to the shop used the cash toward purchasing new bikes over the next 10 days.

Tools used:

Shop Newsletter – Shop has a monthly news letter where the Swap Meet has been highlighted each month. A special short newsletter was sent on the Friday before the Sunday Swap meet. This special newsletter had a 30% increase in opens compared to normal monthly newsletter (38% compared to ~25%)

Consignment Used Bikes – The week before we took in an extra 10 bikes to increase our listing of used bike on Craigslist. Each bike listed on Craigslist had an image Ad discussing the Bike Swap Meet. Traffic from Craigslist for the week before the Swap Meet increase over 300% and equaled the normal traffic to the shop website from Google Search (~1,500 unique visitors).

Craigslist- Listing of a “Free Swap Meet” was promoted in both the local craigslist and the three other surrounding local craigslist areas for two weeks prior to the Swap Meet.

Shop Blog – Increased posts about the shop and new products coming from Trek. Unique visitors to blog were up ~50% for the week and traffic from blog to website increase ~20%.

Facebook – Event was placed on Business page and individual Facebook page over the two weeks prior to the event.

Twitter – Event was “tweeted” from the shop twitter account day before the event and then retweeted to several other twitter accounts – This activity was tracked to ~4000 followers.

Google Analytics – All internet activities were tracked for next day information of what was working and what was not working

Background:
This was the third swap meet for the bike shop. Other than the promotion effort outlined above there was no additional advertising money used for the event.

Conclusion:
The swap meet continues to be a great event to both drive existing customers to purchase new bikes by selling old and bring new awareness / new customers to the shop. The use of Craigslist was amazing for both the promotion of the swap meet and awareness of the bike shop.