Ionadas Local and Sentient Services just published the results of an eye-tracking study on the (old as of 10/27/10) Google Local SERPs that is certainly worth a look. Here’s a summary of the results and some screenshots:

1. People seem to be ignoring the maps
2. This is probably one of the reasons why GOOG moved the maps to the right in the new Place SERPs

Here are four screenshots from the study:

7 Pack w/o Top Ad Unit

7 Pack w/Top Ad Unit

3 Pack w/Top Ad Unit

7 Pack Below Organic Results

This research and this report are © 2010, ionadas local LLC and Sentient Services, LP.

It is very common for business owners to dismiss the internet. Many people still hold to the old beliefs in marketing, and are convinced that only ads on TV, the Yellow Pages, radio, or print media are valid ways of promoting their business. This couldn’t be further from the truth. What has really happened in the world of marketing is that online small business marketing has actually become the best return on investment option available to a business looking to promote their services. What remains is for more business to realize the opportunities which will become available to them as soon as they consider the internet a valid way to market their services.

There are several ways to convince business owners that the internet is the most advantageous media for them to pursue in terms of their marketing. The first way to do this is by example. It is always important to have access to success stories. When you can point to businesses that have expanded their operations or become more profitable since they started marketing online, it goes a long way to helping convince business owners that they can also profit from online marketing. A business owner should also take the time to talk to peers or colleagues to find out what benefits they have had when they started marketing online. The results will be almost universally the same. Almost every business notices their business pick up once they commit to a proper online marketing effort.

The next way to show a business owner how the internet can work for them is to talk about the ROI which is involved with internet marketing. The cost of marketing and advertising through traditional media is incredibly expensive. Often, the return seen through this type of advertising, especially if a campaign is not maintained long enough, is very low. However, the ROI on internet marketing can be extremely profitable. There have even been studies done which have shown that email marketing is one of the best ROI investments that any company can make in their marketing funnel. When small business owners come to understand this, they start to see why marketing on the internet is something that they need to be strongly considering.

The next step in showing business owners why the internet is a valid means of marketing is actually being able to explain to them what kinds of services they should be paying for or receiving. The reason that many people fear advertising on the internet is because they don’t know exactly what types of services they should be pursuing, and what types of benefits they can expect to see from them. When a business owner starts to understand the value of social networking, social media, local business marketing and search engine optimization, they will start to see why they need to be marketing on the internet.

The final reason that local business owners should consider internet marketing is that the internet is how people find businesses these days. People no longer open up the yellow pages or flip open a newspaper to find a certain type of business. Instead, they pull out their cell phone, punch in a search term into Google, and see what businesses are suggested to them. This trend has been growing more and more over recent years, especially with the huge increases in the use of mobile web technology. The real truth of the matter is that, if a business doesn’t start consider online marketing, they won’t just find it difficult to grow their business, they could actually start to lose business as their competitors find ways to attract customers over the internet.

I was checking out Google Instant Previews – Google is now testing displaying images of web pages listed in SERPs to give users a preview so they don’t have to waste a click “pogosticking”, as Danny Sullivan calls it in his overview of the service. Of course, my first reaction was “what are the SEO implications?”

The service doesn’t appear to be fully baked yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but it appears that there may be a simple way to influence what gets displayed.

IMO the most significant feature of Instant Previews are the “Call Outs” – text that GOOG extracts from the page and shows enlarged on the thumbnail preview. See the screenshot below for the call out that appears for my blog when shows up for “local seo”:

It appears that the Call Out is using the first instance of “local seo” that appears on the page after the section of the code. So understanding what your top keywords are and optimizing that first set of text to display the right message for the Call Out could be an area ripe with opportunity.

But you can’t optimize this text for every possible query so let’s see what happens with the case of a keyword that is not “primary” for you. Check out what happens when I show up for “google local seo”:

In this case the Call Out found the first instance of the first two words in the query – “Google” & “Local” – that were in proximity to the third word “SEO”.

Understanding how to craft content that clusters these terms together in a way that explains the benefits of your service could make a difference.

These kinds of concepts are nothing new to SEO copywriters, but with Instant Previews, we now have yet another chance to use Google’s algorithm either to gain attention or to lose it.

BTW I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point GOOG releases a tag or microformat that allows sites to suggest what they want to show as their default call-out.

Small businesses don’t have limitless advertising budgets. In fact, in this day and age even the large corporations no longer have unlimited funds to spend on advertising and marketing. However, the limitations are amplified when looking at the challenges faced by a small business. This is why learning how marketing small businesses online works can be a huge asset for a business owner. It can also form the basis for forming an entire new business. So many small businesses can benefit from online marketing services that there is a huge market for companies to open their doors and provide internet marketing services to other small businesses in the area.

So, how are small businesses best marketed online? It is actually much easier than it might seem at first. Although there are many more complicated aspects to this type of business that can develop down the road, and as companies continue to improve their online marketing, most firms can actually accomplish a great deal with relatively simple methods.

The first step to marketing a business online is making sure that a business has a usable and effective website. The next step is to get people to that website. When starting internet marketing steps from the very beginning, we can divide the marketing efforts into three basic categories. These are search, social media or content and social networking. If all three of these elements can begin functioning, you are well on your way to marketing any small business online.

The search element of marketing a business online is based partly on the website you have, and partly on the content that you have pointing to that site, among other factors. One area to concentrate on is that of local search. Small businesses are likely going to benefit the most by customers who find them online and then come into their physical store to make a purchase. Utilizing tools like Google places and online Yellow pages listings is going to be extremely important for success in this particular type of online marketing.

The next way to market a business online is to start a strong social media campaign. This is going to mean creating lots of content for the business. The content can and should be about anything that is related to the niche that the business operates in, but there is one thing that it absolutely must not be. This is an advertisement. When writing articles or making videos which are part of an online marketing campaign, the one thing to never do is make them advertisements. This might seem counterintuitive to some people, but the most successful content is that which provides good information and content without seeming like it is pressuring people to visit a website or make a purchase. This is the type of content that will ultimately raise trust and the profile of the company that you are promoting.

The final leg of this initial primer on how to market a business online is social networking. Almost everyone is now connected via Twitter and Facebook. A business should take advantage of these same tools so that they can connect to their customers. This provides a business with a tool to engage in an ongoing conversation with their customers, which can be a very valuable way to get people interested in their services.

If you can combine a good website with a local search presence, a social media creation plan, and social networking profiles, you will be well on your way to successful promotion of a business online. These steps alone when followed for a reasonable amount of time can start to boost business for any company.

When a good client of mine took on an account that become a problem account, before they knew it they were receiving 28 voice mails very two hour of yelling and screaming. I was told “FIX IT”.

Upon my initial research, I uncovered that this is expensive and that the right systems should have been put in place in the first place. In any event, what I learned there is VERY little on the Internet in terms of a strategy for Online Reputation Management. There is A LOT in terms of content for explanation of this, but little for execution.

After two months of studying and recognizing that this is information that needs to out there, I decided to implement and test Online Reputation Management and Online Response Management for a Local Business.

In any event, I’ve created a very high level overview strategy. You bet your dollar that we’re on top of this and have tested, or are continuing to test, to create the best strategy for any, and almost all locally based businesses.

I orginally posted this on the Local Biz Builders forum here.

Online Response Management Strategy Overview

1.Monitoring Online Reputation complaints and inventory complaints and put system in Place
a.Twitter, Blogs, Forums, News, *Complaint Sites (like complaintnow.com, ripoffreport.com), Facebook, Yelp, Citysearch, Yahoo Local, Angie’s List, OpenTable and Epinions
i.TweetDeck
ii.Google Alerts
iii.Monitor This allows you to monitor and track keywords over multiple search engines.
iv.Domain Ranking for keywords (I use market samurai and WebCEO – free trial for both)
v.Manual searches using search engine tools ([allintitle: company name] – check blogs, forums, web 2.0, [site:www.facebook.com company name]
b.Inventory Negative PR –create inventory file, one week dated
c.Email – update website email flow for customer service, ops, sales

2.Push Down complaint sites off front page for search phrase [COMPANY NAME] – via SEO (Web 2.0 content works great). Create 2-3 sites with COMPANYNAME in domain (.org, .net, COMPANYNAME-reviews.com)

3.Respond to negative complaints online within 24 hours
a.Twitter, complaint boards, forums, email
i.Copy and paste responses – there are 4-6 catagories.
b.Need to track what we do.

4.Remove online complaints
a.Complaint boards, Wikipedia, (manual removal is very difficult and time consuming, better to direct to customer)
b.ReputationDefender.com – A service that attempts to help you get things being said online about you removed

5.Publish Positive Content (updated phase II to aid in this)
a.Blogs, forums, web 2.0, local reviews sites, complaint boards,
b.Blog Strategy on COMPANYNAME (weekly CEO voice, weekly customer service voice, COMPANY video content) – Implement Share features – T & FB
c.Ideas for content that would be shared among our courier industry – funny video, reports, industry analysis, (such as an extensive blog post), be the ‘camera person’ at events.

6.PR Campaign

Local Business can now Get A Boost in Google Maps. Google announced a new method of sponsored advertising: Google Boost enables local businesses to place pay-per-click ads in Google Maps.

The Google Map blue-marker ads have been tested for years (as far back as 2006), however the previous ad units were charged a fixed monthly fee.

Google Boost is available exclusively to Verified Places already listed in Google Maps. Businesses can participate in the program with a click budget of $50 or more per month. Ranking of sponsored listings is competitive, so Boost likely follows an auction-style placement similar to Google AdWords. Unlike AdWords, the keywords are predefined. This is likely based on business classification as the Boost Ads do not appear when searching for the business by name. It is important to note that sponsored advertising does not affect organic ranking and traditional local SEO efforts are still necessary.

Google Boost Ads show above the organic Map listings (i.e., red-marker A, B, C…). These ads may eventually appear in standard Google results when Google determines the search to be local, though the program is rolling out gradually.

For more information, visit the Google support page on Boost Ads. Of interest, an example screen shot on the support page shows a modified Google search result page that exclusively displays businesses, places and a map.

The program is currently limited to San Francisco, Houston and Chicago. If and when more widely available, Boost will have a notable shift local ad spending.

SEM savant Marty Weintraub has an excellent post on the dumbing down of the Google Adwords Keyword Tool.

Google owns the largest first-hand sampling of query data in many parts of the world. Now, breaking rank with 15+ years of holistic search engine open-source tradition, Google has decided marketers should no longer have easy access to the long, or even mid tail data (search inventory), unless the keyword has demonstrated “commercial” characteristics historically. Effectively, in tandem with the well-established user-herding “suggest” feature, this move consolidates Google’s semantic semi-monopoly into fewer keyword SKUs…

The revolution of search has traditionally been centered on our ability to discover how humans search, the words they use, in what order, the frequency thereof and other subtle semantic permutations. Unless we want to subscribe (in resignation) to Google’s dumb-ass shortening of the known language universe, this tool borders on useless. No more will Google’s sampling of human queries be easily available just for the asking.

As Marty points out in his post, this move provides a lot of opportunity to other keyword research tools, particularly Bing’s.

In the passage of time, there may be various reasons to remove your involvement with a business that you’ve previously claimed.  It may have unfortunately gone out of business, been handed over to another person to manager, or otherwise.  In one situation, we had another business owner take over and they went on to claim their listing in Google.  To prevent our content and information from being shown, we subsequently went to remove the verified listing from our account.  When doing so, I was presented with the option to completely remove the listing from Google Maps along with a requirement for additional PIN verification.  It should be noted that the listing had already been verified, showing statistics and in good standing.

We’re not clear if this secondary verification was required because another account claimed the listing or if Google relied upon other signals that affirm that the businesses is alive and kicking.  Previously, in other situations, we had carte blanch to remove any verified listing from Maps.  In any event, kudos Google for this additional security measure.  This essentially prevents unlawful business listing hijackers to maliciously remove competitors from the Maps.

Anyway, we selected the correct, first option.

In turn, after a few minutes, our content was removed from the record and the listing compressed to the new business owners information.

Fire up an Incognito browser, do some local searches and you might see some new Google local SERPs. It looks like Google may have unleashed the new All-Google-Places local layout they had been testing in more cities.

Thus far I have found two layouts:

- 2 web results followed by a 7 pack with the map on the right side

- 7 pack with map on the right side followed by a series of related category and location tag links

- 7 pack with map on the right side with no category or location tag links

I am still seeing the normal 7 pack layout when I use a browser with cookies turned on, even if I am logged out of Google.  I’ll keep digging around.  Please let me know in the comments if you are seeing these and where you are located. Pizza in San Francisco 2 web results followed by 7 Place Page results.  Map on the side.

Dentists in Burbank, CA 2 web results followed by 7 Place Page results.  Map on the side.

Restaurants in Chicago 7 pack with map on left nav followed by category & location tags

Taxis in New York City 7 pack with map on left nav – no category & location tags

David Rodecker, founder and CTO at LocalSplash reported last month that Google had hired 300 workers to focus on fixing Google Maps bugs.  We decided to test this new reporting system and have been very impressed with Google’s response.   “Last month when we reported that Google was hiring 300 workers to focus on Maps bugs I didn’t know how long until we see results.  The below message was performed using the Report a problem link and I had a positive response within 1 day.  Pretty impressive result.  You should use this for any bugs that we come across.”

Below is the reply by a Google Maps team member:

Hi Dave,

Your Google Maps problem report has been reviewed, and you were right! We’ll update the map soon and email you when you can see the change.

Report history
Problem ID: 2882-085A-2530-5884

Your report: 25-1539 E Main St, El Cajon, CA 92021 is not an address. The prefix “25-” is not needed.

–
Thanks for your help,
The Google Maps team