Internet Marketing Centricity

A New Resource for Local Search

If you're a small business owner, I recommend you check out this new website designed to "connect you with customers in your area." I first read about MerchantCircle in a post on John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing Blog. There's also a CNET brief as well.

The biggest item that caught my eye from their website, in addition to the service, is the major horses this start-up has behind it:

MerchantCircle is led by an experienced team and funded by investors who share our vision and believe in the power of local businesses. Our backers include Rustic Canyon Partners, Bank of America Ventures and Disney's Steamboat Ventures, who each bring their specialized expertise to help us develop and improve your MerchantCircle experience.

You can sign-up for free - it takes 5 to 10 minutes. There are other services for $.

Local Search: How Google Trends Can Help You Identify Regional Differences

In my previous post, I introduced you to the new Google Trends tool. In this post, I'd like to discuss an example of how you can use this tool to focus your keyword strategy for local search. This example discusses how you can use Google Trends to select the best keywords or phrases for your specific target market geography.

I'll use my own company as an example. Terrakon Marketing, provides sales and internet marketing consulting services.  I'd like to optimize one of the Terrakon web pages for professionals and firms looking to enhance their sales knowledge. For purposes of this example, let's say I'm only concerned about professionals or firms based in St. Louis, MO.

Based on research, it appears the phrases "sales tips" and "selling tips" are good candidates to optimize my web page around. But which phrase would work better for my target market in St. Louis, MO?

In the past, I would have had to rely on one of the keyword tools that provide search results estimates for the entire U.S. For example, if I use the Yahoo Keyword Selector, it tells me that "sales tips" was searched on 1,647 times in the month of April across the U.S. "Selling tips," on the other hand, was only searched on 686 times. So, based solely on information from the Yahoo Keyword Selector, I would most likely optimize my web page using "sales tips."

And as it turns out, using "sales tips" would not be the best decision. Google Trends, which shows  search results made specifically from St. Louis, MO, provides a different answer.

The Google Trends chart for sales tips vs. selling tips shows that I should optimize my web page using "selling tips" rather than "sales tips" because "selling tips" is searched on more frequently by searchers in St. Louis, MO. If I optimize my web page for "selling tips," then, I should see more visitors to the optimized page than if I relied on the Yahoo Keyword Selector tool which suggested "sales tips."

In St. Louis, MO, the difference between "sales tips" and "selling tips" is fairly slight. If I lived in Dallas or Denver, though, the phrase "selling tips" is significantly more popular than "sales tips". In Philadelphia and Salt Lake City, however, "sales tips" outperforms "selling tips," so someone looking to optimize a web page for those target markets would come to a different conclusion.

As I mentioned in my initial post, there are many shortcomings to the current version of the Google Trends tool. For example, your target city will not always show up in the top ten for search volume on the phrases you enter. In that case, you'll have to look to a "similar" city or region for guidance.

Overall, the Google Trends tool provides insight not available through other keyword tools. If you're small business owner with operations focused locally or regionally, I highly recommend that someone in your organization learn to use Google Trends to supplement whatever tools or methods you currently use to identify the best keywords for your web pages.

Local Search: Images Bring Your Yellow Pages Search to Life

According to a few recent surveys, over 30% of all commercial searches are categorized as local searches. That is, the searcher is limiting the search based on a geographic parameter such as city, zip code or neighborhood. The local search engine market should continue to grow rapidly in importance as MSN, Yahoo and Google all now provide local search capability.

A9 is taking an interesting step in local search by taking images of brick and mortar storefronts. If you search for "pizza" in Denver, CO, the results come back with a list of pizza restaurants and images of their store and surrounding area.

A9 has taken over 26 million images in 15 major cities. Someone actually drives a truck by each of the businesses with a camera mounted on top. Proprietary software and GPS automatically takes and catalogs the images.

This is pretty interesting stuff. What happens, though, if your business is located in a shopping mall or high-rise? They don't say. Perhaps you'll soon notice people walking around these locations with small cameras affixed to their heads. Maybe this will be a good business opportunity for someone to recruit the "mall walkers" who get their exercise by walking laps in the mall...