Archive for category: Digital Marketing

Here’s a question: What value do you put on your business being seen by prospective customers?

Most of you will agree that the first thing you do these days when looking for a product, restaurant, or business is turn to Google. Working in digital marketing and specialising in local search has shown me two things: how effective it is to be fully present to your target market, and how few businesses utilise this free tool to make sure every possible user can find them.

Having a Google My Business listing allows you to present key information to customers, convincing them to continue to the website or contact you for more information. The best way to engage a user is through images. We’re told not to, but everyone judges the book by its cover, and business listings are no different. So why not make your business ‘cover’ the best it can be?

 

Power Of The Masses

Google has realised that a lot of business owners either don’t have the time, or just don’t know, to fill out their business listings. This is probably why they created the Local Guides community, allowing locals to not only leave reviews but to contribute edits or add to missing information on local business listings.

Out of intrigue I joined the Google Local Guides back in May 2016 and started adding pictures and reviews to the places that I had been.

As a digital marketer I found it fascinating that Google was now ‘Crowd Sourcing’ local business information. Obviously, for me there was a professional benefit here, to find out the information that Google was wanting to gather before making it available as an attribute on listings.

Having now contributed reviews, photos and verified other Local Guides’ information, I’ve worked my way up the Levels Google put in place unlocking different features along the way. One of my favourite features are the questions that Google asks about the places you’ve been, such as accessibility or what the place is known for. So much information has already been gathered that recently, Google has used the questions that it’s gathered from the local guides to add it’s Attributes feature to Google My Business.

“Google My Business Listings with photos and a virtual tour are twice as likely to generate interest.”

This brings my back to my original question of the value of a prospective customer and how they see us. While writing this article I surpassed 2 million photo views, and though the views aren’t for one particular business, there are some heavy-hitters who have seen traffic as the main image shown for their listing.

From restaurants to distilleries and museums, customers want to be able to see what’s there before arriving, so why not make sure you populate your listings with professional imagery that generates interest in visiting?

To truly give customers an immersive experience before arrival Google’s integration of its Street View app has even made it possible for Local Guides to contribute 360° photos to a listing.

 

Doing so and contributing over 50 approved images then leads to becoming a Google Street View Trusted Photographer (which I happen to be), allowing photographers to transfer the rights/ownership to Businesses.

So whether it’s a photo of items on your menu or a 360° of your roof-top terrace, make sure that your business listings show your potential customers everything your business has to offer, and you’ll be rewarded with more visits and more customers.

Moz have recently come out with Moz Local, a new tool that checks all of your Local Listings and makes sure that they are up to date and accurate. You enter your business’s URL and Postcode and you’re given a pretty graph that telling you what’s complete, incomplete, inconsistent or any duplicates you may have. Sounds simple, right?

Getting the graph and information was free (which is the best price ever for a tool and pretty useful to get a general idea of where your weaknesses may be), but what Moz then offers is to get these all sorted for you, in one fell swoop. I thought I’d give it a go.

My initial use of Moz local has been good so far. Previously I would have had to think about all the places that our company could be listed and then see about creating an account on each one of them and then updating them one by one.

It took me around 5 – 10 minutes or so, from clicking on “Start Using Moz local” to entering business information (and asking Nick for the company credit card) to being on the dashboard with a quick click through tour of what’s available.

Filling Out Content

Adding Mackerel’s information was quite easy and straightforward. Overall there are four sections to fill out : Basic Information, Additional Information, Additional Contact Information and Advanced.

Basic Information is fairly straightforward, however under the categories section we have a message from Moz saying :

“Enter between 1 and 5 categories for your business separated by commas. Categories should be added in the order of importance for your business. Checkout Category Research to see all categories.”

To which I thought,  “Great, where do I find these categories?“ but there was no link on the page. Having a look later, I found my answer in the Moz Q&A Forum. It’s here by the way: https://moz.com/local/categories .

Additional Information seems to be related to Foursquare which doesn’t really apply to us but I do have a few clients in mind. Here you’ve got a 150-character Description, Opening Times, Photos (which you add using URLs), and Payment Types.

Additional Contact Information  is just in case you want to add extra numbers, secondary lines, mobile and Fax (apparently still a thing).

Finally there’s your Advanced section which asks for a URL to your logo, a display URL, Social Media URLs, any External Media URLs, Promotions (links to menus, product, discounts), Brands you stock, Certifications, Neighbourhood your listing is found, Containing Location (If you’re in a mall/shopping center) and a Store code (a unique ID for each of your listings to distinguish them from each other.

The Dashboard

When you first arrive at the Dashboard, you’re welcomed by a quick click-through tour telling you what each section does.  Your main sections here are: your Listings, Distribution, Performance, Visibility, and Reputation.

Each of your listings is set out nicely with your distribution score, and the progress of each of the local listings that Moz Local has sent your info to. I immediately saw a jump as some as the listings updated straight away, but Moz does then tell you that some could take a couple of weeks and you’ll get an e-mail when it’s all up-to-date.

Listings and Distribution cover your general information that you’re looking at getting updated.  Performance, Visibility and Reputation however, are extras that you can purchase that allow you to get your Google Analytics and other Insight information in the same place. When you click on these, get to use these on a trial basis to check them out, though it seems to take a little while for them to get up and running.

Almost there…

The largest annoyance that i’ve had so far is that Moz Local is reporting I have possible duplicate listings, and saying that I should “Simply ‘close’” to delete them. There’s just one thing; there’s nothing to close.

For now I find that this is a great wee tool for getting all the info in one place, and saving a bit of time getting your company’s information distributed to the local listings. It seems like Moz still have a few bugs to sort out, but give it time and it will definitely be a resource to add to the proverbial Toolbox.

Over the last few years, Google’s focus on Local Search and Local Business has undergone a huge number of changes, with perhaps the most significant being the shift to Google My Business, which took on the mantle of Google Places, Google+ Local and the other myriad personalities their Local product had adopted. What has remained constant throughout these changes is that the service is ‘free’ to the business owner. However, if some recent tests are anything to go by, that might be about to change, and Google might be looking to take a major slice out of the small business web site market.

The Background

For many years Google has featured some sort of map-based listings in its organic search results, and over the years the format of the product, its name and its positioning has changed. Starting out as Google Places, the product has evolved and morphed to become in the most recent iteration Google My Business, which offers the business owner an ostensibly easier way to manage the profile for their business. The product is now tightly integrated with Google+, and from our experience is certainly easier to manage than it has been. Complaints abounded for previous iterations – business owners often found their details out of date, despite having updated them; claiming profiles for business was often a tortuous process; from time to time business profiles were hijacked and owners had to fight to get them back and there seemed little rhyme or reason to when, how and where these listings would show up in search results.

Sitting against these changes are two broad market developments:  firstly the decline of print-based local advertising and the growth of mobile. Looking at the first of those, for many years the Yellow Pages, or the Thomson Directory was the first port of call for anyone looking for a local service. Google’s growth and huge market dominance has – for want of a better description – utterly destroyed the Yellow Pages, leaving the old book format completely redundant. Whereas previously business owners could rely on the Yellow Pages to find customers and services respectively, nowadays Google is where people go, and Google AdWords has become the de facto source of business for many of these companies. As an example, I spoke to a locksmith in Edinburgh who happily (I’ll emphasise that: happily) pays Google around £600-£900 a month as it’s such a strong source of business.

In a slightly ironic twist of fate, the Yellow Pages morphed to become Yell.com, and from there became Hibu, which offered to manage Google AdWords campaigns and build up web sites on behalf of small businesses – thereby feeding the very company that had destroyed it.

The growth of mobile also plays an important role – users on mobile devices often use them to locate local services such as cafés, restaurants, service providers and others, and Google has worked hard to react to this. Search results are mobile-oriented, Ads are more suited to mobile devices and after Apple developed its own Maps product for iOS and Mac OS X, Google released an excellent Google Maps app which has a huge user base. The fight for eyeballs is clearly on, but what about the fight for revenue?

The Puzzle, and a possible solution

As I’ve mentioned, barring AdWords, all Google’s Local products are free, and to me it has been something of a conundrum that Google has never really tried to monetise the product as – let’s face it – they are very good at driving revenue from practically every single other product they put out. There’s clearly a market out there, as hibu’s existence attests, and other players such as Johnston Press are getting in on the act in the UK, so why not Google?

An eagle-eyed observer in the USA may have the answer: they recently noticed Google testing a completely paid-for set of Local Listing Ads, effectively turning a 100%-free product into a 100%-paid-for product. Cast your eye over the screenshot here and you’ll see three maps-based ads for ‘Stores for gas grills near you’, which features Lowe’s, hhgregg and Walmart. All three are ads, all three will cost the retailer if someone clicks.

 

Of course, Google tests product variations all the time, so this on its own isn’t definitive, but if you consider some other recent developments and the language Google is using, we might be able to pick a path to a future where Google’s local business products become a substantial source of revenue, and the likes of hibu are squeezed even further.

Yesterday, Google published an article on their Webmasters blog titled “Bring your local business online — no website required!”. The advice goes on to tell small business owners that they don’t need to set up their own web site, rather they can simply use Google’s products and others to gain a place on the web, market themselves, engage customers and grow. This of course is entirely true – it’s entirely possible to build a profile for your business using Google My Business, TripAdvisor, Laterooms.com, LinkedIn, Yelp or whatever web site or directory is suitable for your business and do well from it.

However, and it’s a BIG however, if all these local businesses are using Google products to market themselves, and if a Google My Business or Google+ page becomes the central hub for a small business’s marketing, in my view it’s almost inconceivable Google will not want to monetise that activity, or in other words take a cut of the transactions and relationships that ensue. Google has already been enormously successful in its monetisation of web search traffic, and the huge recent developments in Google Shopping show both that there is plenty more to come in terms of innovation and there is also plenty more to come in terms of what will be free and what will be paid-for traffic.

The search engine is superb at understanding what is and is not a commercial search query, so whilst I’m wary of making sweeping predictions, I don’t think it will be long before we see the same intelligence being applied to local business’ Google+ and Google My Business Presences, and business owners being given the choice of paying Google for leads, enquiries and business, or staying free and finding themselves relatively invisible on Google properties.

Local SEO – End of the Road?

An elephant in the room with all of this is the impact on Local SEO and those who make their living providing such services to local businesses. Clearly, if Google ’s Local Listings move to a 100%-paid model, the landscape will shift dramatically, and the ability of Local search experts to promote their clients may diminish, which in turn would reduce their income. This is a larger subject area, and worthy of a deeper exploration, so watch out for a longer blog post on that in due course.

In the meantime, interesting times for all concerned!