Three Deep Marketing - St. Paul, MN » Local Search Optimization

Three Deep is Google’s Favorite Place

Jeff Sauer — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:22:23 +0000

We are Google’s favorite place! You read it correctly! After years of hoping, prodding, sweat and tears, I can finally announce to that Three Deep Marketing is Google’s favorite place in the United States, and presumably the world.

I would like to thank my family, friends, acquaintances, complete strangers and people who I might meet in the future; we couldn’t have done it without you!

In the mail today, Three Deep received a package from Google containing a large window sticker with a bar code, like the image shown to the right. I have been anticipating this package for the past 10 days; ever since reading this announcement from Google. I knew it was only a matter of time before Google would send us an affirmation of how much they truly like our organization.

What does it take to be Google’s favorite place? A strong presence for your local business listing. Those fortunate enough to receive this designation and a package in the mail (about 100,000 exclusive businesses) have worked hard to optimize their local business listing on Google so that they often show up in local business oriented search results.

How can you get your business to be one of Google’s favorites? There’s actually a pretty simple process to follow in order to become a Google favorite:

Claim your Local Business Listing (you’d be surprised how many businesses do not get this far)
Add Vital Business Information - Things like your web address (remember to use tracking url’s for maximum value), phone number (unique tracking number encouraged here as well), business hours, category of business (this is the trickiest part, since they don’t always describe your business perfectly), photos, videos, coupons and more
Optimize your Company and Service Descriptions for Search - Claiming your listing is easy, but make sure that you use relevant keywords in your description so that people can find you
Make Searchers Choose YOU – The typical local search results page has 10 results; why should they choose you over your competitors? Do you have the best prices? Most convenient location? Friendliest service? What is it about your company that should make them choose your listing?
Define Success – What makes your listing successful? An impression of your listing? A click through? Requesting driving directions? Phone calls? Sales? Defining the action you want your visitors to take, and then optimizing around this goal will result in an amazingly effective marketing campaign

If your business follows these simple steps, then Google might find you worthy of being their favorite places as well.

At Three Deep, we have been “eating our own dog food” and spent a lot of time optimizing our Google local business listing so that we can easily be found. The results are humbling: our listing is viewed by thousands of people each month, and driving directions are requested hundreds of times each year. All for a marketing company with no retail presence or “drop in” potential.

Through optimization, we were able to build a presence around our company using Google’s free local business listing tool. Now we have an awesome Google sticker on our front door that makes our business look even more awesome than it did before.

For more information on what you can do with a Google Favorite Place sticker, check out this video:

Automated SEO Services like Website Grader – Thoughts

Jeff Sauer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:07:34 +0000

A few weeks ago, we received a concerned call from one of our clients. Apparently, they had been solicited by another company that offers similar online marketing services to Three Deep, and they were directly questioning the work we had done for them. The solicitors did a great job of undermining our efforts by simply putting the URL through a free service called Website Grader, printing a screen shot, and clicking send.

Frankly, they made a compelling argument; the grade the site received was not great by any means, and was a definite cause for concern at a surface level. Nobody wants to receive a poor grade. At the same time, I was equally concerned with the implications of these results, because I personally built much of the site, entered content, and did a quality job of making the site search friendly for the their local market and the services they offer.

It looks bad, but it's not really THAT bad

I have spent many hours with this client over the past several years, working hard to make sure they were happy and that we were meeting their objectives. So when the work that we had done on this website came into scrutiny, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Were we not properly servicing this client? How much work will it take to fix?

Rather than dwell on the poor score we received, I spent the next 45 minutes skimming through the criteria that this site used to grade SEO scores (honestly, I feel the criteria is very out of date and I don’t agree with much of it). I then found the elements of the site receiving poor grades (90% of the grade comes from home page only) – “fixed” it – and reran the grading program.

Voila! In no time I had increased the score by 51%! Now the site was no longer a laughing stock, but actually a leader among its sitegrader peers.

But what exactly changed on the site during those 45 minutes to actually make this site better for SEO?

Yay Optimization!!

Not much in my opinion. I really don’t think these changes (mostly cosmetic and structure based) will have a big effect on the search rankings of our client… but we will surely be monitoring Analytics to prove that this is the case.

There are clear lessons to be learned from this story by SEO’s and clients alike. Taking this advice will surely help you achieve better results and more meaningful client/agency relationships than any “grade”:

1) It’s easy to poke an SEO agency in the eye, because there is always room for further optimization. Just as soon as a site becomes fully “optimized” toward a certain set of search engine algorithmic criteria, the next set of changes will occur – rendering these recommendations less than optimal. True optimization of a website is an iterative process, and should be treated accordingly.

2) We are often pulled in several directions trying to satisfy all of the objectives that a client wishes to achieve on their home page; and many of these elements trump SEO focused recommendations. As a result, your client may be very happy with the service you provide, but the site is still achieving a less than optimal grade.

I like to think of this give and take the same way as the famous Joel Spolsky quote about usability (which can easily be applied to search):

“Usability is not everything. If usability engineers designed a night club it would be clean, quiet, brightly lit, with plenty of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms. But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly pouring beer on each other.”

3) For incumbent SEO agencies, it is imperative that you defend your turf. Even if you can easily debunk the merits of a service like websitegrader.com, you should still spend that extra hour during development time grading your site against this service. A little effort on the front end will save you hours of client frustration in the long run. Your services can only be called into scrutiny so many times by your client (no matter how valid), before their perception of your agency begins to go south.

4) If you are on the client side, we highly recommend that you run your site through these tools to get a better perspective of how your agency is performing. At the very least, a good agency will do whatever it takes to promptly rectify any issues you bring up.

While I personally take the rankings provided by websitegrader.com with a grain of salt, I have also learned a very clear lesson: spend an extra hour running your site through these tools before you launch. It may seem like a tedious use of time while you’re doing it, but it will save you many more hours in frustration in the future and help give your clients peace of mind and keep them HAPPY!

Home Improvement SEO: Three Deep in Remodeling Magazine

Jeff Sauer — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:56:26 +0000

Recently, our National Sales Director for Home Improvement Contractors, Tom Audette was interviewed by the folks at Remodeling Magazine for their article, Web Marketing Makeover. You can view the article here.

For the most part, the article provides a high level overview of what you can expect from your website, how you can refresh your website to receive more leads, and how many companies are relying on the web as their primary lead source.

While I agree with the general tone of the article (contractors need to have a web presence, NOW), I can’t help but feel as if they may have overstated a few points and left out some vital pieces of information.

Particularly, there are several points made in the article that I would like to refute (as well as several true statements):

Myth #1: SEO Is Cheap

“Companies can get optimized for less than $2,500,” says Martin Gould, of marketing and communications company Focalize Consulting, in Cooper City, Fla. “But you can also literally spend nothing, since most high school juniors can do this.

As the old adage goes, you get what you pay for. While you may certainly be able to find a company that will optimize your site on the cheap, what kind of results will they deliver? How long will these results last?

In a recent post, I lamented the fact that one of our least successful SEO engagements occurred when we developed and optimized a site initially, but did not have an ongoing SEO maintenance contract in place to continually improve the site. After an initial push and lots of traffic being driven by SEO, our clients rankings and traffic declined gradually until very few search visits trickled in each month.

The fact is, it takes time and money to optimize your site. Sure you might be able to pay someone $10 an hour to work on your site (or nothing if they are still in high school), but chances are that you won’t like the results and they won’t last long term.

Myth #2: SEO is a One Time Project

The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, and as a result, you may need to tweak your site often in order to stay at the top. While anyone can learn about search engine behavior and get a site to achieve quality rankings (heck, even a high school juniors can do it for free!), staying at the top of the search engines requires spending a lot of time reading about search, experimenting, and delivering results.

While you may be able to receive some initial results from the high school junior’s optimization, what happens to your site rankings when they go away to college? What about when they stop reading about search engine changes and your rankings suffer? What if they get greedy and implement tactics that get your site banned by Google? What happens when Jr. wises up and realizes the value they provide your company?

You may certainly achieve a boost in your SEO traffic by undergoing a one-time optimization, but chances are these results won’t stick around forever. Hiring an agency to stay on top of the search engine marketplace is often more cost effective than hiring a full time employee… but obviously more expensive than an intern.

As for the high school junior analogy… I think that this population segment is a little more suited toward blinging out MySpace.com profiles than optimizing your website for the search engines.

Myth #3: Google Analytics is a “program” that you “download”

“Programs such as Google Analytics or Alexa — both free downloads — tell you how many visitors are coming to your site and how they behave when they get there. They also point to ways in which you can improve site design and content.”

I’m sorry, but I just found that to be hilarious. Google Analytics is a SaaS application (Software as a Service) that is hosted in the “clouds” – No download required. In fact it’s not even a program… just a website with an amazingly intuitive interface and some very actionable data. We highly recommend that ALL companies place it on their website; especially contractors.

Also, Alexa hasn’t been relevant since the early 2000′s (and some say it was never accurate). You should try compete.com or quantcast.com if your site is large enough… or just focus less on the vanity of your traffic rank, and more on GETTING TRAFFIC!

True Statement #1: You Need Someone to Make Web Analytics Reports Actionable

‘Web marketing expert Gamse suggests that business owners familiarize themselves with analytics programs and manage their sites accordingly. “You have to have someone who can look at those numbers and create actionable intelligence,” she says.’

She had me at actionable analytics. As we have said many times in this blog, collecting data for your website is a great start. However, this data doesn’t do much for your company if you don’t apply it to your company and make it actionable.

True Statement #2: Customer Ratings Enhance Your Online Presence

“Click on any one of 10 subject headings on Eberle Remodeling’s website, for instance, and a link on the left side of the screen says, “Click here to view our customer satisfaction ratings,” and steers you to the company’s GuildQuality page, which incorporates responses from 72 clients and gives the remodeler a “100% Recommended” rating.”

Remodeling any part of your house can be a very expensive proposition… and a lot of trust goes in to your visitors even contacting your company the first time. Adding reviews and ratings from other satisfied customers helps establish trust in your online presence. It’s all about trust and transparency online, so help visitors make informed decisions by providing ratings from previous customers (but make sure that these reviews/ratings are easy to see and understand).

As an avid online shopper, I often make purchase decisions without ever seeing a physical product. These decisions rely 100% on peer reviews (both negative and positive). Help online visitors trust your company by incorporating feedback from their peers into your web presence.

Closing Point

Since most of my experience working with contractors comes from online initiatives, I would love to say that all you need to do is “go online” and all of your lead generation problems will be solved. However, that’s not the case for most contractors.

For most contractors, online leads should simply be a component of your well balanced marketing mix. Relying too heavily on one single tactic is probably not the most responsible way to market your business. In fact, we have clear evidence that your online marketing efforts are significantly enhanced when they are tied closely to all of your offline marketing. All of your TV, Radio, Newspaper, Yellow Pages, Canvassing efforts can help bring visitors in to your site through direct visits and searches for your brand name.

Make sure your website does a good job of converting these visits into LEADS.

SEO Q&A – What Was Your Worst SEO project?

Jeff Sauer — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 14:16:46 +0000

Several of the SEO Q&A questions coming up in future weeks come from various RFP’s that we have been asked to answer. Now that this process is over, we are displaying some of our highest quality answers on the blog.

Worst SEO project? What went wrong and why?

The worst SEO project Three Deep worked on last year (2008) was for , a nationally recognized company that sells . This project was actually successful at first, and we are proud of our implementation. However, with the way our contract was structured, we did not set the client or ourselves up for continued success.

This project was not successful in the long term, because our contract was purely for creation of a web site that was search friendly and followed SEO best practices, and did not contain any type of ongoing maintenance retainer. Three Deep believes that the key to SEO is not only making sure that your site is search optimized, success also comes from actively managing the SEO of the web site, and constantly making improvements to ensure ranking sustainability.

In the case of , we search optimized the site and noticed a huge uptick in search visitors. Thousands of new visitors came to the site each month through search, and hundreds of them converted. Over the next several months, we noticed that traffic steadily declined, and now the site receives around 50% of the search traffic that it received mid-year. Now the client is asking us for a maintenance retainer so that we can uplift the site back to the high levels of visitors it achieved earlier in 2008.

The lesson that our client gained is that SEO can never be a one-time project. It requires consistent maintenance as search algorithms change regularly. What worked one month may not work the next month. Three Deep is here to help your business adjust with each change to ensure that your site is consistently reaching your target audience.

Why Most Local Search Resellers Fail Their SMB Clients

Tom Audette — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:23:21 +0000

Author’s note: I started writing this article in reaction to a recent study published, and I ended up writing so much that I needed to break it into two posts! You are currently viewing part 1, and part 2 will be released first thing Monday morning.

The other day, a report came out from Borrell and Associates saying that most small businesses (SMB) that try local online search advertising almost universally give it up after 6 months. More specifically:

50% give up within the first 90 days

90% quit within 6 months.

While these numbers are certainly staggering, the important thing to note here is that nearly all of these companies who do not find success with search advertising are entering into the search world with the help of resellers; companies that simply re-sell clicks on Google and other search engines, while adding little value to the advertising company beyond being another hand in the pot. These resellers include local yellow page companies and other online advertising companies like Yodle and Reach Local.

The report wasn’t so much a critique of local search or paid search as a tactic, rather an expression of frustration with some of the service providers that have entered the space in the last 12-18 months. Personally, I started to anticipate this over-saturation of the marketplace as soon as Sams Club started offering Google AdWords discounts alongside gallon drums of Nacho Cheese.

I had my inclinations that it would fail, because search advertising is still so nuanced and micro-targeted, that it can never be attacked with a “big box retailer” mentality. This is why big box resellers have a 90% churn over a 6 month span.

While local and paid search might not be right for all SMBs, success can be had for the right companies in the right industries. For example, we have a number of home improvement clients that are now driving up to 30% of their revenues from online advertising. However they are not getting these results from yellowbook.com, or Reach Local or Yodle. In fact, most of our clients tried the resellers, and dropped them before becoming a Three Deep client.

The truth is that online lead generation has been around for quite some time, and most of our current clients have been engaged in this form of lead generation for several years now, to varied degrees of success. This concept is reaffirmed every day when we talk to potential clients who verbally display their battle scars, alongside stories of ineffective marketing campaigns, and a slight chip on the shoulder toward the concept of online lead generation.

This leads us to the point of our post: Why do Local Search resellers fail their SMB clients? I’ll give you 3 big reasons:

1.) They focus their effort and measure their success on just generating clicks — not actual leads.

2.) They make little or no attempt to understand how their client’s business actually works.

3.) They fail to help their client understand whether their investment is actually producing for them.

I have a unique perspective in that prior to joining Three Deep, I was one of those SMBs. As the marketing director for a medium sized home improvement company, I was responsible for all media buys for the company. I managed an annual marketing budget of over $1mm, with about 11% of that going to online search — mostly through PPC on Google. Even though I had engaged a very good search management consulting firm to run our PPC program for us, I still was called upon by at least 4-5 online companies a month.

What were all of these guys selling? One word: Clicks. All the sales pitches I sat through from resellers were essentially the same; they boiled down to how many clicks per month were they going to guarantee me for $x per month. If you are new to online advertising, those click numbers can be pretty intriguing.

700 clicks per month for $1500 — Where do I sign up????

In part 2, we will discuss the difference between clicks and conversions… and what it means to YOUR business

SEO For Small Business Q&A – Where to Start?

Jeff Sauer — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 11:59:51 +0000

Got a SEO question from my cousin Paul last week that I feel represents a fairly common question coming from SMB owners about how to get their site found on Google. Republishing the question and response (with identifying details removed), since this is sound SEO advice that applies to just about any small business owner in any niche who is trying to increase their exposure within their locality.

Question:

Hi Jeff,

I have a business partner that set up a website and he is unclear how to get more ” meta tags ” for his site.
Can you give me a quick explanation of what he should tell his web designer to do in order to get more web hits in general.

Let me know.
Thanks dude.
P

Response:

Hey Paul,

From browsing the site, I can see that there are quite a few things they could do to improve. Most of it doesn’t have to do with Meta Tags, since they are no longer given much authority by search engines to determine rankings. I would say that the biggest opportunity this site has to capitalize on the search engines is to optimize the site for local search. As you have probably noticed recently on Google, they are really pushing localized listings in the search results, and this will be an even bigger trend in the future.

When it comes to local rankings, the biggest thing site owners can do on their site is to make sure they Google can tell that it’s local! This involves listing your physical address on the site in plain text (which they do well currently), making sure that all of the page titles and headlines contain your city name AND relevant keywords, and just overall making it quite clear from the content on your site that you do XXX work in YYYY city.

In this case, they need to do a better job of saying that they do Real Estate Management in New York City. On the home page, there is no mention of this (it’s in the header image, but that’s not actual readable text by Google). The key is to mention what you do and the city you do it in as many times as possible without overloading the page with keywords and making it look like you are trying to game the system. The content on the site needs to make sense as well, because otherwise nobody will click on the search results in the event that these text changes actually do improve their rankings.

Of equal importance for local search is to register their business/web site with all of the local business sites available on the web and create a profile. There are hundreds of thousands of these sites, and they all contribute to improving local rankings with Google. They also provide a bonus of driving traffic and phone calls directly from the local business listing . Currently, here are the top 10 they should target:

1. infoUSA
2. Superpages
3. Localeze
4. YellowPages
5. Yelp
6. InsiderPages
7. Niche Industry Sites (BBB, Vertical Directories)
8. Acxiom
9. Yahoo
10. Citysearch

Business listings should also have city and keywords clearly written, and provide other useful and distinguishing information about the business.

This should be enough to get them started… let me know if they would like a personal consultation.

- Jeff

P.S. For those of you looking for more information about Google Maps and their Local Business Center, check out this new video that Google recently published on the topic: