ionadas local Blog

Local Marketing, WordPress and SEO
  • Google Places Local Listing Ads on Pause

    Today, Google announced that they were suspending their trial of Local Listing Ads. No new signups are being accepted, and the current ads will cease running sometime in mid-December. My understanding is that advertisers are not being charged, even if their campaign ran beyond the thirty-day trial period.

    Google plans to use the lessons they learned to:

    make further improvements to our online marketing offerings for small businesses, and plan to release an enhanced version more widely in the near future.

    Mike Blumenthal reports hearing that click-through rates were low, but can’t imagine that Google wouldn’t have a paid offering in this area.

    I can’t help but think back to Google’s ill-fated Click To Call offering.

    I also suspect Google underestimated the amount of help local business owners would need, both pre-sale and post. Google simply isn’t configured to provide such customer service.

    Without question, Google will return to local paid listing, but I expect it to look very different than Google Local Listing Ads.


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  • Austin’s Top Google Searches

    Every year, Google announces the top searches for the year. This year, they added info on searches for particular cities. Here they are for Austin:

    1. gradespeed austin isd
    2. ut blackboard
    3. birds barbershop
    4. long center austin
    5. aplusfcu
    6. cap metro
    7. bass concert hall
    8. travis county jail
    9. austin radiological association
    10. acl 2009

    I’m sure Birds Barbershop gives a great haircut, but how the heck did they end up number three?


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  • The Case of the Missing Online Marketing Listings

    On November 5, 2009, something curious happened the the Google Universal results for geographic keywords in the Internet marketing space: they disappeared.

    Search on virtually any high traffic Internet marketing keyword, and add any city you can think of, and the 7-pack appears to be gone. I watch a number of these SERPs closely, and many of these keywords have shown Google Local results for well over a year.

    To test the wideness of this phenomenon, I searched on the following keywords:

    • online marketing
    • internet marketing
    • email marketing
    • search engine marketing
    • search engine optimization
    • seo

    using the following cities:

    • Austin
    • Dallas
    • Manhattan
    • San Francisco
    • Seattle

    Trying every combination of the two sets, not a single Google Maps listing was returned. Other vertical media types (notably News and Video) were sometimes returned, however.

    This change occurred the same time as the several hour long disappearance of phone numbers in the Google Local listings, but I suspect that is a coincidence.

    For many of these keywords, Google previously even assumed there was local intent.

    More general marketing keywords (e.g. [marketing san francisco]) are still returning Google Maps results. As are some longer tail keywords (including, fortunately, one for which I have the authoritative 1-pack).

    Almost three weeks have gone by, so it doesn’t look like a temporary error by Google. Such things usually resolve in a week or so.

    We can only assume that the change is a manual one by Google.

    But why?

    The SERPs for these marketing terms were a little bit spammy, but no worse than many other industries. And they were much cleaner than the locksmith SERPs.

    Google’s always had a tenuous relationship with the internet marketing community (unless, of course, you’re spending a ton of money on Google AdWords). They wouldn’t be targeting this industry directly, would they?

    Some might consider that evil.


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