ionadas local Blog

On Friday, Matt McGee reported in Search Engine Land that Google is building out a national real estate search engine.

In short, Google is now including every property listed in Google Maps within appropriate queries.

As of today, these listings seem to have rolled out to all “domicile”-type queries, such as “real estate”, “housing”, “apartments”, or “townhomes”. Oddly, they don’t seem to be coming up on the main SERP for any queries; you have to click on the Maps vertical search link.

Here are some screen shot examples:

• San Francisco Real Estate (Standard SERP)
• San Francisco Real Estate (Google Maps SERP)
• San Francisco Apartments (Standard SERP)
• San Francisco Apartments (Google Maps SERP)

I checked a number of listings for various cities. Naturally, I could not check them all, but it does not appear that any of the listings are coming up within Google Universal Search.

I can’t imagine that will stay the case. There’s very little traffic on those vertical engines (other than News and Images). If Google wants to drive traffic to those listings, they’ll have to blend them in with the main listings.

While the implications for realtors are not completely clear, one thing is for sure, “realtor” just went up in value as a search term.

You’ve done all the right things to draw your target market to your online presence. You’ve optimized your website for Google Maps so you show up in location-based searches. You’ve dropped the right keywords in the right places to ensure a high ranking on organic search results. You’ve invested in Google AdWords or a similar SEO-based advertising campaign to make sure you appear on your prospects’ search destinations. And now you’re developing a strong online brand through social media such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and their rapidly proliferating kin. Your prospects respond to your brilliant strategies by flocking to your website to learn more.

Now comes the final step — keeping those shoppers on your site long enough to turn them into buyers.

Strong website content can help you get the best return on your online branding investment. You must stop visitors in their tracks within their first few seconds on your site to still that mouse hand. Exciting copy, vivid images, and easily navigated pages are all crucial to viewer retention — they’re the online equivalent of a TV announcer yelling, “Don’t touch that dial!”

How do you grab your new friends’ attention within those first few critical seconds?

Well, if you’ve taken your SEO seriously up to this point, then you already have one big advantage — keywords and key phrases. If your prospects are using these terms in their searches, then you can already guess what kind of verbiage pushes their buttons. Use those terms, by all means, but use them sensibly. Larding your text with keywords, with no concern for flow or eloquence, may enhance your search results, but the resulting clumsiness in the writing may cancel out any gain. Drawing more visitors to a poorly written website isn’t likely to boost business.

Even when the writing is perfect, watch out for other little slip-ups that can lessen your website’s overall impact. Consider the humble hyperlink, for instance. Links are great for guiding your reader to the next stage of the sale — and links written in detailed, targeted language can improve your Google-readiness. But drop a compelling link into the first sentence of your Home page copy, and you can forget about your visitors reading anything below that link — they’ve already been whisked away to another page. Don’t upstage yourself.

Finally, make sure your written message is consistent across all your online media. Your website, your tweets, your LinkedIn profile — everything you do online should form one congruent, powerful statement about what your company stands for. Once you get all your marketing tools supporting each other, you’ll be able to truly leverage the awesome power of the Internet for future business success.

William Reynolds is a freelance copywriter based in Austin, Texas who specializes in web content, print-marketing copy, radio/TV commercial scripts, and ghostwritten articles for corporate clients nationwide. His writing samples and other information can be viewed at ReynoldsWriting.com.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

The blogosphere and twittersphere are abuzz this morning with discussion of missing phone numbers from the listings within Google Local.

Previously, there would have been phone numbers next to the Google Map listings.

There are many theories as to what has happened, including:

• They’re cleaning up the interface.
• It’s in anticipation of a new call-tracking offering from Google.
• Desire to push more traffic into clicks rather than calls.
• Bugs within the Google Local Business Center.
• Google has a lack of confidence in the accuracy of the phone numbers in their system.

A more nefarious idea comes to my mind. Take a look at a result from the paid local listings Google is testing in San Diego and San Francisco:

The paid listings have a phone number, and the free listings do not. Google wouldn’t be trying to bias the traffic to the paid listings, would they?

I think what bothers me the most is that I’ve already finished up my presentation for PubCon next week, and now I have to redo all the screenshots.

Update: Google has confirmed that it was a bug, and the phone numbers are back.

It is crucial for small businesses to stay competitive and to maximize use of their resources, but this can be difficult when managers do not know where the business is profitable and where it is not. Fortunately, time tracking alleviates this problem by shining a light on true project ROI.

Why Track Time?

Small businesses cannot afford to waste time on projects that are not bringing in the appropriate ROI, but how can managers know which projects to focus on and which ones to drop? Since the cost of labor is often a major factor in total project cost, tracking employee time to tasks and projects provides a much-needed window into profitability. Suppose you have a client who gives you a lot of business. You might think that this is a client you need to keep, but time data could reveal that you spend twice as much customer service time on this client. They are not profitable at all, but you would never know it unless you had your employees tracking time by task and project.

Provide Focus to Your Limited Staff

Small businesses are often understaffed, and can face the danger of getting buried in necessary but burdensome overhead and administrative work. Whether you are tracking general employee time for payroll or tracking with more detail for profitability insight, you cannot afford to waste employee time on manual timesheets, double entry or other dated processes. There is affordable technology out there that can lift this burden, allowing you to focus time and energy where they belong – on your strategic goals.

Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx, which has solutions for project management and execution.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.

As the founder of a national technology training company, I was definitely looking forward to attending Austin’s Innotech conference last week. Since relocating the company from Dallas to Austin this summer, the name ‘Innotech’ was mentioned to me at least once a week as a premier event to interact with leaders who are driving the IT industry in Central Texas. I chose to attend the eMarketing Summit because I was specifically interested in social media, which proved to be an excellent decision. After reviewing my notes, here are my personal top five, very manageable and high impact follow up items:

Action #1: Find Hoover’s D&B landing page used as the example in the “Lessons Learned from Five Internet Marketing Experts”

One of the five panelists in this session, Peter Poulin, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Hoover’s Inc. shared with the audience the various iterations of their strategy as they tested design elements, layouts and calls to action on their site. One interesting discovery was that there was a higher conversion rate when they used an image of a blonde woman versus a brunette. It was easy to tell that this stirred up some debate at the various tables because it received a lot of buzz on Twitter. It certainly gives new meaning to “blondes have more fun.”

I intend to find the example landing page he used during his presentation to see the design they ultimately settled on. If I can get a copy of the presentation, that would be a bonus!

Action #2: Download Brian Masey’s presentation “Killing Brad Pitt: Why Buyers Fail to Take Action on Your Web site”

Brian Masey with Conversion Sciences, delivered one of my favorite presentations of the day focusing on the various personas that come to your site. He categorized four different types of buyers:

• Competitive (highly logical but quick to make decisions) – respond well to Ratings, Guarantees, Newness, Brand, Appeal to Others
• Methodical (also highly logical but take time to make decisions) – respond to Case Studies, Process, Samples, Standards, Competing Solutions
• Spontaneous (highly emotional and quick to make decisions) – respond to Color, Ease-of-use, Size, Price, Return Policy, Delivery, Discounts
• Humanist (also highly emotional but take time to make decisions) – respond to Testimonials, Credibility, Company, Reviews, Trustworthiness

A copy of his presentation can be found on Slideshare and I will spend more time gleaning information from it.

Action #3: Another action for us from Brian Masey’s ‘Killing Brad Pitt’ presentation is to incorporate additional calls to action on our site. Here are some examples he gave:

• Add to cart
• Checkout
• Subscribe
• Trial signup
• Sample request
• Contact form
• Download
• Tell a friend
• Read an article
• View the video

I’d like to incorporate four to five of these appropriately throughout our site.

Action #4: Implement landing pages for our events and partner pages.

At the end of their presentations, a handful of the speakers provided links to a specific landing page on their sits. I actually viewed every single one of them and I think I even signed up for anything and everything on their sites, which made me instantly aware of the effectiveness of these pages. This is exactly what I want visitors to our site to do. What a valuable lesson. Check out a couple of examples:

• Brian Massey’s (Conversion Scientist) landing page for Innotech attendees
• Giovanni Gallucci’s (Social Media Ninja) landing page for his speaker evaluation

We’ve already started in this and we’re launching personalized landing pages for key partners this week.

Action #5: Devote 15 minutes, 3 times a day to social media such as Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn and use the tools to streamline and automate what I can.

From his presentation “Top 10 Extreme Social Media Promotion Hacks”, Giovanni Gallucci the, ‘Social Media Ninja’ suggested not 10 but 40 social media tips including using the following tools to streamline your social media activities:

• Twitterfeed
• Tweetadder
• Ping.fm
• Twitter Mutality (Google it)

Although we have Twitter and Facebook pages, I am formalizing social media activities as part of my daily schedule and marketing routine.

For EXTRA CREDIT and a chance to be inspired to build social media policies for our company, download and review Intel’s Social Media Guidelines.

Bryan G. Rhoads, Sr. Digital Strategist, Intel Social Media Center of Excellence delivered “Tying it all together: integrating your business and brand into social conversations” about his experience being part of the team that developed, and continues to develop, a social media strategy at Intel. The Social Media Center they created is remarkable but with me being a trainer, I was most excited about the educational programs they built to provide “Digital IQ” training for their employees. Very impressive.

Overall, this was a day well spent at Innotech’s eMarketing Summit. There was a great deal of valuable and actionable information presented, which made it clearer than ever that you should have your website working for you. It is absolutely critical that it not only provide information, it should be optimized to draw traffic, capture information and when possible bring customers or clients into the sales process. Then it makes sense to use social media to extend the reach and capabilities of the site.

Looking forward to next year and of course, seeing the results of what I learned from last week.

Vickie S. Evans is a former New York personal assistant turned applications instructor with twelve years of classroom training experience and six years experience working as a professional assistant. She is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and holds two additional certifications as a Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor (Office 2003) and Microsoft Certified Application Specialist (Office 2007). Through her company RedCape, Vickie and her staff provide superhero professionals with just-in-time, desk side technology coaching and solutions through virtual collaboration.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.