ionadas local LLC

Importance of Ranking on Google Maps

I was asked yesterday how important ranking is within the Google 10-Pack, assuming you’re listed on the first page. I’d like to share my thoughts here.

Google has not published any statistics on the difference that one’s placement in the local rankings makes, but this is not surprising with a beta service. Local listings are one of the primary battlegrounds between Google, Yahoo, and Bing and they’re all keeping their data very close to the vest.

Still, there’s definitely an analog to traditional rankings. The higher up you are, the more traffic your bound to get, all else equal.

The analog is not perfect, however, as local and organic don’t lay out in the same way on the page. For instance, the tenth organic listing is at the very bottom of the page (e.g. below the fold), while the tenth local listing is still at the top of the page.

In addition, the presence of review data on listings can certainly skew the CTR to be different than the ordering might suggest. A listing with a top ranking but low average reviews might not get the clicks it would otherwise receive.

None the less, being first in the local listings is certainly much better than being tenth.

Impact of ESPN Local

Over the weekend, the New York Times revealed that ESPN is continuing its push into local markets. On Monday, ESPN announced new sites for New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, which will join its test site for Chicago.

Marketing Pilgrim is calling this yet another nail in the coffin of newspapers, and saying it may impact local television stations as well.

Perhaps.

While ESPN certainly has a wide reach, can it truly provide the staff needed to cover a city, except in the biggest cities? I’m not so sure.

Certainly this is bad news for the Chicago Tribune, which is already on the edge, but I doubt the impact elsewhere will be that substantial, except for a handful of top markets.

It’s not clear that ESPN knows how to sell to the advertisers that would want to place on these sites. ESPN is used to working with national agencies and advertisers, not local businesses. ESPN’s current sales staff is unlikely to want to work such smaller deals, which come with smaller commissions. Will they hire a new sales department to work with such advertisers?

Or will they offer a self-serve model like Google AdWords? This is a large reason why Google succeeded with smaller advertisers.

This is certainly an interesting move by ESPN, but I think it’s too early to call it the end of local media and press.

Ten Don’t's for your Small Business Website

Any small business creating a website needs to keep a number of things in mind. While each particular situation will require specific additions, this list is a great place to start.

1. Don’t forget to set goals for your website and define metrics for success.
If you don’t know what success for your website looks like, how will you know when you get there? Prior to building the site, you need to decide what you want the website to accomplish, and define your metrics for success or failure. This paints the picture of the destination, so that you have a reasonable chance of getting there.

2. Don’t build the entire site in Flash.
Designers love Flash because it gives them complete control over the look and feel of the website. Unfortunately, the search engines have a hard time indexing Flash sites. While they’ve gotten much better over the last year or two, I still have yet to see a Flash site ranking for even a moderately competitive keyword.

Flash elements within a page are perfect fine, however. Just don’t make the entire site out of Flash.

3. Don’t pretend that a MySpace page is a website.
If you’re building a website for your band, perhaps a MySpace page makes sense. But don’t pretend that creating a MySpace page (or FaceBook or LinkedIn page) is the same thing as creating a website.

Having a website that runs on its own domain gives a sense of legitimacy that every company should want.

4. Don’t have a redirect in front of the homepage.
I see this one a lot. Someone goes to:

http://www.xyzcorp.com/

…and the site redirects her to:

http://www.xyzcorp.com/homepage2.aspx

…(or some other page).

There are a number of problems with this. First, it’s another chance of confusing the search engines. If Google can’t index a page (or site), you can be darn sure it won’t return it for a search query.

You can use a search engine friendly redirect, but it’s not clear that all linking benefit passes through this.

People will tend to link to the domain of your site, not a page within the site. Make sure you’re receiving the entire link benefit you’ve earned by having the homepage load under the base domain.

In addition, it seems these redirects are often done because the page is in a temporary location. If you later move this page, you then lose the link juice coming into that page directly (or at least part of it if you redirect the old page to the new page).

Ideally, visitors coming into the homepage of your site should just get the domain, not the page designation.

5. Don’t use a splash page.
I’ve been fighting against these since at least 1995. A splash page is a page that comes up when you go to what should be the homepage of the site. It generally is a big graphic or flash animation that someone at the company thought was really cool. The splash page usually redirects to the true homepage after a few seconds, but sometimes you are forced to click on a link to get there.

Splash pages are a distraction and delay the visitor from getting to the content he really wants. And they’re also yet another chance to confuse the search engines.

6. Don’t have the site play music by default.
Many of us find websites with music (or any sound) to be annoying at best. Imagine if your prospective customer is surfing your website while at work, and suddenly the music from your site comes blasting out of her speakers.

Do you think you’re likely to get that order?

If you site must make noise, default to muted and allow the user to choose to turn it on.

7. Don’t put up a site that is just brochureware.
You’re site might be beautiful and have great ad copy, but if it is not transactional, how will you know if it succeeds? For an e-commerce company, this is easy. The sales on your site are the transactions.

For most everyone else, it’s a bit more difficult. The transaction on your site might be contact form. You might go a step further and give a valuable white paper in exchange for contact information. Or, your transaction might be an online demo.

A bricks and mortar store might have a coupon on its website for customers to print out and bring in.

The fact is that you need some sort of transaction on the site that can be measured. Ideally, you should also be able to ascribe some value to it, so that you can track the ROI of your marketing efforts.

8. Don’t neglect to install an analytics system.
If you don’t know what’s going on with your website, you can’t know what is succeeding and what is failing. At the very least, you should set up Google Analytics on your website. While it’s somewhat limited, it’s also free.

Alternatively, you could install one of the entry level analytics systems such as HitsLink. It’s quite a bit more powerful than Google Analytics, and starts around $50/month.

9. Don’t forget to proof read the copy.
Few things look more unprofessional than misspelled words and grammatical errors. Be sure to read through your copy for mistakes. Better yet, have someone who hasn’t read the copy before do so.

10. Don’t just assume people will come to the site.
Once your site is live, you need to actively drive visitors to it. Have a plan (with designated and preferably detailed budget) for generating interest in your website, both online and offline.

If you follow this advice, you’ve greatly increased the chance of your small business’s website succeeding.

And I’ll let you in on a secret: these rules apply to the websites of large companies as well.

Submitting False Reviews is Actionable

It has always been a bad idea to submit false positive reviews to Google, Yahoo, Bing or the various local databases. They are easy to detect, and customers will be turned off. The company might even be called out on it publicly.

Now there is another reason to avoid this practice: it is actionable legally. The State of New York has a secured a $300,000 settlement with Lifestyle Lift. The employees of the cosmetics company were actively posting positive reviews of the company and attacking those who criticized Lifestyle Lift.

From the release:

Internal emails discovered by Attorney General Cuomo’s investigation show that Lifestyle Lift employees were given specific instructions to engage in this illegal activity. One e-mail to employees said: “Friday is going to be a slow day – I need you to devote the day to doing more postings on the web as a satisfied client.” Another internal email directed a Lifestyle Lift employee to “Put your wig and skirt on and tell them about the great experience you had.”

In addition to the fine, Lifestyle Lift employees are restricted from posing as consumers on the Internet. And the company is not allowed to promote Lifestyle Lift online without “clearly and conspicuously disclosing that they are responsible for the content.”

In the long run, what will likely hurt the most is the impact of the negative publicity on Lifestyle Lift’s brand. Anyone looking into the company will quickly find out about this malfeasance. As of this writing, the Attorney General press release is already 7th on Google for [lifestyle lift], and is likely to continue to climb.

Hat Tip to Understanding Google Maps & Local Search.

Eight Plugins every WordPress Website Should Have

I’m a big believer in using WordPress to manage your website, even (especially?) when it’s more than just a blog. Between the ease of content management, the huge selection of graphical themes you can use, and the powerful plugins that you can add, it allows you to quickly and easily build a professional website.

The plugins are especially important, as they allow you to expand the capabilities of your site beyond what comes with WordPress. I believe all WordPress-based websites should have the following plugins installed:

Akismet
If you’re going to allow any sort of commenting on your site, such as for a blog within the website, this plugin is a must. It monitors the incoming spam to determine whether a comment is spam or not. Spam is moved to its own bucket which you can review at your leisure.

All in One SEO Pack
There are a number of SEO plugins for WordPress, and I go back and forth as to my favorite. Michael Torbert’s All in One SEO Pack is certainly one of the best, however.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
Each WordPress theme has a place where pages (as opposed to posts) are listed. You might want to not include a particular page in that list, however. This plugin adds a checkbox which allows you to do so.

Google Analyticator
No, Google Analytics doesn’t really give all the information you want, and who knows what Google is doing with all the proprietary data it gathers on your site, but the price is certainly right, and it’s a heck of a lot better than not having any analytics system. Google Analyticator allows you to easily manage the Google Analytics code on your site.

Google Sitemaps Generator
An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted list of all the pages on your site. It allows Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to more easily index your website. This plugin automatically creates a sitemap of all the pages on your site.

StatPress
In many ways even less powerful than Google Analytics, StatPress gives you insight into your visitors on a realtime basis.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
This plugin makes upgrading to the latest version of WordPress much easier.

WordPress Database Backup
Almost as certain as death and taxes is the fact that hard drives crash. This plugin ensures that you have a backup of your entire WordPress system. When you do have a crash, this will make recovery much easier.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?