Search Engine Tigers

As I mentioned previously, Danny Sullivan’s new company announced that they were going to be running a local version of their new SMX conference series in Denver in September, following on from the one day SES conference that was held there last year. I mentioned that I’d noticed that there was no SES local scheduled for this year, so the SMX conference was filling that gap. Today I noticed that a link for SES local has gone up on their website, in the list of upcoming conferences, with a conference listed for Denver in September this year, but as yet no specifics bar the phrase

“Returns to Denver September 2007″

So what does this mean? Are we going to have dueling conferences in Denver in September? Presenters and attendees forced to make a choice between one or the other? Will one follow the other? Will they be at different ends of the month? Or is is just simply that that page was created at some point in the past with the assumption that there was going to be a repeat conference, and someone pulled the wrong version of the html out of the repository?

It’s most likely the latter, given that I don’t see there being head to head conference competition, or at least not at this point, while people are still trying to get along, and Danny is involved with SES conference organization (at least through SES-SJ in August). The other big giveaway? At the bottom of the SES pages they list all of the cities that they’re having conferences in… no sign of Denver there.

* Toronto * Tokyo * London * San Jose * Chicago * New York * Munich * Paris * Miami * Dallas *

“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”

-Albert Camus

Everything in life is a choice, some more extreme than others (personally I don’t like coffee, but I would choose that over the other option). I was in the book store the other day, and I saw that they were running a 3 for 2 sale, so I picked up a copy of the Dalai Lama’s book on science, and since I’ve been getting into walking lately, and I live about 20 minutes from the Appalachian Trail, I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods”. This left me with one book to pick. There was quite a selection, but none of the choices really leaped out at me. There were fiction books, factual texts, autobiographies, and business books, but I couldn’t choose one. After looking through the piles of books for a few more minutes I noticed one called “The Paradox of Choice” by Barry Schwartz (nope, not that Barry Schwartz). For someone having an issue with choice, it seemed like the perfect… well… choice.

The premise of the book is that as available options increase, choice itself becomes harder. Should you get the relaxed fit jeans, slim fit, baggy, button fly, zipper fly, etc, etc. For a consumer, knowing that they got the perfect item that they were looking for is tough. Then you have all of the issues of brand differentiation (real and imagined). It’s tough for a person to make a decision and know that they made the right one, or at least one of the best available ones.

Schwartz splits consumers up into 2 categories, maximizers - those who make sure that they thoroughly evaluate all options before making a decision, and satisficers - those who go for an option that looks good when they find it. Obviously for smaller purchases / decisions, the majority of us fall into the latter, but for larger / more involved decisions there’ll be a lot of variance.

So how does this apply to the topics on this blog? Well, from a local perspective there’s a wide variety of choices for a consumer. If you want to find a local business, where do you go? Do you go to a search engine - Google, Yahoo; a specialized search engine solution - Google Maps, Yahoo local; an IYP - superpages, windstreamyellowpages; a vertical search site - limousines.com, 1800Dentist; a local site - citysearch, askCity; others - Craigslist, insiderpages, etc. At the moment there’s no clear winner in local search, and with the variety of choices, with no ‘killer solution’,the satisficers (and for this relatively small decision that would be the majority of users) go with whatever looks good to them.

So for a small business what should they do? Should they just stick with their website or go out and get their data distributed out to all of the potential locations that the end user may look at? The answer is that they most assuredly need to do the latter. As Justin Sanger of Local Launch said at SES in Chicago last December

“… It’s about business information online. It’s a different way of thinking. We must cleanse, enrich and optimize content. Think: Atomization - separate and spread. Managing and dispersing biz info is the local search marketing tactic of our time. The new local search landscape requires new thinking.”

So small businesses should take note of the proliferation of choice, and get their data out to as many end solutions as possible, so the satisficers and maximizers both will find their information wherever they end up doing their search.

Last year, Search Engine Strategies (SES) did a local search show in Denver. It was a one day show, and was far enough away that it didn’t make sense for me to attend. This year SES didn’t schedule one, must not have gone down too well I thought. Well, today Danny Sullivan’s new Search Marketing Expo announced SMX - local and mobile, which will run for 2 days - September 19th - 20th, in Denver, CO. Programmed by Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling, it should be interesting, and given that it’s 2 days may attract more people from this coast.

released their annual Search survey this week, in it they aggregate the results of questionnaires filled out by 587 search engine advertisers and SEM agencies. This post is going to deal with details on the local portion of that survey, and focus on the responses from the advertisers, not the agencies.

The first local question asked on the survey was whether or not people had experience or interest in Locally Targeted Search Keyword Text Ads. 14% said that they’d tried it and were unimpressed, and 50% of advertisers said that they had no experience with geo-targeting, with 26% saying that they were interested in trying it out. If these figures hold, that’s a lot of advertisers that are going to be opening up in the online local market space…

The next question was about where the money was going, in other words, which engines were the most popular among those who responded. No shocker on the top 2 - Google & Yahoo, but MSN was not third, not even fourth, it came in fifth. Third & fourth places were actually taken up by 2 of the biggest IYPs - Superpages & YellowPages (given that I work with several IYPs that’s a good sign).

The last local specific question that I’m going to touch on (for more comprehensive results / more results you’ll have to join SEMPO to get the full survey) is that of how much more would people be willing to pay for better local targeting? Over 3/4 of respondents said that they’d pay no more than 10% of a premium (42% said no more than 5%). Of course that would depend on what the ‘better local targeting’ entailed. What can the engines do to improve their targeting? Well, I found out last week that MSN doesn’t just rely on the IP address of the searcher to place them, they also use their Passport system, which makes sense given that people have signed up for that service, so they may as well get use out of it. Yahoo does allow you to set your location by clicking on the local button on their main page, and Google has made it optional to add your location information, Maybe they’ll all start making this information required, and this will be where personalization is really going to improve local search.

Since we hit the end of the month we’ve been playing around with the reports in Yahoo’s Panama. A rather nice one that isn’t available in Google is the “Performance by Geographic Location” report. This report allows you to see a breakdown of the spend in your account by location. If you are targeting your campaigns in different geographical locations this is an easy way to pull that data and see exactly where your campaigns are working.

I’ve seen quite a few people blog about this, but what the heck I may as well get in on the act since one of the main topics of this blog is local search. Michael Gray has interviewed 20 people in the local search space, and is releasing the interviews 4 a day over this week. He also promises some ‘nice local search resources’ and a couple of surprises over the week. It’s worth checking out.

It’s well known that Google Maps gets data from InfoUSA and, more recently, from business owners going in and editing their information themselves, but are they also getting that data from crawling regular websites? The short answer is ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’.

The long answer is that I’ve seen listings for small businesses in Google Maps where the website displayed for the business is that of a ‘profile page’ on an IYP site. It’s highly unlikely that these small businesses that don’t have their own websites have located their profile pages on these IYP sites (in multiple states), and submitted them as their primary websites. I also know that the IYP site didn’t go in and change the data for these advertisers to point at the IYP pages as these are sites that I have primary SEM responsibility for, and I don’t have the resources to go and add the listing for each advertiser in each phone book to Google Maps. Now as to whether it grabs other data from the website, such as address and phone number, that’s more difficult to detect, as there has to be a known difference before-hand that you can observe for a change. The advertisers that are out there now with these IYP profile pages as the primary website have the same info as in the IYP, which may mean that they always did have, or that they did change unobserved. I don’t have data on this yet, but given that I do have sites out there with metered numbers I may one day be able to say that they do (of course, I would never be able to definitively say that they don’t).

For the majority of sites with the metered numbers I am using this tip from SearchEngineGuide, and having the name, address and phone number of the business listed on one line on the bottom of the pages. It’ll be interesting to follow those that have that, and those that don’t to see if it makes a difference in getting picked up in the local search results.

I’ve been looking at the difference between searching for a local company on the regular Google web search and on the Google Maps search to see if there is any kind of correlation between the two. For this test I decided to search on “Vasi’s Catering Haiku, HI“. Entering that as my first search, I was given a result page that had a local result at the top of the page (which points to their own website), and a nice list of iyp results, starting at city search, going through paradise pages, down into local.yahoo, before actually listing their website in the regular results.

Clicking on the ‘More information‘ link under the local result gives a different result set as the query has changed, it now includes a zip code, radius parameter, and lat and long parameters. The first result is their own website (to be expected since that was shown as the primary local result on the previous page), then it’s a New York cafe website, that lists nothing to do with Hawaii on the site, followed by the previously seen paradise pages result and new allpages and yellowbook listings.

Interestingly enough, clicking back on the ‘web’ results then displays a different set of results, as the new parameters added in in the last step are now passed back through to this search, which returns pretty much the same results as the first time, bar the paradise pages result which was showing in both of the other searches.

Staying in Hawaii (who wouldn’t?), the next search that I did was for “kihei plumbing kahului hi“. This gave me a local search result for Paradise Pages that was also the primary organic result. Following that came Switchboard, BuildingTradesDir, Superpages and CitySearch. Again, clicking the ‘more information‘ button changes the results. Paradise Pages retains pole position, but then Allpages and Kivanetext are the only other results associated with this search.

So what does this show? Basically that there’s not much of a relation between the regular organic web search and the local search on Google. Yes it’s a small sample shown here, but you can do the same searches with most businesses and you’ll see similar results. It’s also not as if the local results are somehow tied to the business in some special way, as in the first example there was a website with no relation to the business, and in the second example there was a listing to a competing plumber on Paradise Pages, as well as to the actual plumber.