feed hat blog

This isn’t exactly news anymore, but it’s worth noting that two more reports this week confirm the idea that consumers tend to do their research online prior to buying offline/locally.

The first is a Kelsey Group study that indicates 97% of consumers use the Internet to research products or services in their local area. What specific online research tools do they use?

• 90% use search engines
• 48% use Internet Yellow Pages
• 42% use comparison shopping sites
• 24% use vertical sites

If consumers are starting the local buying process online, this reinforces the value of great local content, local SEO, and local visibility in general. In fact, according to the study, consumers use 7.9 different media sources for research when looking for local products and services. That speaks to the importance of being visible on a number of channels — your own site, your blog, Google Maps, Citysearch, important industry sites, and so forth. Diversity of presence makes a big difference.

The second report comes from local product search engine Milo.com in the form of a large infographic that breaks down the percent of online vs. offline buying in a number of industries. The conclusion, based on US Census data, is that less than 5% of retail sales happen online.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Two More Studies Confirm: People Research Online, Buy Locally

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That was one of the topics of Luther Lowe’s presentation Tuesday at the annual SearchFest conference in Portland. Lowe — Yelp’s Manager of Business Outreach — gave a generally clear description of what the company says are the benefits of advertising on Yelp. I say “generally” because he said that advertising on Yelp gets a business owner “SEO,” but he really meant to say “visibility.”

These are not the same examples he used during the presentation, but they show the same points he made.

1. Visibility on Yelp search result pages

Advertising on Yelp gives a business the opportunity to show up above the regular search results for category/city combinations, like this search for dentists in Los Angeles.

2. Visibility on other business profile pages

A Yelp ad may show up on a competitor’s business profile, like in this example here.

3. No competitor ads on your profile page

Using the example above, no competitors’ ads will show up on the profile page of that dentist because she’s advertising. She’s essentially paying to keep competitors from advertising on her profile page. But note that Yelp still does show other competitors on the page under a “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed” heading.

4. Added content options

Yelp advertisers can also add extra content to their business profiles, such as a photo slideshow and an extra content spot to post alerts or discounts.

5. Promote a “favorite review”

Yelp sponsors can also choose one review of their business and mark it as a “favorite.” In doing so, that review will show up first on the business profile page, as seen here.

Lawsuits: The 800-lb. Gorilla

Before his presentation, Lowe called out the 800-lb. gorilla in the room: the recent lawsuits from small business owners who claim that Yelp has offered to remove negative reviews in exchange for payment. I don’t recall his exact wording, but Lowe rejected the claims of the lawsuit, saying that the alleged behavior — if it were true — would cause Yelp to lose the trust of its users and advertisers.

But from several conversations I’ve had at conferences over the past two weeks, that trust is on shaky ground with some. This isn’t the first time Yelp’s been accused of taking money to remove negative reviews (see Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 from last year), and some are wondering if the phrase “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is appropriate.

One suspects that, as long as Yelp offers a way for business owners to manipulate reviews in exchange for advertising (see #5 above), they’ll continue to run the risk of lawsuits — no matter if the lawsuits are justified or just the result of misunderstanding.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?

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What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?

If you’re reading this while at SearchFest 2010, a big welcome to you. Thanks for visiting SmallBusinessSEM.com. In my presentation, I mention a few web sites that you may not have had time to jot down while I was speaking. If that’s the case, here are all the references I made in chronological order:

• Nielsen: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most
• Local Search Ranking Factors
• Yelp FAQ (most reviews are positive)
• Bazaarvoice Industry Statistics (most reviews are positive)
• Post the good, the bad and the ugly in customer reviews, Dell and evo say

If you have any questions or feedback about my presentation or the session in general, feel free to leave a comment below. There’s also a Contact button at the top of the page. I’d love to hear from you!

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Welcome SearchFest Attendees

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Last week’s SMX West conference was a unique one for me. I didn’t get to sit in on many sessions as an attendee because we were a bit short-handed at Search Engine Land, and I was pretty much working constantly on a variety of things for SEL. I live-blogged the keynotes, did the daily coverage roundups, wrote up a bunch of news stories from the conference, and kept up with the daily SearchCap articles.

I also managed to shoot a few photos here and there, and those are now finally on Flickr. You can either see the set on Flickr.com or just use the slideshow embedded below.

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SMX West 2010 Photos

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SMX West 2010 Photos

It’s sometimes hard to imagine or even quantify the specific SEO benefits of a business blog, but credit the gang at HubSpot for doing a good job of it. If you missed their blog post from a few weeks ago, I think these stats are worth sharing here:

A study of 2,168 HubSpot customers shows that businesses that published at least 5 blog articles in the last 7 days draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and 1.12 times more referral traffic than those who don’t blog at all.

Here’s all that in a more visual piece of evidence:

You should click through to read the HubSpot post because they have additional stats showing how site traffic goes up the more blog posts you publish.

All of this is a nice complement to HubSpot’s earlier stats, which showed how companies that blog get more traffic, more inbound links, and have more pages indexed in search engines.

A good company blog is an exceptionally powerful SEO weapon.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SEO Benefits of Blogging: More Search Traffic

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SEO Benefits of Blogging: More Search Traffic

MIssed this when it came out a week or so ago, but it’s worth posting about after the fact a bit. The Small Business Success Index reports that social media adoption among small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the past year. From reading the release, I gather that “adoption” means a business is actively using social media, as opposed to just having a placeholder profile page.

Here are some of the other findings:

Small business owners use social media to attract new customers:

• 75% surveyed have a company page on a social networking site
• 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers
• 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn
• 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next twelve months

Small business owners still have concerns with social media:

• 50% of small business social media users say it takes more time than expected
• 17% express that social media gives people a chance to criticize their business on the Internet
• Only 6% feel that social media use has hurt the image of the business more than helped it

The study is sponsored by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

More Small Businesses Using Social Media

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More Small Businesses Using Social Media

I sometimes struggle to explain Google’s ranking algorithm to small business owners. I just tried last week during a workshop here in my hometown, and I’m not sure if I did a good job. But fortunately there are other resources out there that do a better job than me.

One is this new article from Wired magazine: Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web. Here’s a good portion of it:

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

It’s not too technical for me, which means it shouldn’t be too technical for anyone. Highly recommend reading this, not for specific SEO tips but just because the more you understand about how search engines work, the more likely you’ll be able to succeed in increasing search visibility.

One more thing: This Wired article is similar to a series of articles that BusinessWeek ran a couple months ago. I recapped those articles on Search Engine Land, along with links to read each one. Also recommend reading those articles and interviews.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

How Google’s Algorithm Works

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Here’s a screenshot that the folks in Redmond won’t like:

How about that? “Results 1-3 of 3 for review us on bing“. And yes, you’ll get a lot more results if you try that search using Google, Yahoo, or Yelp.

Bing might be gaining search share, but it’s way behind on having SMB’s asking customers to write reviews there.

Advertisement: Improve your website rankings and traffic in just 15 mins/day! LotusJump will show you how to do your own professional-grade SEO. Find Out How Today!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Anyone Wanna be Reviewed on Bing?

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This is one of the most common questions small business owners and new bloggers ask. Blogging is uncharted territory. What should I write about? How often do I need to write? How long should a blog post be? Good questions all, but I’m focusing on the last one in this post.

First, though, I need to share my perspective on what a business blog is. This is how I described it at the GetListed Spokane event earlier this month:

It’s your chance to be real, to be yourself, and to be part of the conversations that are already happening online. It’s your voice, but only with more legitimacy than your main business web site offers. I love Jeremiah Owyang’s quote in this blog post:

The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content.

There’s a lot of truth in that, I think. And blogs can provide the opposite — more believability, less artificiality, more real content. So keep that in mind as we get back to the original question.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

My answer: As short or as long as it takes to say what you need to say.

1.) There’s no perfect length for a blog post. It’s like the idea of keyword density in SEO; there’s no magic number for keyword density on a web page, and there’s no magic number for how long your blog posts should be.

2.) A variety of blog post lengths is a good idea. For me, the most enjoyable blogs to read are the ones that offer variety; the ones that offer the unexpected. I think a blog is easier to read when there’s a mix of short posts, mid-length posts, and long posts. Too much of one type of post can be monotonous for the reader, and invites the reader to start tuning out.

3.) It’s natural to have posts with different lengths. If you believe that a blog is conversational in nature, then think about your blog posts as individual conversations. Important question: Is every conversation you have the same length? Of course not! You have conversations that last 10 seconds and you have conversations that last 10 minutes (or longer). This is how we communicate. So, if you’re trying to be natural on your blog (and you should be), your blog should have a mix of blog posts, some short and some long.

Blog Post Examples

I’m going to use this blog as an example to answer the question, How long should a blog post be?

Short Blog Post

How to Choose the Right Category in Google’s Local Listings — the main point of this post was to share a link with my readers to Mike Blumenthal’s Google categories tool. Aside from a quick explanation of why categories are important, I didn’t have much to say. The results:

Paragraphs: 4
Words: 135

Medium Blog Post

Alerts on Place Pages? I Want More From Google — the point of this post was to share a list of things I wish Google would add to its local business Place Pages. It was written when Google announced that business owners could post alerts on their pages, and I had seven other ideas of my own to share. So it needed more depth than the post above, but I didn’t need to write a novel. The results:

Paragraphs: 6, plus a list of 7 items
Words: 448

Long Blog Post

Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Businesses — this post was written to expand on one of the concepts in my SEO Success Pyramid. I knew I had a lot to say on this subject and, to be frank, I also wanted to write the type of blog post that others would link to, and that would have a shot at ranking highly for a term like “small business reputation management.” The results:

Paragraphs: 26, plus three lists
Words: 1,538
SEO: number one ranking for “small business reputation management” on Google (not signed in), Yahoo, and Bing

This last post — the long one — also received a very healthy 29 comments, which is often another benefit of the occasional long blog post.

Final Thoughts: How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

I consider all three of those example blog posts to be successful, because they accomplished the goals I had for them. If you’re a new blogger, keep this in mind:

1. Don’t feel like you have to limit your blog posts to a certain length — whether short or long.
2. If you can say what you need to say in 150 words, stop there and hit the Publish button. If it takes 1,500 words to say what you need to say, that’s okay, too.
3. For best results, I think a variety of short and long posts is a Good Thing. It keeps your blog from getting predictable.

Your turn: What are your thoughts on how long blog posts should be? If you’re a marketer, what do you tell clients who ask about this?

Postscript: Having published this post about 25 minutes ago and now just going through my feed reader, I’ve discovered Glen Allsopp’s excellent and related article, Bloggers: This Is How Long Your Posts Should Be, in which he examines the average length of posts in the top 5 blogs across various industries.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

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How Long Should a Blog Post Be?