It's Not About You - It's About Them | Digital Product Launch Pt. 3

So - we’ve got an album that no-one knows exists, we have no access to or influence with industry gatekeepers, we have no budget to significantly impact awareness and our plan for circumventing the music business failed because it required too much work from people we had no relationship with.

Nice problem huh!?

Re-Focus On The Market

So we stopped thinking like a record label, like a business, and for the first time started to think as altruistically as possible from the perspective of the people who are actually grieving.  What is it they need, and how can we help them get it?

I’m oversimplifying here but, the thing that most helps people dealing with grief is connection.

They may not know it and the way they connect may be unique and different from yours, but the underlying behavior that helps to alleviate grief is some type of connection with other human beings who have experienced something similar.

The True Problem

There’s too much information.

Whether you’re looking for music, for political news, for the right trainer or lawyer or insurance agent, or even help with your grief - there’s just way too many options out there.  Google does a pretty good job and social connections help, but finding what you need is becoming harder not easier.

Curation - A Global Trend

The fully digitized music world has already made the transition to playlists - curated indexes created by taste-makers.  As local businesses we strive to be reviewed and featured in Yelp, Foursquare, and Google - again, nothing more than indexes “curated” by customer feedback.

These things exist because they work, because they create value for the end user by saving them time.

So how do we serve people who are looking for help with grief?

Next Week: The Grief Directory

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Unsplash

Here’s How Local Search Works

Aside from the whole “Organic SEO” bit, (which if you don’t fully grok, get in touch ‘cos it’s really important,) here’s the fundamentals behind being visible in local search results.

NAP & Digital Footprint

I’ve written about NAP before, (if you don’t understand what it is and how it affects your visibility, get in touch,) but it’s not just NAP - it’s about visual branding, about imagery, about standardized language and about knowing where and how to apply these things.

Top 10 Directories

Links back to your website are perhaps the biggest factor in online visibility, (see Organic SEO above,) however in the local world there is a category of links called “Citations” - these are links back to your website from online aggregators.

• Google is an aggregator - it aggregates the world
• Facebook is an aggregator - it aggregates friends
• YP.com is an aggregator - it aggregates businesses
• Yelp.com is an aggregator - it aggregates business reviews.
• Citysearch.com is an aggregator - it aggregates local businesses

This is not about having a blog post linking to your site with cleverly devised anchor text - this is a simple listing - your NAP (see above,) a link to your website and occasionally some photos and language.

You need a citation to your business from the top 10 aggregators at the very least - 5 of which are listed above - and citations are generally free.

The Next 50 Aggregators

• IRS.gov is an aggregator - it aggregates Tax information
• NAEA.org is an aggreator - it aggregates Tax Professionals
• CSEA.org is an aggregator - it aggregates Californian Tax Professionals
• TaxMama.com is an aggregator - it aggregates discussions between Tax Professionals

I’m using the word aggregator on purpose but you could substitute it for Directory.  There are thousands of websites that list or curate information where your business could get a citation.

Note that - as with organic links - not all citations are equal.  A link to your website from IRS.gov is going to have exponentially more impact than the flattering blog post on bryanslegoblog.com.

Researching the right sites for your business, creating the citation and following up to make sure it has been implemented correctly, all takes time.

It’s Not Rocket Science

I know that for my clients it’s not that they can’t do it or couldn’t learn how to do it, it’s that they don’t have time.

So the question becomes, who is going to do it?

If you’d like to get a jump on your local visibility get in touch - I have some solutions.

Written while listening to: Sadness Development by music2work2

Image Credit: Citation House, Worcester by Duncan Hull on Flickr

Data From A Recent Yelp Ad Campaign

Client was a Vintage furniture store in Los Angeles.  Before  the promotion they would average around 70 Yelp visitors a month but the traffic was good - most of it new, 20% bounce rate and an average of 5 pages read per visit.

Yelp were marketing a 3 month minimum contract, $75 a month for an “enhanced” profile with $275 a month allocated to Ads.  We reckoned it was worth dropping a grand to see if it worked.

Call To Action

With our “enhanced profile” we ran a 10% Off Anything In-Store call to action which lead to a dedicated landing page - all people needed to do was inform us of the offer at time of purchase.

The Results

I’m not going to quote Yelp’s metrics because although they look impressive, here’s what the store experienced:

• Nobody mentioned the Yelp Ad and claimed their 10% off during the time of the promotion
• In the 11 weeks up to the end of the year only 10 people visited the landing page with no-one visiting it during December
• And even more impressive - actual Yelp traffic during the promotion was down 21% on the previous year!

Takeaway

If you’re a law firm - you might want to check out this article that pretty much says the same thing:

https://jurisdigital.com/yelp-advertising-reviews-effective-for-lawyers/

Bottom line - I won’t be recommending Yelp Ads any time soon - oh sure - you need to ensure that your NAP is correct and that you deliver a good enough service that inspires people to review you - but spending money to juice the process - doesn’t seem worth it.

Written while listening to: Sadness by music2work2

Image credit:  y2.d56 | fml. by Bryan Rosengrant on Flickr

For All Businesses

Remember the Science post?  Well I’ve got some more good stuff for you.

Social Proof

It’s the current buzz word and will be for a while until something new takes over.

What is it?  It’s the presentation of what people are saying about your business on your website.

Cut and Paste Reviews Then…

Well yes - that’s a start and what we’ve done in the past but there are ways you can make those reviews stand out. 

With the arrival of the semantic web you can wrap your reviews in code that tells the search engines what they are and can result in them being pulled into your search results.

This is good.

Do People Review Your Business? 

Yes.  Yes they do.  And while some of them might use Yelp, G+ or Tripadvisor, the vast majority of reviews come in the form of word of mouth or thank you emails.

The micro-formatting doesn’t care where a review comes from - it’s just as easy to wrap a thank you email as it is a Google+ review.  Sure you’ll need to get their permission to publish and at the same time you might want to ask them if they would rate you on a scale of 1 to 5, but so long as it’s real - the search engines don’t care.

What Next

I recently wrote that generating reviews is a must for any local business.  I’d amend that and say generating reviews is a must for any business.

Shout me if you need help with this.

Written while listening to: Introduction to music2work2

Image Credit: 4.5 Stars.SVG on Wikipimedia.org

For Local Businesses

If you have a physical location then you need to be aware of how local search works.  While it initially seems fairly opaque with terms like Local Pack, Three Pack, NAP, Citations etc - it’s actually pretty straightforward

Steps To Take

On-Site

There are a few things to check on your existing site.  If I built it with you the only thing we need to look at is correct schema setup in the footer for NAP, schema for on-site reviews and maybe the amount of content and internal linking on some of the major pages.

Off-site

This is about NAP consistency and the amount of citations you have in local directories.  This is something you can do yourself - which takes time - or you can have a third party do it.  You’ll be looking at a few months at around $225 a month to get everything set up.

Behavioral

Generating reviews on Yelp and Google+ is now a must for any local business.  If you’re speaking to customers on a daily business how hard is it to bring up the topic of online reviews?

If you change your mindset to accept that a review will increase your local visibility in search - why would you not talk about this with your customers?

What Next

Every business is different and will have different priorities.  If you’d like to talk about your business and work out a plan of action, drop me an email and book a session.

Written while listening to: Andy The Barman 1105 by music2work2

Image Credit: Map by Amber Case on Flickr

My SEO is crap but I'm busier than ever

That's what the local San Fernando Valley artisan laughed as I gave him my money. 

I was looking for a local skilled professional and knew that if I used Google I'd just get sponsored results and the big chains.  So I used Yelp and searched around my zip code and read the reviews.

This behavior is going to become more and more common - and yes - there are pros and cons of the whole review thing and no you shouldn't stop adding content and improving your website's search engine visibility, but...

Getting customers to help you

The most powerful thing a customer can do for you - aside from give you money - is to write positively about you on the internet - and the most dominant place for that is Yelp with Foursquare making a strong play for second place.

Make it part of your plan

As part of your marketing plan for 2014 (you are writing one of those yes?,)  you might want to allocate more time to those two networks. 

If you've got no idea where to start or would just like to be efficient and not waste time making rookie mistakes, email me or give me a call on 310 980 2499 and we'll have a chat.

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Image Credit: SEO by Sean McEntee on Flickr

Written while listening to "God Knows" - published next week on music2work2

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