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Prescription for Patch: Become an All-in-One SMB Marketing Solution

See the original post at:

http://streetfightmag.com/2012/04/20/prescription-for-patch-become-an-all-in-one-smb-marketing-solution/

 

 20 APRIL 2012 BY KIRK CARAWAY

Kirk Caraway is a guest author.  

There has been a lot of criticism hurled in recent months at AOL’s hyperlocal news experiment Patch. It seems that some new “dramatic” tidbit is always showing up in the trades about how Patch is failing.

Some of this criticism is deserved. I don’t think the folks at Patch would claim there haven’t been mistakes made. But part of the reason it’s in focus is that the company makes an easy target for those in the news business who are shell-shocked by the changes transforming the industry.

I think there is a lot of value in the network approach to hyperlocal news. Many small startup publishers are challenged by the technical details of web publishing — and by the need to offer the kind of polished, powerful, digital product that online readers have come to expect. Tech and design can suck up huge amounts of time and resources. By centralizing the technical details, Patch achieves an economy of scale, and frees its local editors to concentrate on content.

Putting content aside, though, it seems the big problem for Patch is sales. With only $20 million in reported revenues for 2011 across the 850+ sites, it’s clear that something is missing. This report from Business Insider quoted a Patch sales team member who said that 70 percent of salespeople were not hitting their targets. Another report estimates that the average member of Patch’s 152-person outside sales team is only bringing in $52,022 a year in ad revenue.

Patch’s problem is the same one that affects many other local news operations: in pinning its focus so heavily on display ads, the company isn’t offering local businesses the kind of comprehensive marketing service they really need.

Let’s back up a minute. Before the web, newspapers were the kings of local. If a you had a local business and needed to get the word out, you just called up the newspaper to place an ad. It was that easy. But newspapers don’t have the monopoly they enjoyed in the past. Not only are there many other sources for local news, newspapers also have to battle for readers’ attention against Facebook, YouTube and the entire Internet, as well as 500+ channels of television, Netflix, video games, etc. The days when a local business could successfully market itself to new customers by simply buying an ad in one publication are gone. Yet online news organizations — including Patch — are still by and large using the same old newspaper advertising model.

The mission of any newspaper or other advertising-supported media operation is this: Help your clients communicate. That is what they pay for. In today’s media world, display advertising is just one method of communication. These days social media, public relations, search engines and other online marketing vehicles all play a role as well (in addition to advertising). Those in the local news business might despair at this fragmentation, but they are actually missing a huge opportunity.

If you talk to local business owners about all of these online promotional vehicles, you will find that most of them are confused and frustrated. They know they should be using Facebook and Twitter, or updating their websites, or doing more PR, or sending out email blasts. They are constantly hit up by salespeople promising to put them on the front page of Google, or selling them Yellow Pages listings online, or a hundred of other types of advertising. But they don’t have the time or the knowledge to handle all of these things. Too often they fall for scams, or rely too heavily on one vehicle, only to find that it doesn’t pay off.

Unlike other local start-ups, [Patch] has the resources to build this kind of integrated system, and can use the power of its network to create effective marketing and sales programs to push out to all their sites.

Businesses don’t need more online advertising options. They need a solution. The real opportunity is to offer businesses a service that bundles together as many of these promotional vehicles as possible into a simple, low-cost package that makes it easy for them to communicate with their customers.

The service I envision is one where a business manager can do something as simple as writing an email, and have that message pushed out through multiple channels. He or she can write, “Hey, we’re having a sale today!” and have that message automatically formatted into an advertisement on the news site. In addition, it could also be pushed out to his or her blog, as well as posted to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc. In the process, that same message could be emailed out as a press release to all the local news media and/or blasted out to the business’ customer email list.

The next step would be to integrate this message into the news site. Press releases can be automatically imported in the site, and displayed as sponsored blog posts. Those messages that have dates tied to them can be included in the site’s event calendar. Messages could also be marked as coupons or specials, and given different display options, or included into the news site’s email newsletters and social media pages. The service could even create local advertising networks to place these ads on other sites, or allow clients to book and manage ads on Google, Facebook, Bing and others.

If business managers are too busy or not savvy enough to pump out the messages themselves, then a fully managed service could be offered to do it for them. Now, you have something that is worth a lot more than CPM-based banner ads.

There are other services available that try to make it easy for business to update different social networks in one step. But the advantage local news publishers would have with a system like this is the ability to combine their clients’ communications with advertising and content, and present them to a local audience. Just as advertising alone is not the answer, neither is social networking. This is where local news sites like Patch can offer a service that others can’t.

If Patch decided to go this route, the company would be well-positioned to make the service work. Unlike other local start-ups, it has the resources to build this kind of integrated system, and can use the power of its network to create effective marketing and sales programs to push out to all their sites.

But to get there, Patch will have to change its advertising-centric mindset and focus on providing a service with real value to local advertisers. No business can be successful unless what it offers to its target customers is something they need. Solving their clients’ communications needs would go a long way toward patching the hole in AOL’s ship.

Kirk Caraway is founder/publisher of CarsonNow.org, and mother site of the Nowtown Network that includes SouthTahoeNow.com. He grew up in the newspaper business, and is an award-winning writer and editor. He started building and managing local news websites in 1994, and has witnessed firsthand the evolution of local online news. He can be contacted atkc@carsonnow.org.

 

Study: 40% of SMB Sites Lack Phone Numbers

Read the original post at: http://www.screenwerk.com/2012/04/16/study-40-of-smb-sites-have-no-phone-number/

By Greg Sterling

Implied Intelligence is a company that generates and enhances local databases. I spoke to founder Marc Brombert several weeks ago about the company’s services and capabilities. As an illustration he offered to perform a number of tests. I suggested a comparison of the accuracy of local search sites.

Implied Intelligence completed that study and sent me the results a couple of weeks ago. I wrote up the methodology and results of that test at Search Engine Land. Here’s a brief recap . . .

Using a data set of 1,000 local businesses (with websites) in the US, Implied Intelligence compared a number of leading local search sites along several criteria:

• Coverage (was the listing present)
• Number of duplicates
• Accuracy of information
• Richness of information (presence of additional information beyond business name, address and phone)

The results were a surprise: Superpages and YP.com beat Google Maps for overall accuracy and completeness. However, reviews were not part of the content comparison. Here’s the final, overall ranking:

As a separate exercise, Implied Intelligence looked at more than 8 million local/SMB websites in March of this year and found that most had relatively little content. Indeed, 40% didn’t feature a phone number and half didn’t have an email address:

–One page websites: 22.4%

–Websites with email addresses: 49.6%

–Websites with e-mails from same domain: 30.5%

–Websites with e-mails on first page: 23.8%

–Websites with phone numbers: 60.4%

–Websites with local phone numbers: 49.3%

–Websites with phone number on first page: 32.4%

–Websites with local phone number on first page: 24.8%

More than 15 years after the mainstreaming of the Internet most SMB websites are still weak and thin. These businesses are under-utilizing their sites and undermining themselves by failing to give customers multiple obvious ways to contact them.

 

About Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is the founder of Sterling Market Intelligence, focused on the Internet’s impact on offline consumer behavior. He is senior analyst for Internet2Go, an advisory service from Opus Research tracking the evolution of the mobile Internet. Sterling is also a contributing editor for  Search Engine Land, the leading online publication about the search marketplace.

Until he left in 2006, Sterling ran BIA/Kelsey’s Interactive Local Media program. Before ILM he was a producer at TechTV. Prior to TechTV, Sterling was part of the pre-launch editorial team at AllBusiness.com. And way back in the 1990s, Sterling was a practicing attorney — before leaving law to join the manic world of online marketing.

He is frequently cited and quoted in leading US publications regarding the search, local and mobile markets.

Follow Greg     Connect with Greg on LinkedIn.

How to do Keyword Research

 See the original post at:http://www.affiliateprograms.com/blog/how-to-do-keyword-research/

 

Apr 16, 2012 by Karol K in Getting Started

 

Keyword research is the most crucial task for every affiliate marketing campaign you might conduct. No matter if you’re after the natural search rankings or the paid listings (like Google AdWords), your road always starts at keyword research.

 

There’s only one main rule to keywords research, actually – you simply need to find some keywords that are both popular and low on competition.

 

Popular means that many people are searching for the keyword on a daily basis. Low on competition means that there aren’t many competing sites for the keyword.

 

There are different opinions circling around, but generally a popular keyword is one that gets more than 400 searches a day, and low on competition means that there are 30,000 competing sites or less. However, your experience may vary.

 

When you do keyword research we advise you to focus on these five main tools:

 

Google Trends and Google Insights for Search

 

Both of these tools give you a broad look into a given market, so you can see what the major trends are, and what you can expect in the near future.

 

(Let’s use “lose weight” as an example.)

 

Google Trends will let you know what the overall trend for this niche is, and point out some of the important events on a timeline.

 

 

 

Google Insights for Search will show you some more info about the geographical distribution of a given niche’s popularity and the top related searches for your keyword phrase.

 

You can filter the results by region, country, date, and category. On top of that, you can compare two or more searches.

 

 

Google Keyword Tool (GKT)

 

This is the most popular keyword tool online. Once you have your seed keyword ready – a keyword from which you want to start your main keyword research – you can go to this tool to do the main part of the work.

 

GKT lets you filter the results by location and language. Plus, there are also some advanced customization features. When you search for a phrase you’ll get a table containing various pieces of information about your keyword and others related.

 

The features GKT provides make it the place where you can do your research from start to finish – to the point where you have a number of popular and low on competition keywords.

 

 

Wordtracker’s Free Keyword Tool and Microsoft Advertising Intelligence

 

You can use this last pair of tools to make sure that what you’ve found in GKT is indeed valuable.

 

How To Build a Keyword Universe

 

Wordtracker’s tool is a web based app – like you’d expect. Microsoft’s, however, is an Excel 2007/2010 add-in. You can download it for free, but you need to sign up for an adCenter account in order to use it.

 

Once you have your keywords ready you can finally launch a search engine campaign or an advertising campaign, whichever you have in plan.

 

What’s your favorite way of doing keyword research? Feel free to share.

Pages With Too Many Ads "Above The Fold" Now Penalized By Google's "Page Layout" Algorithm

This post was originally published on http://searchengineland.com. Visit the original here:

http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613

Pages With Too Many Ads “Above The Fold” Now Penalized By Google’s “Page Layout” Algorithm

Jan 19, 2012 at 6:00pm ET by Danny Sullivan

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Do you shove lots of ads at the top of your web pages? Think again. Tired of doing a Google search and landing on these types of pages? Rejoice. Google has announced that it will penalize sites with pages that are top-heavy with ads.

Top Heavy With Ads? Look Out!

The change — called the “page layout algorithm” — takes direct aim at any site with pages where content is buried under tons of ads.

From Google’s post on its Inside Search blog today:

We’ve heard complaints from users that if they click on a result and it’s difficult to find the actual content, they aren’t happy with the experience. Rather than scrolling down the page past a slew of ads, users want to see content right away.

So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience.

Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.

Google also posted the same information to its Google Webmaster Central blog.

Sites using pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads are not impacted by this. It only applies to static ads in fixed positions on pages themselves, Google told me.

How Much Is Too Much?

How can you tell if you’ve got too many ads above-the-fold? When I talked with the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, he said that Google wasn’t going to provide any type of official tools similar to how it provides tools to tell if your site is too slow (site speed is another ranking signal).

Instead, Cutts told me that Google is encouraging people to make use of its Google Browser Size tool or similar tools to understand how much of a page’s content (as opposed to ads) is visible at first glance to visitors under various screen resolutions.

But how far down the page is too far? That’s left to the publisher to decide for themselves. However, the blog post stresses the change should only hit pages with an abnormally large number of ads above-the-fold, compared to the web as a whole:

We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content.

This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.

This new algorithmic improvement tends to impact sites where there is only a small amount of visible content above-the-fold or relevant content is persistently pushed down by large blocks of ads.

Impacts Less Than 1% Of Searches

Clearly, you’re in trouble if you have little-to-no content showing above the fold for commonly-used screen resolutions. You’ll know you’re in trouble shortly, because the change is now going into effect. If you suddenly see a drop in traffic today, and you’re heavy on the ads, chances are you’ve been hit by the new algorithm.

For those ready to panic, Cutts told me the change will impact less than 1% of Google’s searches globally, which today’s post also stresses.

Fixed Your Ads? Penalty Doesn’t Immediately Lift

What happens if you’re hit? Make changes, then wait a few weeks.

Similar to how last year’s Panda Update works, Google is examining sites it finds and effectively tagging them as being too ad-heavy or not. If you’re tagged that way, you get a ranking decrease attached to your entire site (not just particular pages) as part of today’s launch.

If you reduce ads above-the-fold, the penalty doesn’t instantly disappear. Instead, Google will make note of it when it next visits your site. But it can take several weeks until Google’s “push” or “update” until the new changes it has found are integrated into its overall ranking system, effectively removing penalties from sites that have changed and adding them to new ones that have been caught.

Google’s post explains this more:

If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes.

How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content.

On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.

Our Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update article explains the situation with Panda, and how it took time between when publishers made changes to remove “thin” content to when they were restored to Google’s good graces. That process is just as applicable to today’s change, even though Panda itself now has much less flux.

Meanwhile, Google AdSense Pushes Ads

Ironically, on the same day that Google’s web search team announced this change, I received this message from Google’s AdSense team encouraging me to put more ads on my site:

This was in relation to my personal blog, Daggle. The image in the email suggests that Google thinks content pretty much should be surrounded by ads.

Of course, if you watch the video that Google refers me (and others) to in the email, it promotes careful placement, that user experience be considered and, at one point, shows a page top-heavy with ads as something that shouldn’t be done.

 

Still, it’s not hard to easily find sites using Google’s own AdSense ads that are definitely pushing content down as far down on their pages as they can or trying to hide it. Those pages, AdSense or not, are subject to the new rules, Cutts said.

Pages Ad-Heavy, But Not Top-Heavy With Ads, May Escape

As a searcher, I’m happy with the change. But it might not be perfect. For example, here’s something I tweeted about last year:

Yes, that’s my finger being used as an arrow. I was annoyed that to find the actual download link I was after was surrounded by AdSense-powered ads telling me to download other stuff.

This particular site was heavily used by kids who might easily click on an ad by mistake. That’s potentially bad ROI for those advertisers. Heck, as net-savvy adult, I found it a challenge.

But the problem here wasn’t that the content was pushed “below the fold” by ads. It was that the ratio of ads was so high in relation to the content (a single link), plus the misleading nature of the ads around the content.

Are Google’s Own Search Results Top Heavy?

Another issue is that ads on Google’s own search results pages push the “content” — the unpaid editorial listings — down toward the bottom of the page. For example, here’s exactly what’s visible on my MacBook Pro’s 1680×1050 screen:

(Side note, that yellow color around the ads in the screenshot? It’s much darker in the screenshot than what I see with my eyes. In reality, the color is so washed-out that it might as well be invisible. That’s something some have felt has been deliberately engineered by Google to make ads less noticeable as ads).

The blue box surrounds the content, the search listings that lead you to actual merchants selling trash cans, in this example. Some may argue that the Google shopping results box is further pushing down the “real content” of listings that lead out of Google. But the shopping results themselves do lead you to external merchants, so I consider them to be content.

The example above is pretty extreme, showing the maximum of three ads that Google will ever show above its search results (with a key exception, below). Even then, there’s content visible, with it making up around half the page or more, if you include the Related Searches area as content.

My laptop’s screen resolution is pretty high, of course. Others would see less (Google’s Browser Size tool doesn’t work to measure its own search results pages). But you can expect Google will take “do as I say, not as I do” criticism on this issue.

Indeed, I shared this story initially with the main details, then started working on this section. After that was done, I could see this type of criticism already happening, both in the comments or over on my Google+ post and Facebook post about the change.

Here’s a screenshot that Daniel Weadley shared in my Google+ post about what he sees on his netbook:

In this example, Google’s doing a rare display of four ads. That’s because it’s showing the maximum of three regular ads it will show with a special Comparison Ads unit on top of those. And that will just add fuel to criticisms that if Google is taking aim at pages top-heavy with ads, it might need to also look closer to home.

NOTE: About three hours after I wrote this, Google clearly saw the criticisms about ads on its own search results pages and sent this statement:

This is a site-based algorithm that looks at all the pages across an entire site in aggregate. Although it’s possible to find a few searches on Google that trigger many ads, it’s vastly more common to have no ads or few ads on a page.

Again, this algorithm change is designed to demote sites that make it difficult for a user to get to the content and offer a bad user experience.

Having an ad above-the-fold doesn’t imply that you’re affected by this change. It’s that excessive behavior that we’re working to avoid for our users.

Algorithms? Signals?

Does all this talk about ranking signals and algorithms have you confused? Our video below explains briefly how a search engine’s algorithm works to rank web pages:

 

Also see our Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors, which explains some of the other ranking signals that Google uses in its algorithm:

Name The Update & More Info

Today’s change is a new, significant ranking factor for our table, one we’ll add in a future update, probably as Va, for “Violation, Ad-Heavy site.”

Often when Google rolls out new algorithms, it gives them names. Last year’s Panda Update was a classic example of this. But Google’s not given one to this update (I did ask). It’s just being called the “page layout algorithm.”

Boring. Unhelpful for easy reference. If you’d like to brainstorm a name, visit our posts on Google+ and on Facebook, where we’re asking for ideas.

Now for the self-interested closing. You can bet this will be a big topic of discussion at our upcoming SMX West search marketing conference at the end of next month, especially on the Ask The Search Engines panel. So check out our full agenda and consider attending.

Related Articles

• It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor
• Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Panda” Algorithm Update
• Why Google Panda Is More A Ranking Factor Than Algorithm Update
•  Taking a Closer Look at the Google’s Panda 2.5 “Flux”
• The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors
• Search Engine Land Guide To SEO
• What Is SEO / Search Engine Optimization?

Related Topics: Google: SEO | Top News

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About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan