BookFresh is attending the Local Search Summit Conference in San Jose, California today. The Summit bills itself as the leading conference for thought leaders in the local search space. Members of the BookFresh team will be live blogging and tweeting throughout the event in order to share some of interesting tidbits that are sure to pop up throughout the day. We're here because helping small businesses to reach local customers is a focus of the event and of course, providing this expertise to the BookFresh community is one of our top goals. BTW, there's some great folks in attendance including our friend and local search analyst, Greg Sterling.
Google TV Advertising with Steve Stukenborg - Google TV Product Manager
9am. Interesting talk about Google's expansion in tv advertising. The level of targeting is quite impressive. Wasn't totally clear how the SMB can easily create a video ad. Creating good video is hard. Wondering if this will help services like TurnHere to grow due to demand to advertise on television.
Local Search Ranking Factors - David Mihm
10:30am. Important key factors to rank well:
- Manually claim your business listings
- Have an address in the city being searched
- Categorize Properly (Google biz listings gives you 5)
- Use a 2-3 keywords in your title
- Google loves photos and video
- All SMBs should claim their Google Local listing and make it robust!
- Citations from Data Providers and Major IYPs
What are Citations? They are mentions of your business name found in close proximity to your physical address and what Google has in the local business center. The highest rated citation factors are sites like infoUSA, Superpages, Localeze, Yellowpages and Yelp. On page factors. Quality of links more important that quantity. "LBC" means "Local Business Center".
Reviews. Volume more important than quality in terms of reviews. Positive or negative has no relation of ranking. Yelp, Insider Pages, Yahoo, most important.
Big Picture Stuff. It's all about sending Google and Yahoo a "geographic scent" and make all the address information totally consistent. "10 pack" is the term for the top ten search results on a google local SERP page.
What Kind of Online Products do SMBs Need?
11am A panel led by Greg Sterling. Guy from CitySquares, Elocallistings and Marchex. What's most important for SMBs to market themselves online? "It needs to be simple!". Elocalistings has 20K customers. Proving ROI to the SMB is key. Nothing to surprising being said here so far... Consultative selling is key. Greg Sterling wants to really know what products are most interesting to SMBs. Marchex guy says fundamentally, it's an agency model. Helping to sell them Everything. They just went through a mock sales call to a local business owner. The elocallistings sales guy rocked the fake sales call. "I need help. I have additional clients and I need to know if you're the plumber I can give to them." ELocallistings buys "used" leads and has a much better conversion rate. Pay-per-call and coupons work great for all these guys. Showing constant value to the advertiser.