Ephricon Web Marketing

Yesterday we talked about how Google is now merging the local listings and organic listings such that in many cases they are inseparable.  Similarly, we’re noticing several other interesting developments with regard to actual rankings of sites… not just what the listing looks like when it does rank.

Like most really cool discoveries I have in the world of SEO, I stumbled upon this (haha, “Stumbled Upon”) by looking at my analytics.   Our site produced 3 web-form leads in a 45 minute span yesterday which is well higher than the norm.  So this morning I was curious if they came from a particular referring site, a particular tweet, or a particular keyword.  I suspected they were not from organic search, since traffic from organic search tends to be more consistent over time.  Traffic from referring sites tends to be highly volatile – when a prominent blogger creates a new post and links to you you’ll see a ton of traffic for a day, maybe two, and then as that post drops down and is no longer the “new thing” you’ll see that referring traffic die down quickly.

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So we may have jumped the gun here as Google appears to be testing these changes to the SERPs, but if we waited until Google stopped testing things before commenting on them then we’d still be without Gmail accounts and most other Google products.

Korey and I share outline the recent changes and share our initial thoughts, below:

Anyhow, it appears that sometime yesterday Google started testing changes to how they show the “local” (map-driven) listings in the search results.  Specifically, they seem to be doing away with the “7-pack” or “one-box” format where a map is showing (typically with up to 7 listings) immediately above the organic results and below the top 3 paid results.  Instead, they are showing the organic results higher on the page, immediately below the top 3 paid results, but this time with the local listings and related info (reviews, link to the places page, map marker, physical address) all tied to the organic listing itself.

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Last night I taught a 2 hour seminar about the basics of SEO for CPCC’s Corporate and Continuing Education program.  The audience was pretty diverse, but did include a number of small business owners.  Most managed their own website or worked with a designer, but did not seem to have a dedicated internet marketing staff. In general there were a number of mom and pops who need help with SEO but often don’t have the budget to hire an SEO agency like Ephricon to handle the work for them.  Seminars like this are a chance for us to help them out and give them advice, and to do so at no cost to them (other than their time).

Anyhow, I took them through a bit about how search engines work, what they are looking for, and tips they can apply to their own websites.  We used a real-world example of Luigi’s Pizza.  Luigi’s is (in my opinion) the best pizza in Charlotte.  Yet (at the time of this post and last night’s seminar) they don’t rank on the first 3 pages in Google for even regional keyword phrases like pizza Charlotte, NC.  Outranking them are 30-plus sites, some of which are local pizza places, some national chains, and some directory and/or review sites (i.e. yellowpages.com, superpages.com, yelp.com, etc.).  In fact, their visibility in search engines is so bad that they don’t even rank on the first page for “luigi’s pizza”.

Here’s how this hurts Luigi’s…

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Wondering how Google Analytics tracks or reports on local search traffic?  We were too.  I tried doing a few searches to find the answer, but could not find anything definitive.  So we decided to set up a little experiment to test it out…

Summary of Our Test

1. Create brand new website on brand new domain
2. Install Google Analytics
3. Create Google Places Account
4. Click through to website from the local search listing, in various ways
5. See how Analytics records it

So to start, I created a brand new website (1-page site) on a new domain.  The site has zero inbound links, no name brand and basically zero traffic b/c no one knows it exists.  This was intentional, in order to keep the data clean for our test.  I then installed Analytics, and then set up a Google Places account for the business/website, and verified it.  I didn’t build out the Places profile very much, basically just one sentence.  The title on the local listing is the name of the business.

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