I just wrote an article which published at Search Engine Land yesterday on the subject of some innovative and occasionally guerrilla marketing tactics that might be used to display advertising promotion via Google Maps. (See: Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps)

One aspect the article touches upon is how some smaller towns and cities might find it attractive to sell the rights to their names in return for sponsor dollars. I find this concept interesting, particularly as many municipalities have begun considering flogging the rights to name all sorts of things from auditoriums to subway stations to city service departments.

In the article I mentioned “DISH, Texas” which sold its name a few years ago to a satellite dish company in return for free satellite TV service for all of its residents. While this is one of the more recent examples of “City Name Sponsorships”, it’s not the first. My coworker, Mike Churchill alerted me to the fact that the small town of “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico” actually changed its name from “Hot Springs” back in 1950 in order to win a radio contest.

The NBC radio program, “Truth or Consequences” offered to broadcast their show from the first town that renamed itself for the show.

In American history, quite a number of towns and cities went through various name transitions over time, but most of these monikers were inspired by people’s names or were descriptive in some way. These days, I suspect that most larger cities would find a lot of resistance to selling off their names — and for well-known cities they’d be losing a lot of “brand equity” if they dropped a well-known name. But, for small towns, there could potentially be a lot of places which might find large corporate investment attractive enough that they could overcome constituents’ resistance to name-change.

Selling a placename is bound to create controversy whenever it happens. Winnipeg’s plans to sell off naming rights on everything from parking meters to bus tickets and even city services has apparently gotten significant criticism.

Kalle Lasn, founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters magazine, says selling off naming rights to city services is an example of backward and unimaginative thinking.

“It’s really depressing … They should learn how to be a little bit more innovative. There are ways of cutting back and ways of generating revenue that don’t include selling your soul to corporations.”

(Adbusters is famous for helping promote “Buy Nothing Day” and other anti-commercialism and anti-advertising philosophies.)

Regardless of the controversy, the prospect of abruptly having some saleable assets available is likely to prove too attractive to resist for many city managers during these cash-strapped times. I expect we’ll see some more instances of corporate-sponsored city names appearing in online mapping systems like Google Maps.

Yahoo! will be launching their new Network Distribution feature on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010. This will allow advertisers to optionally opt out of the Yahoo Search Partners sites for PPC ad display, and will also allow Yahoo! PPC advertisers more control over how they bid on ads.

Advertisers will have the option of displaying ads on:

• The Entire Network – including Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Partners
• Yahoo! Search – includes all Yahoo! O&O properties and co-branded sites only
• Yahoo! Partners – includes all Yahoo! Partners Only

In addition to opting out entirely, advertisers will also have the ability to apply a premium or discount (measured as a percentage of Max Bid) to their bid on the Search Network. This comes with a couple of caveats:

• Bidding Adjustments (up or down) is done by % only, not dollar amounts
• These bids are relative to the Yahoo! Search Network bids, so no discounting on the main Yahoo! Search bids
• This is for the Search Network only – not Content Match

Yahoo! gives the following warnings:

Once the new features are launched, Yahoo! will also make available a Network Distribution Performance report.

So, once this new feature launches, how should you use it? If Yahoo Search Partner site ad displays are adversely affecting your Yahoo PPC Performance, I recommend three approaches, which can be used in combination, depending on your agressiveness in tracking campaigns:

• Use the Blocked Domains list – this gives fine control over blocking specific domains, but many advertisers run up against the 500 domain limit, and still have problems with underperforming domains.
• Bid down agressively – if you have a gauge of the relative performance of your Yahoo! Search vs Yahoo! Partners sites (you are using Conversion Tracking and Analytics, right?), you can use this measure as a guide to how much you should discount bidding on the Yahoo! Partner sites
• Opt out entirely – this will eliminate the poorly performing domains, along with perhaps 50% or more of your ad inventory. Opting out entirely would provide the best immediate change in performance, at the potential cost of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

We are all eagerly awaiting this new feature since it will give PPC advertisers much more control over the ad delivery and bid prices for Yahoo! PPC Campaigns.

I recently wrote an article outlining how Wikipedia was abruptly rocketed into being heavily influential within Google Maps (see New Behemoth Emerges In Google Maps: Wikipedia). For small businesses everywhere, I predict that this change is going to bring Wikipedia to the forefront of SMB’s attention. With just a little bit of review, I think that small business owners are going to be noticing how Wikipedia has become very ubiquitous in Place Pages for Google Maps, and they’ll notice or suspect that those Places which sport a Wikipedia association tend to rank higher than others.

Once a business proprietor notices this, they may think to themselves, “Aha! Easy as pie! I know Wikipedia allows anyone to edit articles and add articles about any and everything, so I’ll have my clever nephew who does the internets add an article about my business!” Unfortunately, it’s not this simple.

The ease with which Wikipedia allows community user edits has been a prime area for criticism of the service over the years, and Wikipedia has responded by tightening review of whether subjects are notable enough to merit their own articles, and dedicated Wikipedia devotees try to scrutinize all edits to insure that they’re factual, backed up by respectable references, and worthy of mention. So, addition of articles in a willy-nilly fashion without good understanding of the service’s rules and practices will almost certainly lead to deletion of the content added. It may not happen immediately, but it almost certainly will happen at some point.

The brutal truth is that most businesses simply are not notable enough to merit having a Wikipedia article dedicated to them. There is some sense of the arbitrary about what characteristics are required to meet notability guidelines, because there is some element of subjectivity about it. Essentially, a subject likely needs to be historically significant, culturally significant, or be widely known. A highly significant, publicly-traded company such as Google would meet the requirements, while a small clock repair shop in Anytown likely will not.

Small stores can make the cut, such as the Gotham Book Mart, for which I researched and authored the Wikipedia article a couple of years back. But, few businesses have had as many newspaper articles about them, mentioned in books as much, or had as many associations with notable individuals.

The iconic "Wise Men Fish Here" sign which hung above the door of the famous Gotham Book Mart for decades.

So, what’s to be done if you’re a small business looking to increase your promotional game? Is Wikipedia completely off-limits to you?

No! There are a number of acceptable ways by which one may integrate with Wikipedia in valid, non-spammy ways, and I’ll cover two of the easiest here. These two methods are primarily for those small businesses which do not merit articles dedicated to them in Wikipedia.

Method 1: Set up your own User page and begin authoring and editing Wikipedia articles.

The best way to understand Wikipedia is to begin participating. Here’s an article on how to start. You may validly write up a User page with links to your own sites, and the more you help out with Wikipedia articles, the more important your User page becomes. As it becomes important, your business site may benefit.

Now, User pages and other pages in Wikipedia automatically nofollow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow external links as they are added, meaning that they are flagged for search engines as not being endorsed by Wikipedia. “Nofollowing” a link was intended to halt it from passing PageRank or ranking value in search engines, and was introduced to help fight spam in sites where users are allowed to add links. There’s a debate among marketing circles as to whether Google chooses to count Wikipedia’s external links in ranking algorithms or not. My suspicion is that as other spam-fighting methods have improved in Wikipedia, the links which have been added and have sustained over time likely do have some rank value — and are therefore likely used by Google for ranking purposes.

The User pages of those who add a lot of value to Wikipedia gain PageRank themselves, and, even if they do not pass PageRank, the links do pass traffic which can indirectly help increase a site’s rankings in other ways. (For instance, see MONGO’s User page, which has developed a Google Toolbar PageRank of 4 or Durova’s which has a 6.)

If you’re setting up your User page in part to promote your business, I suggest that you consider naming it beneficially with your business name, or a category/keyword name that refers to your type of business. Describe your business briefly. Link to relevant articles about your city or neighborhood. Link to your company with descriptive link text. And, to provide a chance of enabling this to eventually help your listing in Google Maps, include a Geobox in the profile (this addes geocoordinates to the page, a key element that Google looks for when deciding if a page is about a location).

If you’re a newbie at Wikipedia, I strongly suggest you proceed slowly and learn the environment. To get a good grasp of what people edit on pages, check out the History tab on a number of articles and click to compare revisions. This shows how people make changes, what they change, and many ideally provide a super-brief snippet of text to state what they’ve altered.

It’s very easy to find areas where you can add value: read articles of subjects you’re familiar with and interested-in, and you’ll likely find text needing grammatical correction, badly phrased sentences needing clearer writing, factual errors, and articles needing some additional vital pieces of information. Be sure to find and add credible references if adding or altering facts — you should ideally back up all facts with a reference source, just as if you were writing research papers for college.

Method 2: Donate photos of local scenes to Wikimedia Commons for use in Wikipedia articles.

I’ve written before about how it can be beneficial to employ loose licensing for images so that others may be incented to use them and link back to your site, and this is a variation on that theme (see: Why Free Photos Equal Good SEO).

For instance, the photographer who donated this pic of the famous Chrysler Building, David Shankbone, included URLs on the image’s information page which link to his site.

For another example, check out the page for the photo I donated for the Gotham Book Mart of the “Wise Men Fish Here” sign.

Is this allowed? Absolutely. Read Wikipedian Durova’s article on how adding images to Wikipedia is acceptable. Wikipedia desires to have good quality photos donated for use so that they may be used to illustrate articles. This is an area where helping the community can be mutually beneficial for everyone.

This tactic is actually pretty powerful, because releasing images into Wikimedia in return for attribution (a citation when anyone uses your photo, with a link back to you) enables you to achieve a lot of links from other sites as well, depending upon the popularity of and usefulness of your photo and its subject matter.

To figure out what photos to add, I suggest reviewing the Wikipedia articles of famous places in your area, and identifying ones which do not have pics. Then take a Saturday morning with good weather and sunlight, and snap photos to donate. You can also look at Wikipedia’s page for Articles needing images, but many of these may be more specific subjects for which you may not be able to provide photos.

Naturally, there are a number of “don’ts” when adding content to Wikipedia. I won’t expand on all those here, but they probably mostly boil down to “don’t be spammy” and “be polite”. I suggest reading up on Wikipedia Etiquette if you’re just getting started. Wikipedia desires content which is informative, factual, and neutrally presented.

There are a number of more advanced means of optimizing for Google Maps and local search via Wikipedia, for those who are more experienced with the service. I’ll likely be going into more of these tactics in upcoming articles at Search Engine Land and in presentations I make at upcoming conferences. So, stay tuned for more!

Keyword Research Session

Despite cold and the busy holiday season, search enthusiasts gathered in Chicago to attend the Search Engine Strategies conference. This year, I had the honor of presenting a solo presentation on Keyword Research. As long as there are search boxes requiring text queries, keywords will play an important role in being found on the web. Keyword research is a fundamental skill set all successful online marketers must master.

In the keyword session I discussed techniques for finding and evaluating keywords. I also covered a number of the keyword tools available to simplify, organize, and manage keyword research.

One of the main benefits of using keyword tools is that they give marketers insight into the popularity of a keyword phrase, which is another way of saying that they give you insight into the traffic potential of the phrase. Higher popularity in a keyword means there is an opportunity for more visits, but it is often associated with more competition.

Byron Gordon, SEO-PR, talked with me after the keyword session about how to conduct successful keyword research. You can watch our discussion in the video below.

Avoiding Keyword Mistakes

Keyword selection is both an art and a science. One of the common mistakes I see people making with a keyword tool is to dump a keyword list directly from a tool into their online marketing campaigns. The tools are helpful, but for best results, there still needs to be a human in the loop reviewing the keyword list for non-relevant or inappropriate words. You need to review your keyword list with several criteria in mind including relevancy, competitiveness, user intent, popularity, and performance.

While there are several tools on the market (both paid and free) that can assist in developing a list of candidate keywords, it is still crucial that you employ your brain to filter the keywords for maximum effectiveness. Otherwise, the list you develop, while extensive, will lack the necessary focus.

There are a number of excellent Keyword tools available to online marketers. Some of the more popular tools available to webmasters include

• the Google keyword tool,
• Google Trends,
• Google Insights,
• Keyword Discovery,
• Wordtracker,
• Microsoft adCenter Lab tools, and
• Wordstream

There are also tools that help you gain insights into your competitors’ keywords. A few of my favorite tools for competitive intelligence are

• Hitwise,
• Compete,
• SpyFu,
• KeywordSpy,
• Trellian’s competitive intelligence tool,
• AdGooRoo and
• Comscore’s Marketer.

I’m obviously only scratching the surface on the tools available. In the session I talked about many more and gave demonstations of some of the tools in use. The important thing is tools can help you make better keyword decisions and give you a perspective beyond your own analytics. Not every tool “fits” with every keyword researcher. Try several of these tools (sometimes in combination) until you find a tailored tool suite that works with the way that you think and work.

Keyword Focus

In the keyword session I talked briefly about doing keyword research for different types of online marketing. For example, if you’re doing KW research for PPC, you have the luxury of going wide in your keyword list (budget limiting of course) and targeting more keywords (compared to keywords for SEO). SEO requires you to laser target your keywords, so you really have to cull your list down assigning a small number of keyword phrases.

SEO versus PPC Session

I was honored to be included on the session entitled SEO vs PPC the ultimate battle. The panel was a mock debate to determine which marketing technique was best – SEO or PPC. Representing SEO were the always-a-class-act Rand Fishkin, my favorite SEO bad boy David Naylor, and the provocative and insightful SEO rockstar Michael Gray. Representing the PPC were myself (Christine Churchill), Karen Weber, VP of E-Marketing, Irwin Union Bank and our moderator Brian Lewis, VP, Engine Ready.

I need to emphasize that this was a MOCK DEBATE, because it became clear during the session that many in the audience thought we were serious in our debate and that we were actually recommending one form of marketing over the other. In practice, my company KeyRelevance does about a 50/50 mix of SEO and PPC, and the synergy between the two often leads to us doing both for a given client.

To be perfectly clear, one is NOT better than the other. The goal of the session was to highlight the merits and differences of the two techniques and to stimulate thinking about when and where to use each technique. On the panel in our mock debate, panelists were tasked with defending one side or the other. In real life we believe SEO and PPC are complementary, not adversarial forms of marketing. It’s not an either/or decision… both techniques should be in your marketing arsenal. There may be circumstances when one might be more appropriate (like PPC being helpful with a new site or one needing immediate traffic), but many sites would benefit from both methods.

PPC Site Clinic

My final session was a PPC site clinic with Melissa Mackey, the Search Marketing Manager from Fluency Media and Ayat Shukairy the co-founder of Invesp Consulting. It was a real pleasure sharing the stage with such accomplished professionals.

Clinics are a chance for companies to get a free review by experts, so they are always a popular event, and many others benefit from hearing the points raised about the sites reviewed. Sites reviewed get recommendations that would be worth many times the cost of admission to the conference. That might be a good tactic to use to convince your boss why you should attend a conference. If you were to hire an expert to review your ads, it could cost thousands of dollars. If your site is chosen to be reviewed in the clinic, you could receive valuable, actionable advice for free as part of attending the conference. That’s a bargain you can’t pass up.

Why should you attend a Search Conference?

Search engine conferences are expensive, any way you measure it (travel expenses, time away from work, admission fees, etc.) so you really have to weigh the costs and benefits. Our industry is unique in the volume of changes occurring. Reading blogs, articles, books, watching SEO videos are all also good ways of learning about SEO/SEM, but attending a search conference takes you to a deeper level in your professional development. Attending a conference is like drinking from the Search knowledge fire hose: there is so much information shared, in such a short time, that you can’t help but come away from the conference with several nuggets of valuable insight that you can immediately implement and reap benefits many times the cost of the trip.

I was checking the weather this morning (raining again – Ugh!) and when I went to look at the detailed hourly predictions, I got a suprise.

It was interesting find that the Google Toolbar thinks that the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website is written in Sovenian !

Today I posted a marketing advice article geared towards small, local newspapers entitled, “Local Newspapers Need To Embrace SEO To Survive“. Ironically, Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, has just stated this past weekend that they’re entertaining the possibility of completely yanking their news articles out of the Google index altogether! This, of course, would be a large mistake because there’s increasing evidence that information resources that are unavailable via the internet (and availability now is largely synonymous with “findable in Google”) are considered by consumers to be less relevant.

I think Murdoch’s idea of creating a walled garden is a bad strategy in this case, although I’m highly sympathetic to the plight faced by large and small newspapers all over the country. With news subscriptions having dropped all over, and advertiser revenue switching more to online and other channels, newspapers companies have been feeling the pinch terribly. It’s my believe that most have huge potential for online, and can turn this around. In my article, I described how the news archives with many papers contain a gold mine of information that a great many people don’t even know exists because it’s walled-off by badly-built sites.

Even so, it’s my opinion that newspapers continue to have a role in our day-to-day lives, and they have an important place in local marketplaces, both online and offline.

Small businesses who desire better exposure online need to keep their local papers’ websites in mind as one component of their online marketing. If you’re a small business desiring better rankings in Google, examine your local newspaper sites closely to see if there are opportunities for obtaining valuable links. Some tips:

• Pages of newspaper sites which rank well in search engines are desireable places for you to obtain links. See what pages are exposed to the search engine, and find out what opportunities there may be to get a link to your business website from them.
• Consider traditional promotion activites to obtain newspaper articles about your business! The old methods can still work today. Just ask the reporter really nicely if they can link to your business website at the end of the story — that makes the story more useful for their own users, too, so there’s a good reason for them to do this.
• Link to the news story(ies) about you! So, if your local newspaper site is one of the badly-built ones, and the story about your business isn’t indexed by Google, help it out by linking to the stories about you from many other places on the internet such as from social bookmarking sites, your personal homepage, and other places. If the URL is publicly available, you can help the page get indexed by linking to it, and if it mentions you or links to you, the reference citation can only help your business site!
• Don’t forget the classifieds! Online newspaper sites have online classifieds, frequently, and many people forget to make use of them. This can often be a free or low-cost option for you to further promote your business and business site.
• Newspaper yellow pages? Many newspaper sites include helpful local directories of businesses, and these are places where you want to claim your business listing, expand your business profile, include links to you, and even consider spending advertising to improve your reach.
• Comment! User comments on news stories online are also another way that one may be able to effectively interact with newspaper sites. You could comment on a news story about your business, thanking the reporter involved. You could comment about other news stories that my be related to your interests in some way. Interestingly, some major newspaper sites allow links in comments and they are not all “nofollowed”! They can do this since they may review/moderate comments prior to publishing them. In other cases, comments may not be good for links and many news sites don’t allow much customization of user profiles. Still, the references to your business are worthwhile, so consider interacting with the local news audience via comments.

So, while newspapers may be struggling to adapt to the internet age, and their sites may not be search-engine-friendly, they can still be valuable components of your overall local marketing mix.

The premise is fairly simple, although I see relatively few companies and individuals using the custom maps (”My Maps”) feature in Google Maps to help market their website or business.

Many users are generating custom maps, some of which garner tens or hundreds of thousands of views, depending upon how well they’re optimized and how much they target subjects of general interest. There are maps pinpointing crimes around cities, maps to find wifi locations, tourist points of interest, and maps showing where to go for certain types of shops or charitable organization donation dropoff locations.

Here’s one example of a entrepreneur leveraging My Maps effectively in Google:

The user, “Sister Diane”, has provided a very helpful map for people interested in her industry. The map shows stores where one may obtain various craft supplies all over the Portland, Oregon area. When one of her location listings is clicked, the information bubble that pops up on the Google Map contains a great description and address, and for some locations there are pictures, phone numbers and URLs.

She also filled out her Google Profile, so when her username is clicked or moused-over by the cursor pointer, map users can see her website URLs for her blog and another site where she writes articles.

This is a really good example of how developing and providing useful content within Google Maps can help to further promote your own content by exposing you to more consumers. While crafts in Portland is very much a small niche, Sister Diane’s map has achieved over 28,000 views since its creation two years ago.

Custom maps may be created by hand, using the simple tools for editing My Maps on Google. For larger lists of locations, I highly recommend creating a KML file as per Google Maps and Google Earth documentation, and either manually uploading the KML or submitting it via a geositemap from your website.

For more examples and tips on how to effectively leverage this long-tail marketing tactic, ready the full article at Search Engine Land, “Google Custom Maps: A Goldmine For Local Businesses“.

On 10 Sept 2009, Yahoo launched a new PPC Traffic Quality report that will be a real boon to PPC advertisers wanting to track the effectiveness of their campaigns across the Yahoo Search network. Yahoo provides PPC ads along side search results for both Yahoo properties and other sites that show Yahoo search results (called the Yahoo Search Network, or Search Partners). Since Yahoo does not allow advertisers to opt out of their search network, tracking performance is of paramount importance to making the campaigns successful. The new Ad Delivery Report will help savvy advertisers optimize their ad spend.

 

Generating the Reports

Generating the report is straightforward: after logging in to your Yahoo PPC account, click on the “Reports” Tab, then on the “Ad Delivery Report” link under “Traffic Quality Reports” in the left-hand navigation.

Merits of the New Ad Delivery Report

I recommend downloading the report into Excel (or other spreadsheet) to make the data easier to manipulate. Once downloaded, the report provides a wealth of information to the advertiser. You can see a domain-by-domain breakdown of all the usual PPC metrics (impressions, clicks, CPC, CTR, etc.). The best part of using this report is that it provides a list of impressions as well as clicks, so you can identify where your ads are being displayed but NOT being clicked on. This helps in a couple of ways:

• you can determine sites which generate impressions but not clicks can drag down your CTR, and
• you can identify sites that are inappropriate for your ad campaign and block that domain even before paying for clicks.

Using the Ad Delivery Reports to your advantage

You can use the report to:

Identify poorly performing sites – Sites with a very low CTR can be identified and blocked. Similarly, sites with a high Cost Per Conversion could be culled.

Avoiding unnecessary impressions – Poor targeting may cause ads to display without generating clicks. This lowers the CTR performance. Sort the data by CTR and consider culling the lower performers, assuming you have given them a chance (say 200+ impressions) to generate some clicks.

Block out of area delivery – Geo-targeting is based on the IP address of the searcher, but consider that if you have a US-based offer, searchers on Canadian or UK sites (both of which showed up on the US-limited ad campaign in the report above) are probably not your target demographic.

Suspicious behavior – Sites with a very low CTR are not helping your campaign, but sites with an extremely high CTR are also suspicious. If your typical CTR is 5%, and you are seeing 100% CTR from a site with many impressions, this could be a red flag. Note that a site with 1 impression could have 1 click and 100% CTR, so make sure you have multiple impressions to confirm any suspicious behavior. I recommend culling these domains, and if the behavior is egregious (say 10+ impressions and a 100% CTR) consider reporting the domain to Yahoo.

 

Adding poor performers to the Blocked Domains list

Once you have identified domains on which you would prefer your ads NOT be displayed, you can add them to the “Blocked Domains” list for your account. To do this, click on the Administration tab, then on the Submit Domains link. We recommend adding the 2nd level domain (e.g. somesite.com) rather than the 3rd level domain (e.g. www.somesite.com, search.somesite.com, etc.). If you provide a 2nd level domain, ALL matching 3rd level domains under that domain will be blocked as well. FYI, Yahoo also supports blocking specific subdirectories (e.g. www.somesite.com/news) from being used, but since the Ad Delivery Report only reports on the domain (not the path), this would require the use of a 3rd party click tracking tool (like www.PPCProbe.com) or manual investigation of each domain to see where the ads might be displayed on the site.

 

Limitations and Caveats

There are a few limitations and caveats that you need to be aware of:

Blocked Domains List Limitations – there is a limit of 500 domains that can be blocked per account

Delayed Implementation – Yahoo says it may take up to seven days for a block request to propagate. In practice, I have seen it take as much as 30 days, so track your requests to make sure they are implemented. Submitting a domain that is already on the list won’t hurt, and the system will warn you if you make a duplicate request.

More Sites Waiting in the Wings – In some industries, the Yahoo Search Network sites work fine. In some very competitive areas, however, there are a lot of “domainer” sites with no real content that capture significant traffic. Blocking these sites can become a persistent problem, as new sites move into the rotation as others are blocked. Keeping on top of the issue is key to making sure that only the best, on target sites are used for your ad delivery.

My article on the “Brave New World For Yellow Pages” aired today on Search Engine Land. In it, I describe how Google Trends is showing that each of the major internet yellow pages has taken a sharp dip since the end of last year and early this spring. I diagnosed the cause of this apparent downturn in referred visits from Google as being due to Google’s change to display their local 10-pack in more cases where user queries don’t include geographic modifying terms (they’re incorporating users’ IP address geolocations).

There are many variables involved, so others may easily dispute my diagnosis. However, what is indisputable is that from Google’s perspective, these sites are now getting fewer referral visits.

This isn’t a complete surprise. There have been indications for some time that overall trends could go in this direction, and many of us in the yellow pages industry were concerned about search engine incursions into YP territory from the beginning. I’ve previously pointed out another concerning behavioral change shown by Google Trends – fewer and fewer users are searching for “yellow pages” in Google keyword search over time. That trend is still continuing:

John Kelsey recently wrote about how these companies can turn things around, even though he implies their “backs are against the wall”. I agree. From an SEO perspective, it’s nowhere near the end-of-the-line for these companies.

It’s ironic that local search marketing experts all recommend that businesses update and enhance their listings within these websites, in large part for local SEO value. Yet, these sites now are struggling with their own SEO.

Almost uniformly, each of them have a huge amount of trust and PageRank from Google. This SEO goodwill can be employed to turn these trends back around, if that goodwill isn’t squandered.

In the SEL article, I mentioned Yelp’s success over the same period of time, and it hints at one of the elements needed. Good user-experience and an engaging interface can do quite a bit. Also, subtle details can make the difference between a site where people wish to interact and add value versus those where people really don’t wish to hang around.

Various SEO improvements should also be used – improvements to the amount of content on pages, the breadth of information about businesses, and forming that content into signals which effectively “sing” to the search engines. There are quite a few areas neglected by these sites, with little excuse. For instance, as far back as 2006, I recommended employing Microformatting for local SEO value. If all of these sites had been following my recurring recommendations on integrating Microformats, many of them would now be sporting improved display in Google search results, similar to Yelp — when Google rolled out Rich Snippets a few months ago, suddenly Yelp listings were decorated with eye-catching star rating icons, and stats have shown that these treatments likely increase click-through rates considerably. (Insiderpages was the only other one of these sites which I noticed were using the Microformats, and the only other ones which enjoyed the Rich Snippets icon treatment in Google SERPs.)

Microformats are only the tip of the iceberg for most of these sites. Basic building-blocks of SEO are lacking in many cases. Search engine friendly infrastructure such as bot-friendly URLs, robust linking hierarchies, good page titles, descriptive metadata, and stable URLs which don’t continuously appear/disappear are some of the items which these companies struggle to have.

I believe these companies can turn the trend back around and increase their natural search referral traffic dramatically. But, are they willing to make the changes necessary to do so? It will almost certainly require them to pull out all the stops in taking their SEO games to the next level.

• 10/5: SMX Boot Camp: Keyword Research Tools & Techniques – Christine Churchill
• 10/5: Local & Mobile Search: Maps, Maps, Maps! – Chris Silver Smith
• 10/6: Pumping Up YouTube – Christine Churchill (moderating the session)
• 10/7: Social Media, Search & Reputation Management – Chris Silver Smith

Don’t miss this opportunity to hear a couple of us from Key Relevance, speaking in person! Attending SMX can provide companies with significant benefits in terms of developing search marketing savviness. More than 150 of the world’s most knowledgable internet and search engine marketers will present at SMX East. Register now!

Let us know if you’ll be attending, and/or drop by one of our sessions to say hello!