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SITE BUILD IT! Xpress
Your Engine to SBI! Success
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Google Puts Local Search on the Map...
Get Your Local Business Site Ready NOW
by David Jonah, SBI! Certified Webmaster
The continuing elevation of Google, the search engine
modestly changing the face if not the interface of
computing, is dovetailing nicely with the SBI's publishing
tool development efforts.
Here's how this new search qualifier works and how SBIers
can optimize their sites for revenues. The idea behind this
feature is to allow searchers to use Google more like a
local yellow pages than an international search engine.
A recent release of a beta test tool by the Google search
engine that sorts web sites by the content's relevance and
by the relevance of their geographic location, changes
everything about how future consumers will both use and
depend on Web searches.
Search-by-location potentially changes how responsive, local
business managers will change their advertising and
marketing investment decisions by rewarding the media
packager that most effectively delivers their local
commercial message in the most cost efficient and customer
effective manner. This is where SBI's Info-Publishers
targeting, among other small business targeting
specializations, comes into play.
Search marketing for an advertiser is a reliable method of
measuring advertising's effectiveness by calculating the ad
costs incurred on a per unit basis, compared against the
conversion rate of sales volume tracked at the sales counter
checkout, or from their web site orders. New
performance-based advertising business models are
transforming traditional media's more generalized ad buying
metrics of mass audience and circulation measurement in
favour of direct customer reach from search.
As convenience and accuracy increases, consumers will
accelerate their use of Web content search tools for local
search tasks and, in the process, increase the importance of
content and web sites for business operations. This will
occur in every business regardless of size, because the
Internet, lead by search engine's time-saving convenience
and search accuracy, is driving the web to become a local
community information phenomena.
"Let your fingers do the walking", Yellow Page directory
promo is now being amended to
let-your-fingers-do-the-finding, or more pointedly,
know-before-you-go. Know-before-you-go web search has
revolutionized the travel industry and is about to turn
retail on it's check-out counter wait lines.
SiteSell's SBI! is directly in the crosshairs of a
content-relevance convergence that is being fuelled by the
competitive marketplace for search-the-web-before-deciding
consumers.
Google's new search function that isolates web pages by
their geographical location has made search engines
generally, and Google specifically, some of the most
valuable visual real estate in retailing, professional
services, and industrial/commercial sales. It has equal
potential to extend that financial value to SBI! owners as
well.
For example, if you are looking for a movie theatre in your
area, or a pizza shop around the corner, the new search
function makes it easier. Rather than relying on a
searcher's ability to narrow their search phrases to deliver
appropriate results, the GoogleLabs new search utility
encourages searchers to specify a geographic location ahead
of a time. Then Google's results would only deliver those
content listings that are appropriate to that identified
location.
Marketers call this geo-targeting. SBIers should call it
manna-from-the-cyberheavens. It means that your SBI! site,
rich in content, and qualified with Google for their revenue
sharing ad network, can now have a share of all national ad
campaigns that qualify by geo-keywording, as well as all
local business ads that can run on the Google search results
pages. You can become an expert in selling PPC campaigns
locally and if your SBI! content qualifies, you can have
those ads appear on your site as well as Google search
results.
When a click happens on your site you gain a revenue share,
when the click occurs on your customer's keyword ad on
Google's results page, you get no revenue, but your customer
loves you for it by gaining more attention to their product
offering. This sets the stage to sell them their own SBI
subscription web site.
Take SBI! to Main Street and teach locals how to go global,
to sell even more local using GoogleLabs' location sort.
How Google does it. Google scans the information on a Web
site and uses it to make a best guess estimate of the
location of that site. Logically, that may include indexing
city names, zip codes or even phone numbers off of the Web
site, and then running a comparison of a database to match
them to a location. For now, during beta testing, the
results are limited to the United States. Reports are that
Google hopes to expand it to other countries in the future.
This is big.
And bigger still for anyone using SBI! for attracting
customer traffic.
Google, with its iconoclast graphical personality (birthday
candles and streamers incorporated in the opening screen on
their recent 5th birthday display, math formulas for
Einstein's E2 recognition), and its nest of search-me
competitors are creating a new, and powerful tool to
influence consumer decisions. The consumer's short list of
site search info and preferences is today's most powerful
retail message for attracting new customers and closing
local sales.
Being able to make those search results relevant to your
home town area or to any geographic location, further
elevates the potential influence of all search engines
offering targeted accuracy. The local community merchant is
where well over 80% of all retail transactions are
completed.
However, as anyone who has ever sold web site participation
door-to-door knows, a web site is perceived by local
business operators to be barely relevant to their daily
sales effort. That was the case until GoogleLab's trial
search box.
The addition of Location sort, changes everything, forever,
even if it remains an option like groups, News, or catalogue
comparison shopping on Froogle. Local sort means that anyone
with a business interest or message to get out in a
cost-effective manner is now a candidate for a SBI! web site.
Google by introducing a second search-qualifier box for
content, with undoubtedly more boxes to come, encourages a
drill-down results feature based on geographic location.
Google is serving notice that if a Web site highlights their
geographic location as being relevant to what they have to
offer as content, it will be found.
Here's what it can mean for any SBI! owner or 5PillarClub
affiliate member.
As SBI! web site that is sorted by Google's location sort is
now as important as having telephone service. It means that
a comprehensive web site content is now critical and must be
properly optimized for sort by location. With Google
influencing over 75% of traffic delivered to most sites,
according to published 2003 traffic surveys, this engine's
sort by local address potentially changes everything about
local advertising expenditures.
There is new impetus to sell SBI! to every local business
establishment. Just as you cannot be without a phone, you
can no longer afford to be in business without a
traffic-effective web site.
You can take your SBI! site and target any community, any
industry, any region, any theme or concept that has some
relationship to your geography, whether it be desert heat or
mountain winter, and become a content publisher. This not
only allows you to sell your community merchants and local
manufacturers on the marketing and traffic power of SBI, but
when twinned with the advertising power of Google, you also
have a huge potential for additional revenue generation.
You can use your SBI! keyword research functions to place
your customer on the Google search engine results page for
specific products and services. These ads are triggered by
the community or regional names and can supplement your
editorial content efforts. You load your SBI! site with
relevant content to the customer's location and products and
provide a directory guide to your local community and its
businesses. Submit your content site to Google for
acceptance in the advertising network.
With Google's acceptance of the site, the same geographic
keywords trigger the very PPC ads you helped your customer
and local business owner create on your site. These ads have
the potential to earn you additional revenues when clicked
through from your site just the same as they do Google from
the results page. You and your client are participating in
one of the most sophisticated advertising solutions ever
devised, since banks started advertising car financing loans
in the 50's to help sell more cars and increase financing
volumes.
What you have accomplished for your client advertiser and
potential SBI! client is a powerful global reach marketing
campaign for the keywords around their business products.
What you have done for your own community focused SBI! site
is added 24/7 revenue potential from one of the most
powerful pay-for-performance advertising program that exists
today.
Until Google showed its hand and their potential to reliably
sort by location according to defined criteria like street,
postal code, community name, this kind of linking of SBI! and
search engine ad transactions was more difficult to imagine
or propose. Looking back, 2003 may be a historical milestone
when the power of a web site to market global went local and
never looked back.
Now in the true sense of SBI! advances, which are slightly
ahead of their time, this integrating of local and global
search advertising concept is also slightly ahead of its
demonstrated potential. Google's search-by-location is
reported to be in rough beta test, and the initial results
are spotty.
For any SBI! owner, however, this means that all sites must
now add pages and content that clearly identifies what
geo-local address they are in, and optimize their pages for
that location(s). If it isn't relevant today it will be, and
soon.
Increasingly, those that benefit the most from this new
revolution in how people find their local business and
service suppliers will be those people who put their content
in an SBI! template. The SBI! method helps all search engines
in nanoseconds effectively select which site can best answer
the user's question, and now as a result of the geo-coded
content provided, create a defined community, short list.
Your business needs to be on that list.
Google-enabled SBI! rocks.
David Jonah
jonah2009@rogers.com
airplane-and-helicopter-charters.com
monctoncommercialrealestate.com
telecommunications-equipment-finder.com
David Jonah is a former community newspaper publisher and
local business marketing consultant who is now a full time
certified SBI-Webmaster creating keyword enriched content
from his ocean-side office on New Brunswick southeastern
coast. He started with SiteSell's MYSS! ebook in 1998, and
is currently developing a new keyword-advertising concept in
online community guide publishing, using SiteBuild-It's
infopublishing.sitesell.com concept, for living in and
visiting Moncton, New Brunswick.
KEN'S COMMENT: Thanks very much, David. I agree. This is
simply HUGE for local businesses with local clientele. Over
the coming weeks, we'll add follow-up articles to this --
Overture has just launched a beta version, too. And we'll
tie it all together into the "Local Business" section of the
TNT HQ as the dust clears.
But one thing is already clear... we've been talking about
how local business (with local clientele) will be a huge
trend in the coming years. Those of you who have a local
business and are using SBI! to enhance it... keep on doing
what you're doing, and follow David's advice above. For
those of you with friends who do have local businesses with
local customers, please do them and us (and yourself through
the 5 Pillar Affiliate program) a HUGE favor... tell them.
Those great, big, heavy paper Yellow Pages are dead as
doornails. They'll only understand that in 2-3 years. But,
once high-speed adoption exceeds 50% (ie., more than half of
people are 24/7 connected to high-speed), folks will use
Google and other local search engines to find a business
that may only be minutes away.
As David says, what this means for you, is to prepare
accordingly NOW. And get your friends to do the same.
This is another MAJOR FUTURE TREND of e-commerce.
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