There is an interesting review on Search Engine Land about a recent Yahoo study on consumer behavior in choosing local services and providers. The Yahoo study covered 5 vertical categories: legal, real estate, home improvement, health care and vocational education.

One of the interesteing treands that is very noticeable from this study is how important the Internet is becoming for find local businesses and services.

• Vocational Education – 67 percent of respondents used a major search engine compared to 41 percent who used local search
• Healthcare – 53 percent used insurance provider directories while 44 percent relied on a search engine
• Real Estate – 51 percent used a real estate vertical search engine versus 44 percent who used a major search engine
• Legal – 36 percent of respondents referred to a search engine while 25 percent used the internet yellow pages
• Home Contracting – 36 percent used a search engine while 26 percent used the internet yellow pages

 You can read the complete article on Search Engine Land - CLICK HERE for the complete review of the Yahoo Consumer Study.

What does this for local businesses?

The basic message for local businesses and service providers is to make sure you have a professional website and make sure that it’s properly optimized for the search engines and can be found by consumers using the search engines to find their local businesses and service providers.

On Google's Webmaster Central Blog they just posted Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (PDF file). After reviewing it, it is definitely an excellent guide for those clueless about website optimization. A lot of what they include in their guide is good, practical advice. The guide is meant for beginners and can really help separate fact from fiction when talking with others about SEO. One thing to remember is you still have to write for your audience and not just the search engines.

A snippet for Google's SEO Starter Guide description:

"Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current."

Google's SEO Starter Guide on Google Webmaster Central Blog.

Hyperlinks are what everyone on the internet calls "links". Links are an essential part of the World Wide Web and are used to connect everything together from web page to web page and web site to web site. They are used in menus, within web pages, by the search engines, and even in emails. Although links have been around for many years they are often taken for granted and poorly written.

In order to better understand HTML hyperlinks and how to use them effectively we need to dissect a typical HTML hyperlink. The diagram above shows what we would see if we looked under the hood at a hyperlink in a HTML source file. The following is a brief definition for each part:

The real success of any hyperlink are with the words you use. The words need to be relevant to the page or website you are linking too and should help the web visitors understand what to expect if they click on the link. The words are also used by the spiders and can definitely help boost a web pages organic (free) ranking position within the search engine results if they are relevant to the page being linked, are repeated throughout the linked page and are used in the search phrase by the user at the search engine. To be continued in a future post. :-)

There is a press release on Marketwire from TMP Directional Marketing about a recent Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore. The study found that most people still use a variety of online and offline media resources to find their local businesses. What I found most interesting in the findings were the preferred sources used by those in the study group.

First sources used:

• Search Engines (31%)
• Offline Print Yellow Pages / White Pages (30%)
• Online Yellow Pages Sites (Superpages.com / YellowPages.com) (19%)
• Online Local Search Sites (11%)

If you add up the online source percentages you get 61% are now using online sources for finding local businesses. Obviously, the vast majority are using online sources for local business information, but doing their buying offline.

The study also states that following online local searches, 39% of the consumers contacted a business over the telephone, 32% visited the business in-person and 12% contacted the business online. This is the part of the study I am not clear on: What were these people in the study group actually searching for? Just a phone number and address? For example: if I was looking to make an appointmnet, make a service call, check stock before I go there, I would either use Google or my Yellow Pages print book depending on which was faster at the time. But if I was looking to get a new service that I knew nothing about the businesses, nor the product/service, I would probably would want to first visit their websites to learn more about the companies and what they offer. In this situation I would guess the search engines would be the first choice for most people today (it would for me) and the search engine precentage would be much greater than 31%.

Click here to read the TMP press release on Marketwire.com

A lot of small businesses still do not understand the Internet marketing terminology. I talked with 2 Wisconsin small businesses today that had no idea what it all this meant. Below are the definitions I have used in handouts during some of the tradeshow seminars I have done in the past. I hope it some find this useful as a general guide.

Click Through Rate  ( CTR )

Click through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks your sponsored ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown (impressions).  CTR  = CLICKS / IMPRESSION

Cost-Per-Click  ( CPC )

The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you pay each time a person clicks on your ad.

Cost-Per-Thousand impressions  ( CPM )

            This stands for cost-per-thousand of impressions. A CPM pricing model means advertisers pay for each impression of their sponsored ad, even if it is not clicked on

Conversion

            When a user completes an action on your site, such as buying something or requesting more information

Conversion Rate ( CR )

The number of conversions divided by the number of ad clicks.

Destination URL

The web page address people will be directed too when they click on your Per-Per-Click sponsored ad. (This is not visible on Google Adwords Ads.)

Display URL

Is the web pages address the user will see at the bottom of the Pay-Per-Click sponsored ad.

Geo-Targeting

Advertisers can select specific geographic areas and languages for their ads to appear. Your ads will appear only to users who live in the selected geographic areas and match the selected languages in their preferences.

Landing Page

An active page on your web site where customers will 'land' after they click on your sponsored ad. The web address for this page is often called a “destination URL” or “click-through URL”.

Pay-Per-Click ( PPC )
            you pay the bid amount only when someone clicks on your advertisement.

Impressions

The number of impressions is the number of times an ad is displayed on Google or on sites or products in the Google Network.

I find one of the time-consuming parts of building online advertising campaigns is creating proper tracking URLs that will work correctly with Google Analytics. So I created a PPC Keyword Tracking URL Creator tool to help speed up the process. This will allow you to enter campaign details into several HTML textbox form fields and then after clicking the submit button the server script will generate the tracking URLS automatically using the information you entered. This inlcudes the landing page URL, keyword phrases you want to use with that URL, campaign source and type of link content. Optionally, you can also insert your bid amount and matching options (broad,phrase and exact) and the script will also generate PPC content that can be directly entered in a Google AdWords campaign.

I know Google also has a similar URL Builder available, but I like this better because of the additional options.

To see it in action go to: PPC Keyword Tracking URL Creator.

Any comments are welcome.

Many small, local businesses have very limited dollars to budget towards Pay-Per-Click advertising online, but still want their website to show up in the search engines when a potential customer is looking online for the products and services they offer. One of the ways to accomplish this is through the natural listings on the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask).

The natural listings are the free listings (also called "organic listings") and appear on the search engine results along with the sponsored (PPC paid) listing. Of course, everyone who has a web site wants to be there too, especially for the most popular used search terms. To makes matters worse, there are only 10 natural lisitings per page and 80% of those searching never go beyond the first page of the search results. So what can we do to help reach our targeted online audience?

This is where search engine optimization (SEO) along with geographic keyword modifiers can really help. Many web users today are narrowing their search results by adding keyword modifiers to their online searches. This helps them find what they are looking for much faster. For example: rather than just searching for "plumber" do a search for "Milwaukee WI plumber" or "plumbing supplies green bay wi". Adding "geographic keyword modifiers" helps narrow the search to the area you really want to find websites that are most relevant to your specific search. This is how many online users are conducting searches for local businesses today.

The problem becomes most small business websites have done a poor job optimizing their website. Plus, they haven't implemented landing pages designed around the targeted, geographic keyword phrases that are used by many local online consumers. The best thing to do is get with a web design company that can help you define the best local, geographic keyword phrase combinations and than create specialized landing pages based on each phrase with call to actions to help engage the visitors. This doesn't have to cost a fortune to develop these specialized pages and can really help boost your website organic (free) rankings.

I know this has nothing to do with web marketing or website design. But it may save you some coins so you can spend more on your web marketing or website!

Go to Yahoo.com and type in "gas + your zipcode" or "cheap gas + your zip code". Yahoo will show you gas stations in your area with cheap gas prices.

PS - It is unbelievable to me that about 60 days ago crude oil was at around $130/barrel and now it is in the low $80's! What a hoax!

If you want to have fun, try downloading and using ChunkIt! for interesting search results! It is a great tool for highlighting keyword search results with page text and for doing competitor keyword and link analysis. (Sorry, if I lost some of my readers with this line that.)

Anyway, go download ChunkIt! for free....

Google has recently launched Google Audio Indexing for video. It appears they are using their new speech recognition technology to index the words spoken in YouTube's political channel videos. With this technology users can type in a search term and navigate directly to the part of videos where the term was used.

Google calls this GAudi and eventually this will probably become a powerful YouTube search technology and add a whole new dimension to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Imagine the day when users will see the YouTube videos ranked by the keywords spoken within the videos. If you haven't started creating and distributing video content you should definitely considered it for the near future.