Local Search

G5 Launches Preferred Partner Program

October 29, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

G5 Search Marketing Inc., today launched p3, its Preferred Partner Program. This strategic offering provides new G5 partners with increased sales opportunities, best of breed technology and additional value-added services.

The G5 Local Marketing Platform offers CMRs and advertising agencies a complete local marketing solution powered by G5. It is the only solution on the market that includes SEO, PPC, Maps Optimization, and a media dashboard capable of tracking & measuring across both traditional and online media.

“After five years spent developing our platform and expertise in local and regional marketing arenas, we are now ready to help partners increase their service offerings,” said G5 CEO Dan Hobin. “This should allow us to extend our reach into new verticals and markets as our partners build and grow revenue streams.”

The G5 Local Marketing Platform is a natural fit for partners who serve multi-location clients on a local, regional, or national level. G5′s p3 program enables partnering CMRs and ad agencies to expand their reach into new markets without the capital expense of developing an in-house solution.

Filed Under: Local Search

Why Measuring Advertising at the Local Level Matters

September 30, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

By Devin Davis
G5 Search Marketing, Director of Marketing

At G5 Search Marketing, we’ve made it a point to figure out exactly what advertising is working and what isn’t for the local business.

This matters not only for major corporations, but, probably in all honesty, moreso for those companies who are regional or multi-location in nature. While they may have some capital to throw toward advertising, there is still a finite amount that htey can use.

This is where we come in. We recently announced our Print Yellow Pages Analytics Tool.

Why does this matter? Simple, really. With this tool, we’re able to measure exactly what kind of ROI our clients are receiving from their spend in the Yellow Pages.

Check out a dummied screenshot of one of our reports below:

Now, we have seen that, from time to time, primarily in smaller markets, there is a significant value to spending some marketing dollars in the Yellow Pages.

But this isn’t always the case. For one of our clients, who is regional with locations across four states, but primarily located in the southwest, we’ve seen that, in major metropolitan areas (for example Los Angeles and Phoenix) it is foolhardy to continue advertising in the Print YPs.

Not only are there far too many of them to make it financially viable to have a significant foothold, but we’ve also seen that, frankly speaking, the leads that come from those ads are few, far between and of incredibly low quality.

However, by enabling our clients to see what is working and what isn’t across both new and traditional media (this extends beyond just Yellow Pages and online and to virtually other forms of advertising mediums) we have seen our clients improve their marketing efforts while, in many cases, actually lowering their costs.

In essence, this is another piece of the puzzle that makes local marketing more effective at a more reasonable cost.

Filed Under: Local Search

BooRah: Semantic Restaurant Search

August 28, 2008 By Shrisha Radhakrishna 2 Comments

BooRah is a restaurant search site that employs NLP to extract sentiment from the wide swath of online reviews across the Internet, bringing to you the bad (“Boo”) and good (“Rah”) aspects of a restaurant.

The BooRah platform uses patent-pending Natural Language Processing technology to generate quantitative scores for domain specific attributes from plain English text, automatic summaries from most relevant user sentiments and enables a highly customizable search based on personal preferences. This technology can be extended way beyond restaurants and will revolutionize the concept of business and service search.

Review coverage & Ratings:

BooRah aggregates reviews form a wide variety of sources – blogs, local newspapers, consumer review sites, and professional critics. Each review is semantically analyzed and sentiment references to food (specific dishes, taste, presentation), service, and ambiance are collected. Such type of content analysis helps consumers customize their searches and provides relevant results for long tail queries. E.g when you search for good “Pad Thai in San Francisco”, the system essentially gives you a list of restaurants with the most number of positive references for “Pad Thai”, not just keyword matches for “pad thai”.

Here are a few other examples of long tail queries that rank highly in top search engines: best foie gras San Francisco, best calamari Palo Alto, best deep dish pizza in Chicago. Such content pages not only rank highly in major search engines, they can also be used to enhance their organic search results. For instance, BooRah’s award winning SearchMonkey application enhances organic restaurant search results on Yahoo. With BooRah’s SearchMonkey application added to your profile, you will notice an enhanced result for boorah.com links within Yahoo search results. Here are a couple of examples:

BooRah also offers a browser search plugin to make restaurant search even easier. Simply install our plugin and turn your browser into a restaurant search engine.

Accurate ratings for food, service, ambiance and concise representative summaries also enable an optimized mobile browsing experience. Mobile users can simply browse to BooRah.com to experience our simple, yet very effective mobile optimized site.

SMS search: Text “boorah your search term” to 4INFO (44636) to receive results via SMS E.g.: “boorah pho mountain view”

Utility links

We have aggregated hundreds of thousands of useful links so you don’t have to go looking for restaurant discounts, online reservations, or menus. See for yourself: reservations in Palo Alto, discounts in New York, online menus in Los Angeles

Happy Searching!

Filed Under: Local Search

SES San Jose 2008 Interview: Peter Hutto of Local.com

August 5, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Search Engine Strategies in San Jose this year features a special session focused on Local 2.0, the evolution of Local Search 2.0. Local Search comprises a significant chunk of online visitor engagement which includes online mapping, shopping engines, and directories. I had a chance to catch up with Peter Hutto, Vice President, Business Development and Sales at Local.com to get some insight on his session regarding Local 2.0 at SES San Jose. Read our chat below:

[Manoj]: How important is it for marketers to include local search as a part of their total online strategy?

[Peter Hutto]: There is a local market component for almost all business to business or business to consumer products or services. Today, the vast majority of products or services can be sourced locally – in fact approximately 80% of all goods and services are purchased locally. There is no question that it is extremely important for all marketers to incorporate a local online marketing strategy.

[Manoj]: What percentage of online searches are local?

[Peter Hutto]: This statistic is often debated. When actually trying to determine the percentage of local searches you need to consider both explicit and implicit searches. The explicit searches are when someone actually specifies the “where” in their search. For example, “used cars in Palo Alto” or “shoe repair in Irvine.” However, there are many searches that are implicitly local, when local intent is implied. For example when looking for “plumbers”, “carpet cleaners”, “marriage counseling” and many other products and services, a geography does not need to be specified since these services are implicitly tied to a local geography. Almost all local search platforms will geo-target the IP address and append that to the search query. Therefore when considering the percentage of online searches that are local, you should look at the combined number of both explicit and implicit searches. It is estimated that overall local search accounts for about 20-25 percent of online searches.

[Manoj]: How does a local search engine such as Local.com provide a unique search experience compared to Google/Yahoo Local?

[Peter Hutto]: Google and Yahoo are both broad in their focus and are not entirely focused on local search. Local.com offers a streamlined user interface and provides users with targeted, highly relevant local search results. These results include special offers, user ratings and reviews, local businesses’ website links, maps, driving directions, photos and more. Consumers can find all of the information they need on local businesses, products and services in one place.

[Manoj]: What is required to implement a local search strategy at Local.com?

[Peter Hutto]: Just give us a call (888-857-6722) or go to http://www.local.com/ to get started. Our sales team can work directly with local business owners and provide them with search targeting metrics- by geography, keyword and category. Ads on Local.com can be up in one day, often within hours. We also have a client services team who specializes in campaign optimization and keyword build out. Advertising on Local.com is cost effective for local businesses and doesn’t require extensive resources.

[Manoj]: What businesses flourish the most in local search?

[Peter Hutto]: There are 3 interesting segments that are starting to take off. We are seeing solid growth with search in traditional “trade services” categories, which have typically been the domain of the Yellow Page publishers like plumbers, auto repair, etc. We are also seeing an increase in the “professional services” categories like attorneys, accountants, financial consultants, etc. The bigger and typically consumer focused (vs. corporate) firms in these categories have been doing search for a while but there is a strong influx of newer and smaller firms who in the past did very little marketing. Finally almost all new companies are now considering search right out of the gate. The new business owner is very concerned about getting new customers and the majority are seriously considering local search because it is much more effective AND affordable than their traditional advertising channels like the Yellow Pages. The ROI and targeting capabilities of local search are nearly unmatched.

For more local search resources check out Web Analytics World’s Ultimate Local Search Resources Guide

Filed Under: Local Search, Search Engine Strategies, SES

Ultimate Local Search Optimization Resources

October 4, 2007 By Manoj Jasra 19 Comments

Local Search is becoming essential in many businesses’ digital marketing strategy. With all major search players (Google, MSN, Yahoo, ASK, AOL) providing pristine real estate for local search results, businesses can’t afford NOT to invest into local search optimization strategies. Search Engines such as Google make it very simple for businesses to submit their websites into its local search index, therefore you can find more and more companies taking advantage of local search services. There also many search engines which primarly focus on “Local” such as Super Pages and Local.com. These engines serve up millions of pages views a month, which means companies need to evaluate these secondary avenues of traffic as well because they can lead to increased online visibility. Below are some useful local search optimization resources you should consider before executing your local search strategy.