One of the most common questions we get asked when it comes to our Victoria BC SEO service is “How long will to take for my website to get on the first page?”
This is such a difficult question to answer as every website is different. So is the competitive landscape. Some businesses have 5-10 competitors in their area. While others can have 50. The more competitors you have, the more websites we have to out rank with our SEO service.
We might have left one out and that is the domain.
Ranking New Domain or Old One
We get a lot of enquires from new businesses who want to hire us. They will inevitably ask us “How long to get my site on the first page?’
If we learn that their the domain is brand new, we tell them a few months longer than if their domain was already well established.
Why is this? Because a new domain takes longer to get on the search engines radar.
We had a potential client approach us last summer with a new domain. When we told them it could take 8 month, they were obviously disappointed.
After explaining why that would be and what they could do to help us, they hired us and it took us about 4 months to get their site on the first page. It should be noted that this client has only 15 competitors. Getting on the first page meant trying to out rank those 15 sites and the YellowPages and Yelp directories. Your competitive landscape and where you are ranking right now might be different.
But we can safely say it could take 4-8 months to rank on the first page locally here in Victoria BC.
This section talked about domain age. We’ve found older domains are easier to rank than newer domains.
However, there might be a faster way and it boils down to the domain name itself.
Exact Match Keyword Domains
An exact match keyword domain is a domain name that contains a keyword you are trying to target. An example in the local SEO world would be if a painter in Victoria BC was trying to target the keyword “painters Victoria BC”, they would try and purchase the domain http://paintersvictoriabc.ca.
Now I say try because years ago, buying exact match keyword domains was all the rage. People actually made a business of buying these domains and selling them. But as they have become less of a ranking factor, these domains can be bought for fairly cheap.
If you find an exact match domain that is a few years old, you might rank faster.
The Experiment
My mother has been so kind as to help me with bookkeeping for Meaningful Marketing. She owned a business for 8 years and completed the Bookkeeping Administration Program at Sprott Shaw here in Victoria. She’s semi-retired but still wants to work and loves numbers.
Since I know a lot about SEO and internet marketing, I thought why not create a website for her and do some local SEO on it.
Knowing that buying a new domain might take longer to rank, I searched for expired domains and found an exact match keyword domain. That domain is http://bookkeepingvictoria.ca.
There wasn’t much on the domain at the time but it was still alive then. A company called Canwest Accounting owned the domain and eventually got a nice website up on that domain by May 2013.
For whatever reason though they decide along the way not to renew the http://bookkeepingvictoria.ca domain and move their website to a branded domain http://www.canwestaccounting.ca/.
Their loss is hopefully my mothers gain!
I purchased that domain on January 22nd 2015.
Today is January 27th 2015 and I have the website up and running with a little bit of content. I’ll be following the seven trends in local SEO for 2015 post that I created last week.
Content and backlinks will be the biggest areas of focus for getting the website ranked organically. Creating business citations will be the focus on getting the business to rank in the Google maps.
The site has already been indexed and crawled by Google which is a great sign and the reason why buying an older, exact match domain should help her website rank faster for “bookkeeping Victoria BC‘ search terms.
I ran a search ranking report for the site today and it isn’t ranking in the top 50 for any of the search terms we’re targeting. But it’s ranking in the positions from 51-100 which is another great sign. Especially after buying the domain five days ago and getting optimized content up yesterday.
The goal of this experiment is to get the website ranking on the first page for the search term “bookkeeping Victoria BC” by the end of March. I will update the status at that time.
A lot of the blogs I follow are doing their annual “SEO in 2015” posts. These are a great way to create thought leadership.
As someone who has been involved in SEO for 5 years now, I’d thought I’d do my own and share my own thoughts on the ever-changing landscape of local search engine marketing and optimization.
Changes
We’ve been helping small businesses in Victoria and Vancouver out rank their competition for over two years now. In that time there have been big changes.
When I first started an affiliate marketing website back in 2009, it was all about links. The more links you had, the better. Now the search engines look at links like your gaming them. More on this later.
There was also importance on having the proper optimization of a landing page. What I mean by this is your page titles, H1 tags and content all had to have your targeted keywords in them. But you had to have the density of keywords sprinkled into the landing page content. This meant that a lot of sites had content that was geared toward a search engine crawler and not the user. It made websites hard to read.
Links are still important and content optimization still is, just not as important.
But enough of the past, let’s look at the present and future of local search.
Local Search In 2015 & Beyond
Over the course of the last year I’ve seen some big changes into what makes a website rank high in Google. I’ve done a lot of research on clients websites, their competitors and have read many blogs and discussion forums about local search.
Here are the areas where you need to focus your attention on if you want to out rank your competition in 2015.
1 – Google My Business/Places Pages
A few years ago when you searched for a local business or service, you would see a list of websites and directories like Yellow Pages and Yelp.
Now, you can see a list of businesses with their addresses and a map to the right of the search results showing where they are located. They call this the 7 pack, or 3 pack in some cases. I call it Google map results.
These mapped or 7 pack search results have slowly been integrated into Google and Bing’s algorithms. When they were first rolled out, they were only being displayed for highly searched terms.
Just last month though, Google rolled out a new algorithm called Penguin. While doing some searching around, I noticed that the seven and three pack mapped results were showing up for almost every search term.
This means that getting your business ranked in the mapped results is as important as ever. Getting ranked in these results is good news for new businesses or those who haven’t invested into SEO and whose websites aren’t ranking well as it’s an easy way to get onto the first page.
Above and below the seven and three packs are organic websites still. The next six tips are on how to get ranked there.
2 – Content Marketing & Web Development
The second biggest trend I have noticed in the last year is content marketing and web development. Content marketing is the big buzzword but it’s really just blogging for business and web development. Here’s why content marketing, web development and blogging are important in 2015 local SEO.
Google and Bing want to give their searchers the most valuable and useful webpages so the searcher doesn’t have to spend hours searching on page two and beyond for a local business or service provider.
What this means is they want to display webpages and sites that have lots of useful content at the top on the search results. This means your website better be a resource of information for people when they land on it. If it does have useful information on it, people will not be bouncing off of it and clicking on your competitor’s sites.
You don’t want people bouncing off your website and visiting a competitors do you? Of course you don’t.
A common question I get asked when talking with current and prospective clients, which you might even be asking, is “But how can we generate useful content Jordan?”
A quick note on this strategy. Many websites and yours might already have a faq section. Great! If it’s a single page though, it needs to be built out and each question needs to be it’s own page/blog post. You also have to be sure that the answers to the questions are not short. Each page has to be at least 250 + words.
Implementing this strategy will help your website and business in two ways.
The first is that if you have links to all these questions and pages/blog posts from your landing page, which I will assume is your main page that is targeting your broad local search terms, people will be able to get all the information they need and won’t have to visit any other websites.
This can also help in preventing you from going Marshawn Lynch on potential customers. Here’s why.
I’m sure you get tired of repeating the same answers to the same questions just like Marshawn Lynch and every other pro athlete does. You can’t go all beast mode on potential customers as that’s bad business. But you can cut down on these repeat questions by answering common questions on your website.
The second way this will benefit your site and business is that it will become a useful resource and in the process, earn some search engine cred. The search engines want to promote websites that are resources of information. When they crawl your site and see more quality content/pages/blog posts being added, they’ll help in boosting your sites rankings.
Since people are asking you questions on the phone, in person and on your website, they’re also asking the search engines. I’m sure you’ve asked Google a question in the last week. Maybe you were wondering “how to remove a red wine stain from carpet” or “what is the difference between marble and granite countertops” are just a few questions I can think of.
If you’re blog posts or pages where you answer common questions are optimized properly, you’re going to generate some traffic.
This site and it’s various blog posts generate loads of traffic when people search for local SEO help. They may not be local or do business with me, but it’s all gravy as it helps the website rank higher for “SEO Victoria BC” search terms.
With that said I really wish the search engines would display local sites and pages for general questions like this. So if you did search “how to remove a red wine stain from carpet” you might land on a blog post from a local carpet cleaner instead of a non-local business.
And if you had no luck removing that red wine stain, you might call that local company whose page you landed on while searching an answer to a problem.
By reading those three posts you will no doubt grasp the idea of how to create better content for your website.
The next trend I see is one you can’t overlook any longer and must address now.
3 – Responsive Web Design
Is your website pissing off mobile visitors? Is the user experience the same as on the desktop version of your site? If not, you’re losing out on better search rankings and new clients.
I don’t need to throw bunch of market research stats around about mobile usage. Do your own research and look around. Everyone is on his or her phone when not at home. They’re texting, using social media and searching the web. When at home, these same peeps are sitting on their couch browsing the net on their tablet.
I’m sure you’re no different.
We have high expectations for technology and web experiences when on our phones and tablets. I know I get frustrated when I visit a website from my phone or tablet and I have to zoom and pinch the screen. I’m sure you’re no different.
That’s why you need a responsive web design. Responsive web design is different from a mobile version of a website. Let me explain.
Mobile web design displays a scaled back version of your website. The design is not the same between your desktop site and mobile site. Nor does a mobile website have all the same content. Since it’s scaled back it has little information on it. Not a good thing for the user or the search engines.
Responsive design has all the same content and your website design is the same. Responsive design essentially knows what device your visitors are viewing your site from and it displays the correct website based on the devices screen width.
The huge benefit of responsive web design is that for the majority of websites, a new design is not needed. Web designers can simply create a responsive version of your current website.
I mentioned that we have high expectations for our web experience. That brings me to the next trend is local search for 2015.
4 – User Experience
Having a responsive web design improves the user experience on your website. So does making information easy to find, along with having a website design that’s visually appealing which loads fast like Usain Bolt.
User experience goes much, much deeper than design and page load speeds. Check out this epic resource page from Smash Magazine on website user experience. By the way, that epic resource page ranks first by the way for the search “website user experience”. Further proof that Google wants to promote useful information that I talked about in the content marketing trend.
With quality content and better user experience, you can surely help in reducing how many people leave your website. This brings me to the next trend.
5 – Bounce Rates
I’ve already mentioned that the search engines want to display useful sites and pages so people don’t have to click to the 2nd page and beyond. Using Google analytics they can track your sites bounce rate.
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).
If people are bouncing off your site without checking out more pages, Google might think your site isn’t the useful resource they thought it was.
It’s still being debated if bounce rate effects search rankings. I think it will play a bigger role moving forward.
To prevent people from bouncing off your site, or pogo sticking back to the search results, check out this guide from Moz.
Before people can even get to your site from a search result, they have to first click on it.
These experiments pretty much debunk CTR and it’s affect on search rankings. CTR is too easy to manipulate after all. However, I still think it’s important to get as many people clicking on your site from the search results as possible. Here’s a simple way to improve your websites CTR.
There is one last thing that will affect your search rankings in 2015. I mentioned this method briefly at the beginning of this post.
7 – Links
If you’re still reading, thanks, we’re at the last one!
I mentioned at the beginning of this post that SEO has changed a lot of since I first started in 2009. One of the biggest ranking factors was having links from other sites to yours.
In those days it was all about quantity. As the search engines have realized getting links is becoming easier, they’ve put less importance on them. Too many SEO’s were gaming the search rankings by getting lots of links from low quality sites.
The search engines are even penalizing websites for their link building methods. We had a client come to us because of the shady link building a previous SEO company did to their site. Here’s how we rectified the penalty.
Links still matter though and don’t be scared about getting penalized. Here are three link-building methods that are safe and will help your rankings in 2015 and beyond.
Link Exchanges
The search engines are looking for natural looking links. The easiest way to do this is by asking fellow business owners who have websites to do a link exchange.
This has worked well for our clients here and it’s a really easy way to get a natural link. Create a new page and call it “Local businesses we support” or “Local Partners”. Then add their link and vice versa.
One of the ways to get ranked is by having your website listed in web directories. When you get listed in those directories, you also get a link back to your website.
There are millions of businesses being listed in directories. The search engines will not penalize all of them. They may devalue those links a little bit but still, it’s a safe way to get links.
Create Linkable Content
You may have noticed that I have linked to a lot of other blog posts in this post. That’s because those sites have created linkable content. This is harder to do from the local SEO level.
But one way to create linkable content is to create a resource page about your product or service. We have done this for a couple of clients already and seen good results.
It takes time to think about an idea for a resource page and it also takes some time to create it then find people who will link to it. The results are going to be well worth it as these types of natural links are high quality.
I don’t want to give away our secrets on how this is done but let’s use this post as an example. If you’re still reading, you’ll agree that it’s a useful resource on local SEO for 2015.
This post could be linked to from other local SEO and business sites. Chances are good I will have to find those sites and ask to link to this post.
I could do this by doing a Twitter search for anyone who has a local SEO blog. Most local SEO’s are pretty good about linking to other local SEO blog posts because we’re not going to steal business from each other as we primarily work with local companies.
I could also go to the Local Search Forum and post a link to this post from there. Chances are good it will get linked to from other blogs by SEO’s from within that community.
Again, there is a lot of legwork here if you choose to do this along. However, sometimes it’s best to leave the work up to the professional local SEO companies like ours. They can save you a lot of time just like an accountant or lawyer would.
Ok, one plug promoting our service is not bad after 2600 words! It’s all about the opening the sale, not trying to close it and ask for the sale at the beginning.
Creating content like this post goes a long way in, generating links, improving search rankings, opening the sale, building credibility and converting website visitors into clients. I hope you can do the same for site and business.
The Finale
In summary, these seven trends I’ve listed are based off my extensive research from analyzing search rankings and by continuously education myself about local SEO.
Moz published the survey a post in the 2014 local search ranking factors. This post is essentially my version. Take it for what’s it worth but if you’ve enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends and on your social network site of choice!
While doing some link research last night for a client, I came across a fantastic website full of useful information. It deals with travel industry and that industry, along with real estate are two of the easiest to create useful content for prospecting.
Many people think of SEO and their websites as one page and that they can only attract people to that one page. That’s not the case at all. You can create so many webpages on your website targeting people at different stages of the buying cycle. You just need to sit down and think of the questions and information people are looking for at every phase of the buying cycle.
So what was this resource I stumbled upon last night?
It was a website created by a Victoria BC hostel, inn and suites property Ocean Island called Ocean Island Victoria Guide. It’s full of useful information for travellers to Victoria and even locals who are looking for things to do in Victoria.
The websites lack of optimization and lead capturing doesn’t hurt what a great resource it is and who knows, they probably have a different marketing strategy driving people to that website.
Now the main market they are targeting is people thinking about coming to Victoria and looking for things to do. If they stumble onto the Ocean Island Victoria Guide, they’ll be on the site for a few minutes. Eventually they will see an banner ad with rates for the Ocean Island Hostel.
Targeting Different Stages Of the Buying Cycle
It’s brilliant yet simple.
Here you have a lodging property trying to get their business and website in front of travellers. Most properties are trying to target people with their minds already made up they want to visit the city of Victoria and who would search “hostel Victoria BC”.
No doubt their website ranks high for that term. But only looking at this stage of the buying (decision in this case) process, they’re also targeting people who are thinking about coming to Victoria and thus looking for things to do. These people aren’t fully sure they want to visit the city. If they land on the Ocean Island Victoria Guide, they might be convinced to visit Victoria and will then look at booking accommodation. What lodging property is going to on the top of mind here? Ocean Island’s hostel, inn and suites!
Another market they seem to be targeting is locals and trying to get them to come down to the Ocean Island Cafe & Lounge for live music and drinks. I even found some cool things to do in the city.
Think Like A Consumer
So how can you emulate what Ocean Island has done and create useful content for your business and website?
Think like a consumer.
No matter what product or service you sell, people are searching for information at every step of the buying cycle. You have to create content in the form of articles or blog posts for every step. If they’re properly optimized, you will get targeted people to other webpages of your website outside of the main page.
You have to think of your website like a bike wheel with various spokes. Each spoke is a webpage (blog post or article) that targets someone searching about your product or service at a different stage of the buying cycle.
This content will also be helpful for people who land on the main page of your website. When they land on your main page and see that you have loads of articles about the product or service you sell, they’ll most likely read those to learn more. When they read more, they’re on your website longer and not on your competitors.
Information Is SEO & Content Marketing
People are looking for information. Give it to them!
Sit down and think about every step of your offerings in the buying cycle.
If it’s countertops, someone might be searching broadly for “countertop materials?” while another person might have already found the type they want are now looking at cost per square foot.
In this case you need to write one article on the types of countertop materials where you educate people on the materials and they’re pros and cons. Then you write another article on countertop material cost per square foot.
Another benefit of creating useful content is that you build trust and credibility with visitors. There are lots of people who are in business who are not trustworthy nor credible. This makes people skeptical. By having useful content on your website, you will turn skeptics into paying clients.
Not only are you building trust and credibility with website visitors, you’re also building it with the search engines. Google, Bing and Yahoo want to provide searchers with quality websites that have lots of useful information so the searcher doesn’t have to visit the middle of the first page of their search result to find what they are looking for.
You don’t want to be the website at the bottom of the first page. You want to be the website ranking in the top 3. Take the advice of this blog post and you’ll be well on your way and ahead of your competition.
Lately I’ve been following local discussions surrounding Victoria to find content and newsjacking opportunities for our clients and this very blog you are reading. I’ve been searching Twitter and the #yyj hashtag, the Victoria subreddit and the Facebook pages of all the local media. It’s been a gold mine of opportunities.
In fact tonight I came across what I think is a great opportunity for brand to really steal the spotlight from a breaking news story.
But before I get into that, let me quickly explain what newsjacking is.
What Is Newsjacking?
“Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story and generating tons of media coverage and social media engagement.”
David Meerman Scott who works in Public Relations coined the catchy term and wrote a book about it called Newsjacking of all things. It’s essentially a great way to earn free media for being creative and quick to the punch.
This idea I am about to share might work. It might not. But it costs nothing and is worth the shot and the potential media coverage.
A News Story Breaks
Everyone hates BC Ferries. Including Sean Smith.
Sean is from Campbell River. He has a computer, Facebook and a opinion. He combined all three to create a pretty epic rant in regards to BC Ferries and a proposal to shut down the Departure Bay Terminal in Nanaimo, which is 90 minutes south of Campbell River and the nearest place for Sean to catch a ferry to Vancouver.
It was so epic it went viral. Within hours the links and comments on his Facebook post were through the roof.
A News Story Has Follow Ups
But that’s not all. Just as of a few hours ago Global News picked up the story. The floodgates are now open and I’m sure Sean, who is oddly enough a social media expert, is going to be gaining a lot more Facebook friends and potential clients from that. But that wasn’t the point of his post.
You may be thinking this blog post is about how Sean can capitalize on all his free media. Honestly, I gave my brain a late night workout thinking of how he could. Nothing came to me but he can still benefit from this idea.
I continued to think about who else could capitalize on this story. Then it hit me while reading the comments section of the Global News article.
A Newsjacking Opportunity Presents Itself
Although many people think BC Ferries has no competition, they kind of do. Airlines offer travel from Nanaimo to Vancouver.
There is a great opportunity for one of these airlines to steal the spotlight of this story and gain some massive media attention. What could they do though? Something simple.
Offer Sean free travel between Nanaimo and Vancouver for a year or two. It would cost them a little bit in the way of one seat and a few trips. If his family were to tag along, they could give them a good sized discount to make the deal better.
But the value in media coverage they would earn if this story gets picked up would be huge. Why? Because people love a good news story despite the majority of news being negative. Who wouldn’t love to hear about Sean receiving a free year long pass from an airline? That and brand fights are healthy, especially when everyone already hates BC Ferries. Samsung picked a fight with Apple a few years ago and it worked well for them.
Be A Follow Up News Story
A big news story like the BC Ferries proposal has lots of follow up articles including Sean’s rant. Another one like the the idea I propose in the blog post would surely get picked up.
People would not only read about this airline offering an amazing gesture, but they would also look at them in a positive light.
During these same people’s next travel between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, they might end up saying screw BC Ferries since they already hate them and use that airline that offered Sean this gesture.
Who knows, maybe some people who fly with this airline competitors might actually switch to them.
It would have to be bigger airline that offers many travel routes so they can capitalize on this as people all over the province will read about it. A smaller airline with only a few routes wouldn’t reap the same rewards.
These follows up are spokes off the main story. As you can imagine a story has lots of spokes. Your goal is to be one of those spokes!
One Key Thing
The key for this airline to take advantage of this idea would be for them to write a blog post on their website and then reach out. They could reach out to the editor at Global News or the Journalist that wrote the previous article with a link to their previous blog post with their offer to Sean.
Writing a blog post ensures that the airline would get a link back to their site (great for SEO) and referral website traffic from the follow up news story.
As I mentioned, this idea might work. It might not. Not all newsjacking gestures are followed through.
How can you apply newsjacking to your business?
Steal The Spotlight
Here’s how you can steal the spot light and jack the news whether locally, regional or nationally:
Find and monitor the news, local discussion forms and Twitter
Think about how your company can creatively steal the news spotlight on a story
Write a blog post about what you plan to do
Reach out to the local media, journalists and or influencers in your area
Watch the free media increase your website traffic and sales!
The answer is based off of the experiences auditing a few of our current client’s websites who switched from Yellow Pages online to work with us.
My goal is to provide you honest feedback like I did with this Yelp advertising review so you can make an informed decision.
So let’s get to it!
Death Of The Phone Book
We all know the phone book is dead.
But that isn’t stopping Yellow Pages.
Nope. They’re working their way into the online marketing world.
They offer Google Adwords advertising, SEO and priority rankings in their online directories. I’ll break down each of their services and give you a review of the work they do.
Before I do that, I want to mention a couple of things we see wrong with Yellow Pages online services.
They Have Contracts With No Guarantees
A few of our current clients have switched over from Yellow Pages online services. But only after their contracts had ended.
Offering contracts is fine. But not offering a guarantee on services along with a contract is a no-win situation for the client. We believe contracts are a thing of the past. Especially ones with no guarantees.
They Use Scare Tactics
Yellow Pages aren’t scammers but they will use scare tactics.
A new client who was in talks with Yellow Pages was warned/threatened that their website would not be found in the search results.
When you don’t use Yellow Pages online service, your listing in their directory for your product or services wont rank as high. That’s because they reserve the top spots in their directory listings for their paying clients.
Here’s an example:
The listings in the red box are sponsored. Just like in the Google search results, ads are at the top, which is fine. If you choose not to use Yellow Pages online services, your website simply won’t appear at the top of their local directory listings.
Our client’s businesses and websites are listed in their respective Yellow Pages directory without paying for their service. The listings are simply not at the top.
But it’s not as if people head straight to the Yellow Pages and conduct a search. So are you really missing out on much?
Chances are good that the vast majority of people search for a local business in a search engine.
So if Yellow Pages says your website will disappear or it won’t be found on the internet, it’s a pile of crap. Millions of websites are found on the internet that don’t use Yellow Pages online service.
Now that that’s off my chest, let me break down their services and critique them.
“My business advertised in the phone book for years…. When they introduced their online marketing services of providing SEO, I tried them out. I can honestly say that even though they said they were providing SEO for my website, my rankings dropped dramatically and I felt I lost out on business as a result. I was thankful to find Jordan and his SEO company Meaningful Marketing. In the year since we have been working together my website’s rankings have improved and I have generated a lot of traffic and clients from their SEO work and would not hesitate to refer them!” Happy Customer – Russ C
Yellow Pages SEO Review
Back in June we received an email from a client who was unhappy with Yellow Pages search engine optimization efforts. He had been with them for almost a year and was not seeing the results he was hoping for.
His rankings were not that great. As a painter, he was in a competitive market. But given the amount of time they had been working on his SEO, surely they would be able to get him into the first page for at least one of his targeted keywords.
During our initial analysis here are the issues we came across:
Lack Of Content
The main page of the website had about 100 words of text. That’s not enough for this day and age. Your main page has to have at least 300 words of text.
There was also a lack of pages on the website. The more pages you have with relevant and useful content, the better your chances of search engines ranking your website high.
Why?
Search engines main goal is to provide the searcher with relevant websites. By relevant I mean websites that have lots of content that can help educate people.
The more useful and relevant pages you have on your website, the longer visitors stay on your site. This means they’ll spend less time on your competitors.
The main page has to be optimized. The Yellow Pages had added in the meta title, keywords and description. But they missed the optimization of search engine optimization.
They failed to add any painting keywords/search terms to the main page of the content. Optimizing the main page title is not enough in 2014 and beyond.
Another issue we saw was a low amount of backlinks pointing to the website.
Outside of having relevant and optimized content on your website, you need to have links pointing back to your website.
Now with all the search engine algorithms, acquiring high quality backlinks is tough.
The easiest way to get backlinks to your website is to list your business in business directories. Business directory listings tell the search engines you’re a real business and have a physical location. You also get a backlink in each listing.
Business listings are also an important piece for how to rank a Google Places page. The more you have, the better your chances of ranking in the Google +/mapped listings.
SEO Summary
Overall not enough maintenance work was being done in regards to the SEO of the clients’ website. SEO is an ongoing process for many websites. From adding properly optimized content to getting more high quality backlinks, these things take time, and they must be done continuously.
Yellow Pages Online Advertising/Adwords Review
Another one of our clients had been with Yellow Pages for over a year. They were managing this clients’ Google Adwords campaigns.
Here are the issues that I found with their Adwords management service:
No Dashboard Access
When I asked the client if we could walk through his Adwords dashboard, he looked at me confused. He said he didn’t have one.
They didn’t setup the Adwords campaign under the business owners Google account. This means he couldn’t see any of the important Adwords data like the keywords being clicked and for how much. He had to rely on the fact that they charged his credit card $1000 every month so he must have been getting clicks.
At the end of the day, you the business owner, need to have dashboard access to Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google My Business/Places and Adwords.
It’s your business and you should be able to see all this data. This allows you to have full access to this very important data to determine what’s working and what’s not. With our Adwords campaigns, we believe in simply having access to your campaign and not setting one up using our account. Being able to see the data can help us determine if our clients are wasting money on Adwords or not.
Another client is still currently using Yellow Pages for his Adwords (he’d love to stop but the whole contract thing is in the way) and he has no access to any of the Adwords campaign information.
Sparse Reports
In both cases I asked the client if I could see some reports.
Both handed me over a few pages of reports. They were very sparse and provided them with only how much they were paying per month. These reports were essentially invoices.
Here is the issue with having no access and sparse reports sent to you: it’s your data!
Both of those clients were/are not able to see what keywords are driving the most amount of clicks, what the ads look like and how much the cost per click on each keyword is. This really hurts them from analyzing the data and making informed changes.
Non-Optimized Landing Pages
The other big issue we have seen with Yellow Pages management on Google Adwords campaigns is that they never optimize the landing page for the keywords they’re targeting.
Like SEO, the keywords/search terms you are targeting for your Adwords campaigns need to be on the landing page. This will help increase the likely hood your ad
The landing page was the main page of his website. When we went ahead and started working on improving his rankings and SEO, we had to optimize the main page of his site. This is actually helping YP and the cost per click of his ad campaigns. But we don’t care since we have a job to do. And that’s to get him better rankings.
High CPC
To get your business listed in the top three spots of the ads section of the search results, Yellow Pages will outbid your competitors and drive up your cost per click in the process.
The cpc will already be high due the non-optimized landing pages. But it’ll be even higher thanks to them making sure your business shows up first.
We see websites with a good amount of click throughs even though they don’t rank in the top three spots above the organic search results. In doing this, we save our clients money on a monthly basis.
Adwords Summary
I will summarize by saying that Yellow Pages doesn’t maximize Adwords spends. The first client I talked about is saving 35% of his Adwords spend all because we decreased his cost per click by properly optimization the landing pages with targeted keywords/search terms.
It’s also alarming that they don’t allow business owners to see detailed reports in the dashboard of the campaign.
Yellow Pages Directory Listings
I already posted a picture of what the Yellow Pages directory listings look like. If you pay, you get to the top of the directory for your products or services.
And as I mentioned, how often are Yellow Pages directories searched? Not only do they have competition from Yelp and other directories, but the majority of people do their searching in a search engine to get a full spectrum of results. There are some people who do have the Yellow Pages app but my guess is far more people head straight to Google and start their search from there.
They might then land on a Yellow Pages directory from the search results. Yellow Pages directories tend to rank high organically because they have been around for years. Do a search for your products or services to see if the YP directory listing ranks well.
If so, it might be wise to have your business listed in the directory. Obviously, you have to pay them to be ranked high. But the costs of that are very low compared to their monthly SEO and Adwords packages which, did I mention, are contract based.
This would be the only Yellow Pages online service I could see value in. But if it’s more than $50/month to get listed, don’t bother. Your business can appear ahead of that directory listing by either using Adwords, organic local SEO or by being listed in the Google mapped listings.
Is Yellow Pages Online Worth It?
Based on what our clients were paying, I personally don’t think it’s worth it for many of the reasons I pointed out. The biggest concern for me is a lack of SEO knowledge from Yellow Pages staff and poor customer service. They seem to be operating on SEO and Adwords principles from years ago.
With SEO and Adwords, search engines are changing algorithms and such weekly. Many internet marketing companies are always reading up and staying educated on the latest trends and changes. This is an area I don’t see Yellow Pages online marketers doing based on our audits of websites that they are working on.
If you are looking for online marketing services from a company other than Yellow Pages, contact us and we’d be happy to see what we can do for you.
One of the most common questions we get asked when it comes to our Victoria BC SEO service is “How long will to take for my website to get on the first page?”
While doing some link research last night for a client, I came across a fantastic website full of useful information. It deals with travel industry and that industry, along with real estate are two of the easiest to create useful content for prospecting.
