The “little guys” at the local level are generally obscured in both the “organic search” and “paid” rankings of the search engines. A search for “home improvement” in “San Diego,” for instance, yields just two local contractors in ten slots. The rest are “aggregators,” like service magic, that grab the top slots and essentially resell them, at a markup, to others.
But speakers at a client-only session at Local ’07 emphasized there is a business to be had in working with small local layers. “The little guys have the advantage on these (organic) pages” if they work at it, said Andrew Shotland, formerly of InsiderPages, who now runs Labitat. Shotland’s magic “to do” list includes publishing articles in multiple sources, updating information on the Internet Yellow Pages and Search Engines, gathering links from friendly local sites, and ensure you have “5 star” reviews on all the social networks.
Shotland said the fight for pole position on the search engines has become the equivalent of the fight for top placement in the Yellow Pages, where companies may call themselves “AAA Plumbers,” and then “AAAA Plumbers” (I know about this. At one point, there were 27 variations on “Krasilovsky Safes” in the New York Yellow Pages, as different branches of the family duked it out with competing safe companies, a battle chronicled on an NPR feature a few years ago).
With the rise of proximity search, the most successful Realtor, or Plumber, or landscaper, would simply open an office in the center of every town. “We’re opening a new business. It is called centrid-real-estate.com,” Shotland joked. “These are the kinds of things people are doing every day.
Uzi Eliahou and Dorab Patel at Matchcraft added that companies should focus more on developing vertical site traffic. They said that vertical sites, like Lawn and Garden Yellow Pages, now get about 25 percent of all searches, and the share of traffic is creeping up on horizontal sites every day.
The Matchcraft guys also said that organic search is where much of the focus is moving for local businesses, which increasingly find themselves shut out of paid search by high prices and a “lock” by the aggregators. Their research indicates that local businesses only make headway on paid listings in certain, under-leveraged categories, such as landscaping and nail salons.
The little guy is getting screwed in this internet age. What happened to the mom and pop shops that took care of you. I use these guys for all my rentals on the South Jersey Shore. They’ve been around for 70 years (before television or the internet) and know the area because they live there. I’ve been using them for years without a hitch.
Oh by the way… here is there sight (twist my arm), mccannrealtors.com
Peter,
There is always PiggyBack SEO as well. I actually wrote and published a post last night concerning this subject: http://www.firstpagefitness.com/blog/2007/03/19/if-you-cant-beat-em-join-em-the-art-of-piggyback-seo/
Hi Peter. One of the points we made in the presentation was that individuals, for the most part, are better served by working with aggregators rather than doing PPC by themselves. On the organic side, individuals have a better shot at doing better for themselves — but they’d have to work pretty hard at it.
There remain many categories out there where SEM’s can still show well within logical searches in the SE’s. It’s possible with or without aggregators and should include ppc.
I’ve done it for 3 years.
Most businesses will be found off of an enormous variety of phrases that include a wide variety of business terms and a wide variety of relevant geographical terms. In this manner businesses can be found both in organic searches and off of versions of SE local (or google maps).
In one example my regional business gets about 1,000 SE/visits month from a variety of logical queries that combine logical geo phrases and variations on our main business terms. Of interest, typically within any one month, no one term will show more than 20 visits.
The long tail is a great way to attract business and convertable business.
Dave
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