Natural Search Blog » Local Search

Guerilla Marketing & Google Maps

Chris — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 22:51:13 +0000

My article on “Six Odd Tactics For Getting Ads Into Google Maps” posted today on Search Engine Land, and I believe many of my regular readers should find it moderately entertaining. The piece covers how some elements of guerrilla marketing have found their way into some Google Maps advertising patents, and also how some others have used creative means to get messages into Maps via “roofvertising”, “skywriting” and more.

Those familiar with Natural Search Blog may remember some of my similar past work here outlining laser graffiti ads on buildings, roofvertising, marriage proposals in Google Maps, “earth art” geoglyph ads, and sponsoring town names as an Ultimate Local SEO tactic.

It’s not surprising to see guerilla marketing tactics finding their way into Google Maps. Not only does Google itself seek to introduce disruptive technology innovations, but I expect that as Satellite and Aerial photos may get more frequently updated in such interfaces we’ll be bound to see a whole lot more efforts from people trying to get messages conveyed through the Maps interfaces.

The real question I’m left with, is if Google resells ad space on pictures of people’s rooftops and billboards, would they owe anything back to the original property owners?!?

Google Maps Should Consider A Canonical Phone Number Tag

Chris — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:01:34 +0000

Google Maps, local search engines, internet yellow pages and other online business directories often receive biz listing info from a great many sources and must merge it together (see my description of this in Eric Enge’s interview with me). When this happens, loads of variations in the business’s name, address and even phone number can cause listing data to fail to be merged. All this makes me think we might need a “Canonical Tag” for phone numbers! Read on, and I’ll elaborate…

Some business directories and data aggregators contain huge percentages of bad listings including gone-out-of-business companies and duplicated listings. Pankaj Mathur of InfoUSA recently estimated that some sources such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Acxiom, Localeze and Google Maps might contain 17-to-18-million records, or up to 4 million more records than actual, live businesses! That’s as much as a 28.6% error rate!

I know from experience that some percentage of a business directory’s bloat can be caused by inability to figure out if a business has closed up for good or not (most data sources are not set up to verify each individual business, although InfoUSA remains an example of the gold standard, relying on a practice of phoning each and every business to verify it’s viability at least once per year, and also using a number of other signals of possible closure). These old, dead business listings clog up a great many online directories and can result in poor usability when consumers attempt to drive to their doorsteps for products or services.

However, another source of bloat is in the form of duplicate listings, and as a search engine marketer, it’s these duplicate listings that my clients sometimes have which concern me highly. Just as with duplicate webpages in regular SEO, duplicate listings in business directories and within Google Maps can potentially dilute down a company’s possible ranking score, resulting in lower overall rankings and poorer online performance.

Back in February, Google and other search engines jointly announced support of a canonical tag for webpages, enabling webmasters to specify which page URL should be treated as the main/authoritative one for search engine indexing in cases where multiple URL variations could occur.

If such a protocol makes sense for the general web search engines, why not a protocol to assist in reducing dupes in local search, too?

Google Maps help suggests that users can help them identify cases of duplicate listings, but the problem is that dupes may be constantly coming in through all of Google’s various data partners.

At the recent Kelsey Conference, local directory industry experts predict that Cost-Per-Call is increasingly going to become a dominant pricing model and this will mainly happen through individual directories displaying different tracking phone numbers for the same businesses - and all these different channels with separate phones feed into Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Bing Maps, and other local search engines. So, potential issues from many various phone numbers could be increasing.

Tracking phone numbers are not the only potential problem - sometimes a company’s alternate phone numbers and fax numbers will get parsed off into separate business listings, causing further instances of duplication.

So, how could this “Canonical Phone Tag” effectively be accomplished? hCard Microformat already provides a framework for doing something like this. A canonical phone tag could be formed like this:

000.123.4567

In this example, webpage users could see the “000.123.4567″ tracking phone number when they view the webpage, and the machines could instead glean the authoritative, canonical phone number for the business, “000.867.5309″, and ignore the tracking number.

So, is this a solution in search of a problem?

How many of you have encountered instances where a tracking phone number has gotten indexed in a separate listing alongside a business’s primary phone number/listing? If so, this solution may be worthwhile to consider in keeping all of a business’s ranking weight combined in one listing as opposed to distributed across many.

Quova Awarded Patent for Improved Geotargeting

Chris — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:35:22 +0000

Quova recently announced that they were awarded a patent for various methods which improve geotargeting accuracy and capability. My understanding is that Quova has been using these methods for quite some time already, prior to receiving the patent.

Here’s Quova’s description of the innovations:

“Quova’s newly added patent describes a method for determining the geographic location of an Internet user based upon combining trace routes, user registration information, host names with textual patterns that reveal geolocation information and Internet Service Provider (ISP) service area information. These trace routes describe the pathways by which data moves through the Internet. Each node or ‘hop’ in the trace route is identified by an IP address. These interconnected nodes can be used to recreate the topology of the Internet. Each geolocation can then be assigned to these IP addresses in order to determine the location of each node, up to and including the end user’s IP address and the geolocation of that end user.”

I previously have written about Quova in my extensive article, “Geolocation: Core To The Local Space & Key to Click-Fraud Detection“. My earlier description of them reads practically as an endorsement - something I very rarely do at all. But, I think what I wrote is pretty accurate, overall. Quova is considered pretty much best-in-class of the companies providing geolocation data mapping, because of their greater variety of geo data sources, their more sophisticated mapping methods, and because they actually submit to a third-party audit for data accuracy.

As I’ve described previously, there are quite a number of providers out there which try to associate endusers’ IP addresses with geographic location coordinates, but I’ve always been a really huge skeptic of the overall error rates associated with this type of data. In the past there were estimates that geolocation error rates could be anywhere from 50% to 85%! For marketers attempting to precisely target ads and content to geographically cohesive groups, such high error rates were far too high to be acceptable from my P.O.V. five years ago.

For all geolocation data companies, error rates increase as the geotargeting level becomes more precisely granular. In other words, most of these companies likely have very high accuracy for country-level geolocation capability, lesser for regional targeting such as state or province level, less than that precision for city-level, and lowest accuracy for ZIP-code or postal-code level targeting.

I’ve also been highly skeptical in the past because there’s a low ability to actually test how accurate a given company’s data may be — most testing is based on sample sets which I’ve suspected may be highly skewed towards more accurate geolocations. Anecdotal stories of erroneous geotargeting have come up repeatedly throughout the industry, while there are few ways of calculating actual error, and geolocation data companies reiterate unverifiable claims of accuracy rates.

However, innovations such as found in this patent awarded to Quova help in improving the stature of the whole industry, and really help to reassure marketers and security administrators that the data is solid. I can critique testing methodologies for auditing the data, but I get less strident about it when I can see that the methods by which the data was arrived at are improving and are far less prone to error rates.

Since increasing amounts of advertising targeting are being based upon geotargeting, and since so much of our security screening of PPC ads’ click-through results are being based upon geolocation data as a major component of analysis, I think it behooves companies to use very high-quality data. Quova’s historically high price tags have caused some to look for cheap and easy alternatives, but people should be very careful about the methods used by those other companies. In many, many cases, the cheaper alternatives equate with far less sophisticated methodologies, which also equate with higher error rates. And, auditing undoubtedly also adds overhead to the pricetag, but using data that has zero third-party checks will open companies to greater liability.

Most of the cheap companies are using only ARIN network data which has a lower accuracy level than if it was further enhanced by data from major ISPs and network tracerouting.

Except for the simplest applications which do not involve security and fraud analysis, I think that Quova’s industry-leading patents in geolocation make it so that other geodata companies’ products cannot realistically compete in this arena.

Is Verizon Responsible for Idearc’s Bankruptcy?

Chris — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:39:37 +0000

My op-ed piece, “Idearc’s Chapter 11 Bankruptcy: Who’s Really Responsible?” published today on Search Engine Land, and in it I put forth my position that Verizon is responsible for spinning off the company with an unreasonably huge debt load, and the people ultimately paying the bill are the stockholders.

I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.

This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable - it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.

But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.

Is my contention outrageous?

Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start - clearly set up to fail.

So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon - they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.

Town Changes Name For Better Google Rankings

Chris — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:38:29 +0000

This is just too cool to pass up mentioning in local search news: a town in Europe has decided to change it’s name in order to get better rankings in Google!

The town of “Eu” in France has been edged out of search rankings for the term, since other pages about the European Union are ranking higher. According to them, they’re missing out on a lot of tourism because individuals simply cannot find information about them.

I’ve previously blogged in Ultimate Local SEO Tactics a tongue-in-cheek post recommending changing a town’s name for search optimization purposes, but I didn’t think it would actually happen!

Now, I’d say they possibly could save some money/trouble by first hiring some SEOs to try to help them rank for the term. For instance, it might be possible to get the Wikipedia page for Eu to rank on the first page.

In fact, I’ll call for a bit of generous community action here - why don’t all you other local SEO’s out there blog about this city and link to their Wikipedia page as well? Let’s help that poor town out!

New Print Yellow Pages Usage Stats from comScore-TMP Study

Chris — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:12:37 +0000

TMP Directional Marketing and comScore announced their annual joint “Local Search Usage Study” today, and there were some interesting statistics:

Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%).
1 out of 5 local business searchers with an Internet-accessible cell phone have conducted a local search via the mobile Web.
Those that own wifi devices (such as the iPhone) are the most likely to conduct local business search via the mobile Web, with more than half of these respondents reporting mobile local business searching.
30 percent of respondents still rely on directories as their primary local business research source, despite a 3 percent decline from 2007 to 2008.
Traditional IYP sites such as Superpages.com, YELLOWPAGES.COM, Yahoo! Yellowpages.com, etc. account for 60 percent of local IYP business searches.
Local Search sites such as Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, etc. account for 40 percent of local IYP business searches.

Now for the inevitable questions from me: how representative are these findings for overall consumers in the U.S.? As you recall, I recently questioned the accuracy of yellow pages usage statistics from a Yellow Pages Association (YPA) -sponsored study because it failed to include a major, growing demographic: cell phone users who have no landline phones at their residences.

First, this new TMP Directional Marketing & comScore study are possibly not any more representative of overall population than the YPA study, because it was only based upon an “…online survey of 3,000 respondents…” — so, it missed inclusion of stats involving people who do not have internet access — and, that’s likely still a significant percentage, I’d assume.

However, this new study is more believable to me than the earlier YPA study, because the findings fall more in line with what we might reasonably expect. The TMP-comScore study indicates that 30% of respondents rely on print YP for their local biz research sources (compare with the YPA study which states that 87% of the U.S. population used print YP last year). This doesn’t compare apples with apples, I know, but the figures are measuring somewhat similar things, and the TMP/comScore study also indicates that there was a 3% decline from 2007 to 2008, while the YPA study showed no major decline at all — something that seemed odd to me, considering the 7.6% downward slide the year previous.

While conventional wisdom holds that print YP can expect some percentage of usage decline with internet and mobile local search usage increasing, one cannot always trust conventional wisdom — one needs to check assumptions with actual research. In this case, though, the YPA study left out cellphone-only households which could reasonably be expected to use print YP less, and that might explain why that study showed no decrease in overall print YP usage from the year previous. In comparison, the TMP/comScore report likely does include both landlined and cell-only household respondents, and it shows a continued slide in print YP usage.

Do not get me wrong — I believe based on a wide comparison of statistics that print yellow pages remains a very important part of the local search marketing mix, and usage of yellow page directory phonebooks is statistically significant. I’ve mainly been questioning some industry statistics regarding how much overall usage of print YP there is, and it appears questionable when those stats don’t show some ongoing erosion of print usage.

Greg Sterling notes that print usage is going to vary by regional area and by business category:

In terms of the outlook for print usage, it’s going to be market by market and category by category. It will be very strong in some markets and categories and quite weak in others. Mobile’s impact is a bit of a wild card at this point: does it cannibalize print, Internet or is it largely “additive” to either or both.

I’d agree with that completely. Some business categories have seen a much more sudden shift from print to internet search as a referral source for their customer base. Variation by market is interesting to consider — I can see that there’s likely a more rapid shift in larger population areas than in small towns — small towns having far fewer businesses to select from and thus consumers there not needing greater research capabilities. There’s also likely difference by regional demographics as well, since more affluent markets might see greater shifts from print to home computers and mobile. Perhaps there’s also some side effect involving communities which are more internet-savvy as well.

Local Search & Social Media Company Praized Worth Watching

Chris — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 15:53:11 +0000

Praized, a startup that offers a social media app targeted to locally-oriented blogs and sites, is well worth watching. The app allows blogs to easily provide their constituents the ability to rate local businesses, and display the ratings alongside the traditional directory info of biz name, address, and maps.

(click to enlarge)

(Try out their local search engine to view businesses and ratings.)

Praized was built by some local search veterans from the Yellow Pages Group, and it’s already managed to nab small dribbles of acclaim — most recently, it was named a finalist in Red Herring’s Canada’s Top 50 Canada award which recognized the year’s most promising private technology ventures in Canada.

While it may be a Canadian company, the technology itself is nationality-neutral and compelling enough to be attracting interest and usage from U.S. developers and companies as well. Indeed, Praized has loaded United States directory listings into their database as well as Canadian businesses.

With the company founded by Yellow Pages Group expatriots, it’s no surprise that they have a formal partnership with that company. Praized has also set up formal partnerships with U.S. companies Yellowbook and Localeze as well.

Funded by a mere $1,000,000 seed round by Garage Technology Ventures Canada (and that was in Canadian dollars, right?), the company appears to have achieved a trifecta necessary to set it up for success: (1) compelling/useful product; (2) “vision” - management who *get* how to target a non-saturated market niche; and (3) partnerships with the sorts of companies that can help drive success faster.

Okay, so Praized isn’t really a paradigm-shifting new technology, I know. However, it marries up a few different pieces of functionality smoothly and simply, and targets a local search / social media niche that could drive rapid adoption and distribution. It looks to me like Digg for local search.

(Greg Sterling previously reported about Praized - check out his post on it.)

Decider Enters Local Search

Chris — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:21:10 +0000

Humorous faux-newspaper, The Onion, has launched a new local directory site called Decider in beta. While The Onion is famous for its satirical “news” articles, Decider is a decidedly serious guide intended to complement their other offerings like serious classifieds and the A.V. Club (The Onion’s arts and entertainment site).

Decider brings local business listings for bars, restaurants, music venues, events, and reviews. It appears to be targeted to the college-to-early-thirties demographic, and sports advertisements on the pages.

When I heard about Decider, I immediately though, “oh, yet another business directory site among the many others,” — a thought apparently shared to some degree by Andrew Shotland.

Yet, I don’t think local search has hit a point of “critical mass” like the largest point of expansion just before an industry’s bubble is about to burst. While I do believe that there is likely to be some collapsing of the businesses at the top of the local directory food chain like major yellow pages, the cheapness of launching local businesses at the bottom of the equation virtually guarantees that there will continue to be many more contenders continuing to enter with their own takes on the local search experience. The barriers to entry for launching a local directory are quite low, and various related local info APIs cause the barrier to reduce even more.

Greg Sterling points out that The Onion’s intro into local directory space isn’t all that surprising, since they are a type of newspaper — though, newspapers have also been struggling to get up to competitive speed in the internet age.

Oh, and I should also take a moment to point out that Decider has been fairly savvy in trying to construct a site that is very search-engine friendly. Their developers have obviously worked to incorporate SEO elements into the construction. Page titles are pretty well-formed, along with Meta tags and H1s. Page URLs are very spider-friendly and include keywords.

They even get a special place in my heart for incorporating hCard microformatting elements, although I’m not convinced that their microformat code is valid — the hCard stuff isn’t recognized by my Operator toolbar in FireFox, so I think they may’ve set the hCard up in an invalid manner, perhaps.

Orion Panel: Tech & Info Giants - 3rd Keynote at SES San Jose 08

Chris — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:56:49 +0000

The Orion Keynote Panel, “Technical & Information Giants”, touched on fairly broad topic areas this afternoon at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

Speakers included Matt Cutts (Google Engineer), Rich LeFurgy (Partner, Archer Advisors), Kirsten Mangers (Co-Founder & CEO, WebVisible), Robert Scoble (Managing Director, FastCompany.TV), Danny Sullivan (Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land), and Tim Westergren (Founder, Pandora).

Conference Chair and moderator, Kevin Ryan, framed up the introduction to the panel by using numerous pop culture video snippets to emphasize the impact of Google, social media, and the overall internet on everyday lives. Some of the funnier snippets included quotes from South Park and Californication.

Moderators Kevin Ryan and Mike Grehan engaged the panel speakers on topics as diverse as whether it was reasonable to consider the possibilities of a “Google Killer” in the near-term, and what were the trends to watch for in search and internet/mobile app development.

One particular topic of interest to me that panelists highlighted was local search and how mobile still hasn’t “arrived”. Danny Sullivan noted that each year for a few in a row now, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, has stated that “THIS will be the year mobile arrives…” (my emphasis), but mobile still hasn’t really arrived.

Also, Robert Scoble joked about how he loved his iPhone, but “it doesn’t do everything well”, so he carries two other phones — and will likely start carrying a fourth when Google’s Android phone comes out. A number of panelists commented about how entertainingly compelling the iPhone Urbanspoon application is — it certainly has some coolness, but I wonder how widely it’s adopted? Kirsten Mangers commented about how it ranks restaurants and whether it gives users what they’re really wanting.

The commentary on the Urbanspoon has been recurring from a number of top internet commentators, so it’s definitely one hot app to watch.

Matt Cutts and Robert Scoble show each other their iPhones

Print Yellow Pages Usage On Decline Or Not?

Chris — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:58:11 +0000

My article on how the “Yellow Pages Usage Stats Are Likely Wrong” went up earlier at Search Engine Land, and the details I highlight in it provide some strong circumstantial evidence that this year’s earlier industry statistics stating that print YP book usage hadn’t dropped over the year previous are likely incorrect.

As I point out, those statistics were all based on telephone polling, and those polls missed having representative samples of cell phone only households, according to their published methodology. Various research groups and government agencies have been saying that this is a significant chunk of the population — anywhere from 13.6%, growing to as much as 25% by the end of this year.

When you further realize that this segment is younger, and likely earlier adopters of technology, you can see that there might be a strong reason to believe that their usage profiles probably differ significantly from the land-lined population — they’re probably using print YP less than those who were polled.

This chain of reasoning is an assumption — there’s no absolute evidence to support it. But, the lack of representative sampling in the original polling data leaves us with no alternative but to try to put the findings up against logical reasoning.

It’s hard to monitor and assess usage of offline media, so print yellow pages are not the only ones that struggle sometimes to show value proposition. Print newspapers, magazines, billboards, and others also have similar difficulties in showing how many consumers see them.

Of course, some people have pushed real hard to count offline media — Google has apparently been interested in this Eyebox device which counts when people look at wall ads or billboards.