Google is rolling out Hotpot along with Boost.
If you haven’t signed up for Google Places by now, you should.
If you already claimed your business in Places, now may be a good time to make sure that it is filled out completely. Perhaps add a few more images. The more that your listing is filled out the better, especially if your listing comes up ahead of your competitors.
As you may already know, Google announced they are offering an enhanced listing option. You can get your website listing highlighted in the seven pack area for $25 a month. They began rolling this out in mid June. The idea is that the yellow tag will encourage your customers to click on your your link.
Seven Pack with a yellow tag
The idea is too new to see if it’s worth $300 a year so Google is letting you try it for a month at no cost. You’ll need to log into your account at Google Places.They do require a credit card to sign up and if you forget to cancel they keep you signed up by default. I just signed up and will post the results as they come in.
They are a number of items you can enter in your tag, You can imbed images, a video, a discount coupon or some other incentive. I’m just testing the tag and see if it raises enough awareness to increase clicks to my company site.
The way I’ll be determining if it is worthwhile is by measuring the local clicks. Google offers a dashboard to be able to do this. They also seem to think that “impressions” have value. I think that is more a remnant of old marketing thinking. I can’t imagine that a potential customer would value seeing a link to your site and then not clicking it. If anything the opposite would hold true, that is, a searcher had the opportunity to click on your site and didn’t. That would make a negative case for the yellow tag in my mind. So the metric I plan on using is the ration between impressions and clicks on local traffic. I’m looking for more clicks to impressions.
The chart is from a new site I’m developing. We registered for the yellow tag on July 11th so the dates on the chart aren’t up to date. I’ll post the results near the end of the month.
The next big question? How many more clicks will you need to justify $25 a month? If they convert well, it wouldn’t take many. I’m thinking I’d need to sell $500 worth of work a month to justify the expense. That’s not very hard to do. It may be harder to measure the performance of the tag.
I’ll keep you posted.
Tags : Free Seo, Google Places, Local SEO, Seven pack
As contractors, most of us are considered “local”, that is we draw customers from a limited area. Simply put, we want search traffic from places we serve and aren’t so concerned with traffic outside of our area. What this means is we have to let the search engines know when to display our site when someone in our market is searching for the services we offer.
How do we do this? The first step is to “claim” your listing on the local search listings. This involves logging on and filling out the info about your company. It only takes a few minutes and will get more traffic to your site. More traffic equals more customers.
It’s important to list a local business address. The search engines are looking for validation in regards to where you are located. The goal of the search engines is to return the most appropriate results to the user. The more sure the search engines can be that your site is the best choice, the more likely you are to appear in the search results. Read More…
Tags : Local SEO
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Dec.4,2010