Is Reach Local and ATT Programs Worth The Cost?

March 12th, 2011

 Today I want to address the advertising opportunities offered by ATT and Reach Local.  There are several other similar companies but I decided to go with these two because of my recent experience with them.  Both companies have a marketing plan that helps local companies advertise to local customers on a regional scale via online mediums.  Most of these companies package several online advertising options that you can actually do yourself, but many do not know what is involved to do this so the packaged concept appeals to them.

Take google adwords for example, this is a powerful tool that can allow you to show up when a key word is typed in a search that is related your business.  You can determine what key words you want such as “Las Vegas Honda Repair”, or “Las Vegas Body Repair” and you can set them up to be shown in a variety of word combinations or exactly as you have them written in.  You can budget your campaigns based on how much you are willing to pay per click along with the hours you want to show up.

Most of the companies that I researched have taken that concept and added several bells and whistles to package an online Search Engine Marketing campaign with a custom webpage and ways to measure your calls to your business.  They also have pretty cool looking reports that break clicks down based on times, days and where they came from based on IP addresses.  They also offer pie graphs, along with just about any configuration you can come up with to break your information down for a report.

We have also noted that each company creates a webpage that gets indexed in the search engines that has a phone number, not yours, to call.  This is how they are able to measure the calls that are placed from the webpage that they create.  ATT being a phone company also has the yellow pages website that they have re-branded as yp.com.  Now they are attempting to market this site as an online version of the traditional Yellow Pages Book.  Remember “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking” television commercials?  On a side note, the name Yellow Pages was never copyrighted, so ATT bought the rights to the name and website URL in order to add more value to their internet presence.

While this is a great way to have your advertising measured and monitored, it is not cheap.  In fact many of these companies charge twice or three times as much as a small to medium size budget for Search Engine Optimization.  One of the other issues that should concern all business owners is the fact that these companies create a webpage that they host.  While most folks do not mind, the problem with that is if you stop advertising with them, your page also eventually drops off the search engine index.  From a Search Engine Optimization stand point, I also say that you should concentrate on building the relevance of your web pages not paying for ones that will go away at some point.   Most statistic packages that come with hosting a webpage will have reports that show just about 90% of what the pay for companies show you. 

Now, don’t get me wrong, I can tell you these companies have a nice bag of tricks to offer a small to medium size business that has an unlimited advertising budget.   Case in point, one of my clients was approached by ATT.  After a fairly long and drawn out presentation, the price of all the things they were going to do for us was finally presented and the number was 5 times what they were paying today for essentially the same results.   Nowhere in the presentation did I see them offer to help optimize my client’s website to help gain more traffic.  They seemed to be more focused on driving traffic away from their organic site and into their portals like YP.com and those “hosted” pages that they create.  Bottom line, they literally have you pay them to poach your organic web presence and then charge you to drive your customers back to you via pay per click campaigns designed to make all your online leads virtually come from them.

That being said, I propose that if you want to increase your online presence, have an honest budget and an open mind, then you should consider letting an SEO professional go over your options.  Most SEO organizations are owned and operated independent small businesses just like yours, so they understand that money does not grow on trees, therefore they will be much more aware of your budget constraints and work out an option that works best for your needs.  As we say, “Stay Ahead of the Curve, Invest in your Website”, and you will be surprised by the results.

Bill Gornet is a Professional SEO and is owner of www.SEOinvestment.com.  With over 12 years of retail and service oriented website experience, his services include search engine optimization, web marketing, analysis including return on investment, customer experience and overall web marketing strategies.  He can be reached at 702-604-6236 or by email BG@SEOinvestment.com. 

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How Can An SEO Professional Help You Attain Higher Natural Listings

March 3rd, 2009

Last month we talked about the difference between Organic and Paid listings for your website searches.  We discussed the importance of optimizing your website for key words that are specific to your business sector and how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help with your overall marketing initiatives.  We also explained that 70% of the traffic generated from a search is from the organic or natural listings not the paid ones.  People tend to trust the listings generated from a search engine more than the ones that are paid for. It is not enough anymore to simply create a site and expect it to magically end up high in the organic listings.

 

So how can an SEO Professional help you attain higher natural listings and stay there?  First off keywords are very important to a website.  Key words are simply those words that a person may use in a search engine to find your business. 

 

Lets say you are a Paint Shop.  What words would you use to describe yourself?  “body paint”, “paint shop”, “car painting” or “auto paint shop” to name a few of the obvious ones.  How about long tail versions such as “Las Vegas auto body paint shop”, or “Henderson Nevada car paint shop”?  These are called long tail keywords because they are longer than the regular key word choices.  These are important because this is the first step in determining what we need to do to optimize your site so potential customers can find you.

 

So, if you have a site call JoesPaintShop.com this means that on your pages we will write about your site “Joes Auto Body Paint Shop in Henderson and Las Vegas Nevada, featuring the best professional painting and finishes with state of the art auto body car paint booths and baking machines for a superior car paint finish to accommodate all budgets.  We accept all major insurance and offer free estimates.”

 

Many websites are built by design professionals who tend to concentrate on the overall look of the website.  As noted above many of the aspects of what a search engine looks for will be lost on even the best looking websites.  Descriptions such as the one that we created above may simply say “Joes Paint Shop”. You have to take into account that there is much more to that name and type of business that needs to be considered when writing about it. 

 

We always urge current and potential clients that if you are lucky enough to include an SEO Professional during the creation of your website, you will keep your initial costs down as many of these basic techniques can be implemented along with the design elements and content that the web designer will be creating.  Even Google.com the worlds largest search engine says, “If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.”

 

So now that you have incorporated an SEO into your site and your pages have been optimized how long does it take to start rising in the search engine rankings?   Allot of that depends on how many competitors you have in the top rankings and how your site compares to them via the search engine rankings.  The SEO will analyze your site compared to the competition and determine along with your keywords what else needs to be done in order to help you rise in the rankings.  We also have to take into account that the search engines change this criteria often so it is not enough to optimize your site once, it needs to be optimized at least monthly to keep the content fresh so that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN can pick up on the changes.  Many times it can take months to rise toward the top.  With that being said patience is important during this period. 

 

Next time we will discuss the importance of constant updates with content such as monthly newsletters, blogs and other ways to keep your site fresh and high in the search engine rankings.  We will also talk about the importance of carefully accomplishing this goal without overdoing it.

 

Bill Gornet is a Professional SEO and is owner of SEOinvestment.com.  With over 10 years of retail and service oriented website experience, his services include search engine optimization, web marketing, analysis including return on investment, customer experience and overall web marketing strategies.

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What is SEO and How Can It Help With My Website?

October 14th, 2008

What is SEO and how can it help my overall marketing inititatives?  Well, first off, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  In today’s world of the internet many companies have extended their reach to the web but many have not done much more than create a generic site with generic information that they refer to occasionally if a customer is interested. 

 

SEO work takes that initial creation and helps take it to the next level.  Over then next several months we will take the opportunity to touch on many topics that will help you as an automobile professional delve further into the power of the internet.  We will also help take the mystery out of the SEO profession so that you can feel comfortable with your decision to go forward utilizing these type of services.

 

First off lets discuss the difference between organic searches and paid searches.  As you may have noticed, when you do a search on Google Or Yahoo, you will usually see on the top 2 or 3 spaces shaded results and then several more along the right hand side of the page with the rest of the results under that.  The results that show up in the shaded area at the top and along the side are paid advertising and the rest are what is called “organic results”.  Organic means that these are the results that show up for free and are what the search engine deems as credible sites for your search words. 

 

That being said, those free results account for 70% of the clicks on search result pages.  People tend to trust the organic results more than the paid ones.  A good mix of paid advertising along with some SEO work is always good, but an SEO will work to help you reach those all important organic results. 

 

So how do you reach the top?  Allot of it has to do with content.  Search engines “crawl” the web with “spiders” which are nothing more than a program that basically goes to your site and follows the links on your home page.  From there they read everything and save the information that ultimately ends up indexed.  From there it hopefully will show up when a potential customer types in relevant keywords for your site. 

 

As a SEO we go in and look at your pages and optimize them for the keywords that are relevant to your service.  If you are an “Auto Body Repair” service then we would help build your site’s content to include the appropriate mix of those keywords along with other relevant content that will help your site show up higher in the organic results.  We also will look at your web logs and analyze where customers are coming into your website and leaving.  This allows us to make recommendations toward appropriate best practices for your site’s customer experience.  The biggest thing is that we also have to update your site at least monthly to keep content fresh which will help build your organic rankings and also help maintain them.  More on this topic next month.

 

Bill Gornet is a Professional SEO and is owner of SEOInvestment.com.  With over 10 years of retail and service oriented website experience, his services include search engine optimization, web marketing and analysis including return on investment, customer experience and overall web marketing strategies. 

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