AOL has jumped on the local search bandwagon with it’s own introduction of a local search page.

A few tests show some very sketchy results as it seems very easy to spam AOL with a variety of techniques.

The worst feature is how AOL forces you to add a location. On 4 of my 5 browsers, I wasn’t able to access the location setting tab. On several of my computers, the firewall security features had to be disabled before I could add my location. This wasn’t a great user experience.

However, even if the features are lacking, it does show the power of local search that AOL had to launch something to try to compete with Yahoo and Google’s dominance in this area.

Related Links:
AOL Search Page
AOL Local Search Page

I’ve been a long time reader of the Wilson Web newsletter. Dr. Wilson and I did a quick video about quality score a couple months ago which was just published.

If you’re wondering why we’re laughing and seem to be moving quickly at times, it’s because we had just done the entire interview and found out that the tape wasn’t rolling. So, we were almost rehashing a conversation we’d just had in simpler terms. Overall, an enjoyable experience.

Don’t forget the factors that make up quality score.

You can see the entire video here: How to Improve Your AdWords Quality Score with Brad Geddes (6:55).

These two sites are pretty self-explanatory. Everything you shouldn’t do in a website in two easy to see examples.

Usability? Readibility or Navigation?

Please turn the sound on, this site had me laughing for quite some time.

The Yellow Pages aren’t dead.

Small businesses are confused by search marketing.

Over 50% of small and midsize businesses fail to properly track successes (Source)

Who will empower reps to sell the full marketing package?

Will your company be the one that breaks the magic formula?

There are millions of dollars for both small agencies and large sales forces lying around just by helping small businesses.

Some Background

In 2005, I spoke at Pubcon on how search engines need to make changes to help local adoption. About half of my points have been implemented by the search engines. At that time, there wasn’t an ad display hierarchy system that examined the search intent (by keyword or property) to display ads. These suggestions were implemented:

• Stop showing national ads over local ads on local search intent queries
• Show local ads on local properties
• Better tools for local advertisers

In 2006, I spoke at SES Local in Denver about SME campaigns. I had two points to make:

• Fulfillment from aggregators had to be better: Most campaigns were being set up with 1 ad copy and 25 keywords due to technology and scale limitations (although, I’m proud to say LocalLaunch could do hundreds of ads and thousands of keywords for a single SME campaign).
• Search Engines needed to empower agencies. A small business doesn’t have to understand the inner workings of search marketing; they just have to believe in the power of it. While part of this responsibility falls on the sales force – the rest falls on the search engines. There’s a reason both manufacturers and dealers run ads – they’re complimenting each other.

Both of these points have improved – but are definitely not solved.

In 2007, I spoke at Google on the network effect of searchers to publishers to advertisers. Along the way I made several suggestions; of which 90% have now come to pass (Thank you AdWords Team).

While the network effect works well for non-local queries; the process is still breaking down at the local level.

Yellow Pages + Internet Yellow Pages + Search Engine Marketing

Throughout those years, I worked with some very smart sales trainers on selling the “Triple Play”, which is a combination of Internet Yellow Pages, Yellow Pages, and Print advertising. It was RHD’s future strategy; and was so believed in that RHD acquired Business.com.

Why sell all 3?

There’s not enough search for all local businesses. The Yellow Pages are still highly used. One should never lean on just one source of leads for their business. IYPs have fantastic conversion rates. The list goes on.

However, just like one should not just buy AdWords or just rely on SEO for all of their traffic; advertisers should diversify their traffic sources.

While we were selling the Triple Play; that doesn’t mean you need to sell print. You need to sell a combination of advertising mediums that make up most (if not all) of a company’s leads.

A company’s position should be: When our clients think of advertising – they think of us first.

You should be the gateway between your clients and their leads.

Do you want to be part of the marketing mix or do you want to be the marketing mix?

Where does that leave us today?

Print and Search Engines are highly used to find local data:

You can also look at this and not think just YP and Search. It’s where eyeballs currently lie. If you can put a business in front of enough (and the correct) eyeballs, then you can be the marketing mix.

According to the study, the first sources used are Search Engines (31%), Print Yellow Pages or White Pages (30%), Internet Yellow Pages Sites (19%) and Local Search Sites (11%). This represents a change from last year’s study, which ranked Print Yellow Pages first (33%), followed by Search Engines (30%).

Source

• 47% of consumers have used a search engine in the past 30 days, compared with 64% for print Yellow Pages
• Teens are almost equally likely to have used a search engine (52%) or the print Yellow Pages (47%) in the past 30 days
• Search engines were deemed the “most useful” of the eight key platforms tested; they rated highest in satisfaction for being a free service, providing the right amount of information quickly, acting as a trusted resource, and providing relevant results

Source

Businesses are confused by search engine marketing.

Source: Opus Research, AllBusiness.com (2008)

The study revealed that 59 percent of small businesses with Web sites don’t currently use paid search marketing, and of those, 90 percent have never even attempted it.

One quarter of respondents believe paid search marketing is too complex.

Twenty-one percent thought it would be too time-consuming.

Thirty-five percent felt they would need an agency to help set up a search marketing campaign.

Source

If we examine the numbers:

• 15% State lack of time. Translation – they need a 3rd party
• 19% State Internet not relevant. Translation – they haven’t heard an internet marketing product pitch that resonates with them, waiting for the proper 3rd party to come along.
• 7% Skeptical of effeteness. Translation – still waiting on the correct product to come along.
• 25% State Confusion. Translation – they need a 3rd party.

That means 66% of businesses which are confused by search engine marketing just need the right product and sales rep to come along.

Will your company be the one that breaks the magic formula?

The formula isn’t hard:

• Create marketing products that:
  • The business, executive team, and sales reps believe in.
  • Bring ROI to the customer
    • Will produce excellent renewal rates
  • Can be understood by the business
  • Can be understood by the sales reps
  • Can be measured to show tangible value
• Train sales reps to:
  • Use a need based analysis sales approach
    • Understand what the business needs
    • Determine which mix of products fits that need
    • Be able to sell multiple products if necessary. If you’re not a newspaper or Yellow Page company, you can still sell display, IYP, websites, local data inclusion, etc. While search marketing is sexy; all of the above venues can work for a company.
  • Understand the product
  • Believe in the products
  • Explain the products in simple terms
  • Training the sales reps is often undervalued – please make sure your reps have the proper training.
• Train your analysts to:
  • Understand search marketing
    • Understand other marketing avenues of your product (IYP, display, print, etc)
  • Understand the product (sales and analyst alignment are crucial)
  • Properly fulfill the product
  • Don’t use the ‘set and forget’ mentality
• Implement technology to:
  • Scale your business
  • Improve your product’s value
  • Showcase your product’s value to your clients

I could write another 20 pages about the formula, so this is the simplistic view.

Where does your business fit?

Small Businesses are confused about search marketing.

There is value in selling multiple products.

There is value in selling SEM (SEO + PPC).

There are millions of dollars on the table.

Is your company ready to help businesses?

If the answer is yes, good luck, there’s a lot of money sitting on the table waiting for the right product.

The AdWords Editor was recently updated; and now shows this information:

• Quality Score
• First Page Bids
• Keyword opportunities now shows data by location
• The volume column in the keyword opportunities tab now shows last month’s data
• Full release notes

It’s now easy to sort by quality score within the editor to see where you should stop making bid changes and do some quality score optimization work.

I also like the fact you can see a 1-10 number for advertiser competition within the search-based keywords research tool in the editor.

Caution before updating

At present, the only way to see minimum bid information is the an older version of the editor. The reason that’s useful is that the higher the minimum bid (especially over $1) the more likely the landing page was at fault. You might want to export your account into an excel file so that you can see cases where you might want to update your landing page over work on ad copy to keyword to landing page relevancy work.

I recently bought my first BlackBerry, the Storm. Until all of my emails for an entire day were stored in a single place, I didn’t realize how many communication pieces I received in a single day. And yet, I manage to get things done in a communication overload world with just a few simple applications.

If your day looks like this (and this is what I’ve received from 6am-5pm today):

• 79 Facebook notifications
• 106 direct/reply twitter messages
  • No idea how many twitter messages I actually saw
• 112 personal emails
• 258 business emails
• 17 blog comments
• 11 forum emails
• 200+ IMs
• 50+ SMS txts
• Who knows how many new RSS, news, and other random items
• and 23 phone calls (but only 14 voice mails)

There’s a simple way to manage everything

First, use either GMail or Google Apps for Domains.

Secondly, use Firefox.

Third, install these Firefox extensions:

• GTD Inbox and then read the page about how to use it. It will help with prioritizing email
• Remember the Milk and sign up for an account while your at it. It will help with task management
• Better GMail2. It will assist with a more usable GMail account
• WiseStamp for your signature
• If you’d like a more custom GMail, you can use Greasemonkey or Stylish
• There are many other good Firefox add-ons, but the above will help with email management the most

Next, customize your GMail filters. By creating filters (or even aliases with GMail for domains) you can have items like news go into one label, and twitter into another one, etc – as long as they bypass the inbox and then only view those folders when you have time. With GMail you can also send yourself email that triggers filters.

Lastly, use the GMail labs features and enable the labs that will help you. I prefer the ‘default reply to all’; quicklinks, forgotten attachment detector, custom label colors (Red for next action, yellow for action, etc so it pairs with the GTDInbox priority list), and superstars.

Managing Your Work Flow

Go through your inbox and put a GTD Inbox filter (next action, action, someday, waiting on, etc) on each email and archive it. If it’s not due for a while, put it in either the action folder and use Remember the Milk to set a reminder when it’s due.  I also like using the superstars to ‘sub-label’ emails within action. Don’t forget with GTD Inbox you can send yourself personal emails and put them into categories as well.

Then…

• Go to the next action label
• Work on the items until its empty
• If you need a break, check your RSS feeds, twitter, Facebook, etc labels
• Check Remember the Milk to see what tasks you have due that day
• Go to the action box and see what needs to be moved to next action
• Go back to your inbox, prioritize the email you’ve received and archive it
  • Notice, we never went back to the inbox until we were ready. This is important for managing information overload.
• Start over again

Some Quick Tricks

• When you send an email to someone where you want a response, BCC yourself
• Label the BCC email ‘waiting on’ and archive
• At the end or beginning of each day, if you have emails that are in your ‘waiting on’ folder that you need responses to that day, send a quick reminder to the person. Since you’re forwarding the email you BCCed yourself on, they have the full context of the email so you don’t need to rewrite it again, just a quick forward and note as to a timeline when it will be completed (or something nicer if it’s a prospective client)

I also like using Vonage’s visual voice mail so that I receive a text of the voicemail message to determine where it fits into the priority list. I rarely answer the phone and instead prioritize responses (hence why with some people you get much faster responses via email than voicemail, such as myself).

Your Inbox has 0 Messages in It

Most of the time my inbox doesn’t hit the dream of 0 emails. However, it’s almost always under 30 emails.

Today’s social world is not about communication overload. While it’s easy to drown in a sea of emails and to-do list, the goals of productivity have not changed. It’s just about effectively managing time and expectations.

Google’s recent announcement to extend their domain parking service to all publishers has caused a bit of stir among advertisers. However, from an advertiser’s perspective; it really doesn’t matter as long as you know how to see which domains are doing well for you, and how to block the ones not doing well.

Here’s a step-by-step instruction manual to removing your ad from displaying on under-performing parked domains.

What is a parked domain?

A parked domain is a website that has not been developed. Essentially, someone buys a domain page and then instead of putting content on the page, they just put ads on the page. Most traffic from parked domains are direct type in traffic.

Step by step guide to making decisions about parked domains

First, head to your reporting interface in AdWords and run a placement performance report. This report will give you detailed information about where your ads are being shown, and if you use AdWords conversion tracker, it will also show you conversion data.

One of the columns of the placement performance report is called ‘special categories. Here, Google AdWords will tell you which site is part of the domain parking program.

Next, export the data into excel. The useful items on the content network are cost per conversion and total conversions. Items like CTR and even conversion rate aren’t very important on the content network.

In the placement report, you need to take note of the ‘domain’ column. This will be made up of 1 of 2 pieces of data. The first will just say ‘parked domains’ In this instance, Google is not giving you the actual domain where the ad was clicked. In these cases, you might want to average up the entire section to see how the domains are doing for you. However, you will also see specific domain names where your ad was shown.

If you have certain domains where you’re doing well, you might consider adding them to a placement targeting campaign.

However, the domains not doing well – take note of these URLs. In the next step, we’ll show how to block those domains from displaying your ad.

Block Domains from Showing Your Ads

Navigate in your account to the Tools > Site and Category Exclusion Tools. You will need to select a campaign. Once selected, here is where you can block sites from showing your ad. You have two options.

Option 1 – Block your ad from showing on any parked domain sites.

Navigate to the ‘Page Types’ tab. This will show you your stats by different types of pages where your content ad is shown. Here you can quickly choose a complete page type (such as parked domains or other special categories) and keep your ad from showing on those pages.

Option 2 – Just block underperforming sites.

Click on the ‘Sites’ Tab. This will open up a text box where you can add all of the sites you noticed in excel weren’t performing up to your goals.

Conclusion

Wile the parked domain program is quite controversial. With very little work, you can either completely opt out of this program, or opt out of sites that are not converting for your AdWords account. It doesn’t take that much time.

Previously,many companies did not see a huge amount of impression on the parked domain program (and yet others did); however, with the new announcement, many companies will start to see many more impressions from these pages. Instead of complaining about the results, take the simple steps above to optimize your account for these impressions.

On page landing page testing has been well discussed and talked about this part year. From blogs like GrokDotCom to programs such as Google Website Optimizer.

However, talking about on page optimization can only be tested if you’re sure that the traffic is going to the correct page in the first place. It is easy to get caught up in conventional wisdom of where to send traffic (usually the most logical page that is furthest in the buying cycle) without testing if that was the correct page to begin with.

One good example of this is for informational queries. A query such as ‘Candle burning times’ is often linked to from a PPC ad to a candle product page. However, that is not the question the searcher asked. If one thinks about a consumer making that query, they are probably buying candles for an event. They do not want to see a candle taper product page, the searcher is looking for a page that discusses the different candle types and how long each one will burn.

This is where you can combine information giving with eCommerce. If you sent the traffic to a page listing your candles and how long they burned; and then linked those candles to your product pages suddenly you can monetize those informational queries.

This step can be repeated with several different query types.

Local business queries

For a query such as ‘Chicago kitchen remodeling’. Conventional wisdom says to send traffic to the ‘before and after’ picture page of a kitchen. However, it is not unusual for a small business to see that when someone visited the ‘about us page’ where we discuss our 25 years in business, our 10 testimonials, and our Better Business Bureau involvement that suddenly the conversion rates increases. Test sending them to the conventional wisdom page along with the about us page.

Narrow Theme Sites

I’ll never forget working on a site where the homepage had double the conversion rate of the most appropriate page of the site for the query. It was a site that connected families with nannies. The most specific page for a search such as ‘Chicago Nanny Services’ would be a page about Chicago with actual nanny resumes. However, the front page of the site conveyed trust that the site worked with both nannies and families thus ensuring your data wasn’t being sold or random nannies were being assigned to the families. While conventional wisdom says the home page is never the best page, their home page’s cost per conversion definitely said otherwise.

Ambiguous Queries

Generally the search ‘merchant account’s’ will send you into a form that will help you apply for a merchant account. After committing to 3 pages of form fill out there’s a question that stops the user in their tracks – ‘what type of merchant account do you want?’. It turns out the query ‘merchant accounts’ wasn’t so specific after all. In cases where the searcher needs more information to take action, take them to a segmentation page where they can learn more information before choosing their route. This is also useful for larger forms where measuring where someone is abandoning the form can help you pinpoint issues to either rephrase the question, change the landing page, or put informational text around the question.

Thank You Pages

While the Thank You Page is the most underutilized page on the web, it is also worth testing. What types of pages lead to longer Lifetime Visitor Values? Should your page have a newsletter signup, a whitepaper download, or related products? It should not be a page that says ‘Thank you for contacting us, now go away’; it should say ‘Thank you for contacting us, we’ll get back to you shortly; but while you wait – here’s some other information that may interest you’. It is much more expensive to gain the first customer than to keep a customer. Use trust pages (of which the thank you page is one as someone trusted you with either their contact information or their credit card). Test these pages to see which leads to most involved customers.

Final Thoughts

On page testing is important. Changing pictures, forms, layout, color, etc can lead to higher conversion rates. However, if you don’t pick the correct page to send traffic to in the first place, on-page testing is a waste of time. Take a step back, examine the conventional wisdom of where you should send traffic, and then test a few different pages before taking the time to optimize the on page experience.

Your landing page quality affects your AdWords quality score. and quality score has a large impact on the success of an AdWords account. So, it’s important to separate the fact from the fiction about what affects landing page quality score, and to understand what you can do to improve your landing page.

Myth 1: My keyword has to be on the landing page

False. The search engines understand semantic indexing. If a page is about cell phones, it probably has the words: Bluetooth, 3G, mobile or cell, phone, etc on the landing page. If your keyword was ‘mobile phone’ and you sent traffic to your page about ‘cell phones’ that did not mention the word mobile on it, your quality score should not suffer.

It can be a good practice from a consumer’s standpoint to use their lexicon (mobile or cell); however, it is not an absolute must.  The closer related your landing page’s theme is to your keyword, the better your landing page quality score will be. However, it is not necessary to use the keyword on the landing page from the quality score perspective.

Myth 2: Adding a privacy policy will increase my quality score

It depends. If your site doe not collect any personal information, then you do not need a privacy policy (from Google’s perspective, but your country may have different laws regarding TOS and privacy policies). However, if you collect personal information, such as an email address, phone number, or credit card, having a privacy policy will help your quality score.

One of the quality score guidelines is transparency. Your privacy policy may say that you will sell any information given to you to the highest bidder. However, the fact you put that into your Privacy Policy means you were transparent to the user on what would happen to their personal information.

Myth 3: My site is in Flash, so I can never have a good quality score

False. Google has made many improvements with regards to indexing flash. This does not mean they will index your site properly. An exercise you can try is to put your URL into the AdWords Keyword Tool< and have your page spidered. If the suggested keywords are similar to what you think the page is about, then you are generally in good shape. If there aren’t any results, or the suggested keywords are completely different than what you think the page is about, you may wish to try making your site more search-engine friendly using progressive enhancement technologies such as SIFR.

Myth 4: My page is all images. The new load time guidelines are lowering my quality score

False. Google only looks at how long it takes the page’s HTML to load in determining landing page load times. If your site is loading so slowly that you see a problem with load times in your AdWords account, you have larger issues with your site. Just loading a page’s HTML (not scripts, nor images) should be exceptionally quick. It should be noted, Google has said they may eventually incorporate all page elements into the load time for determining quality score. If this happens, you may need to optimize your images, scripts, and other called files.

Myth 5: Adding an ‘about us’ page will increase my quality score

While this is a good practice from a user standpoint, it is not an absolute must. As above, the actual AdWords guideline is to be transparent to the user. My testing has not shown that this will help quality score yet. However, it is a good practice as this could very easily be added to the landing page quality score formula and being transparent to users about your business is very much inline with Google’s goals.

Myth 6: Google hates affiliates

False. The question affiliates should ask themselves is: “Was the user’s search experience made better by visiting my page before going to the merchant’s page?”. If you review several services and show the benefits and features of each service so that a searcher can make a more informed decision – then you’ve helped the search process. If your page is just about a single product and every single link from that page just goes to the same merchant page, then you’ve not added to the search experience.

There are many exceptional affiliate sites that add to the search experience. Google does not hate affiliates. Google hates making the search process longer for the user.

Myth 7: Microsites and dedicated landing pages no longer work

False. While Google does wish a user to have choices, you can easily build a page that showcases a single product or service while still giving the user navigational choices. While microsites or one-page-wonder sites have taken some quality score hits over the past couple years, dedicated landing pages are still effective.

When designing your page, look for non-intrusive ways to add some navigational elements to the page. If you consider this from the user’s standpoint, the page you chose for them may not be the actual product they wished to see. More importantly, if a user wants to find out more about your company before committing to trusting you with personal information; do they have any options?

Myth 8: If my site doesn’t have a high Pagerank, I can’t get a good quality score

False. First, PageRank is stored at the page level and not the website level, but we’ll ignore that fact for the moment. Google has a completely different bot and algorithm for pagerank versus landing page quality score. While both ads-bot and Googlebot may share some data, the way the data is actually processed is separate and for completely different purposes. A brand new site can do well in PPC. A site that is banned from the organic SERPs can do well in PPC. A site banned from PPC can do well in the organic SERPs. Landing page quality and natural search rankings are completely unrelated to each other.

Myth 9: If I only have manufacturer descriptions, I will never have a good landing page quality score

Sometimes true. One of the quality signals Google looks for is unique content. If there are many sites using the exact same manufacturer description, the question to ask yourself is: Why should someone read this information on my site as opposed to the other many sites out there? If you can mix up the content with other information, offer buying guide decision help, or offer other unique content for a searcher – it will help your quality score. However, if you must use manufacturer descriptions, your landing page quality score may suffer some, so that just means you need to focus more on increasing the other factors that affect quality score.

Conclusion

It is important to note the landing page quality’s influence to your account. Landing page quality score is not used for all of the algorithms that determine your account’s visibility. You can view information about your landing page quality score within your AdWords account. Just click on the magnifying glass icon located next to a keyword within your account and you can see detailed information about your landing page.

While it is important to maintain a good landing page quality score for your AdWords quality score. It is much more crucial to ensure that when a consumer arrives at your landing page, you can turn them from a visitor into a conversion.

Google recently added a new way in which your ads can be displayed – on Mobile devices with full internet browsers (such as the iPhone or G1).

The change did give you more control in your campaign settings. You can now have an ad that is displayed to just desktops and laptop computers, or to just iPhones and devices with browsers, or both. Of course, this setting is at the campaign level, thus every single ad in your campaign will follow those rules.

If you wanted, you can now create one ad for just people on mobile devices with full browsers that go to one landing page (maybe iPhone formatted), and another ad that’s just shown to people on a computer that goes to your regular webpage.

If you have an iPhone formatted site, you might want to duplicate your campaigns and switch the landing pages for the iPhone vs computer searchers (i.e. a iPhone landing page campaign and then your typical desktop/laptop computer campaign).

For your existing campaigns, your campaigns are automatically opted into showing to iPhones and full internet browser devices. You can easily change where your ad is shown in your campaign settings.

This change does not affect mobile ads. If you have created a specific mobile ad; it will still be displayed to mobile devices as usual regardless of your campaign settings. You can also preview mobile ads with Google’s mobile preview tool.