~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SITE BUILD IT! Xpress Your Engine to SBI! Success Excerpt ------- ---1--- ------- Google Puts Local Search on the Map... Get Your Local Business Site Ready NOW by David Jonah, SBI! Certified Webmaster The continuing elevation of Google, the search engine modestly changing the face if not the interface of computing, is dovetailing nicely with the SBI's publishing tool development efforts. Here's how this new search qualifier works and how SBIers can optimize their sites for revenues. The idea behind this feature is to allow searchers to use Google more like a local yellow pages than an international search engine. A recent release of a beta test tool by the Google search engine that sorts web sites by the content's relevance and by the relevance of their geographic location, changes everything about how future consumers will both use and depend on Web searches. Search-by-location potentially changes how responsive, local business managers will change their advertising and marketing investment decisions by rewarding the media packager that most effectively delivers their local commercial message in the most cost efficient and customer effective manner. This is where SBI's Info-Publishers targeting, among other small business targeting specializations, comes into play. Search marketing for an advertiser is a reliable method of measuring advertising's effectiveness by calculating the ad costs incurred on a per unit basis, compared against the conversion rate of sales volume tracked at the sales counter checkout, or from their web site orders. New performance-based advertising business models are transforming traditional media's more generalized ad buying metrics of mass audience and circulation measurement in favour of direct customer reach from search. As convenience and accuracy increases, consumers will accelerate their use of Web content search tools for local search tasks and, in the process, increase the importance of content and web sites for business operations. This will occur in every business regardless of size, because the Internet, lead by search engine's time-saving convenience and search accuracy, is driving the web to become a local community information phenomena. "Let your fingers do the walking", Yellow Page directory promo is now being amended to let-your-fingers-do-the-finding, or more pointedly, know-before-you-go. Know-before-you-go web search has revolutionized the travel industry and is about to turn retail on it's check-out counter wait lines. SiteSell's SBI! is directly in the crosshairs of a content-relevance convergence that is being fuelled by the competitive marketplace for search-the-web-before-deciding consumers. Google's new search function that isolates web pages by their geographical location has made search engines generally, and Google specifically, some of the most valuable visual real estate in retailing, professional services, and industrial/commercial sales. It has equal potential to extend that financial value to SBI! owners as well. For example, if you are looking for a movie theatre in your area, or a pizza shop around the corner, the new search function makes it easier. Rather than relying on a searcher's ability to narrow their search phrases to deliver appropriate results, the GoogleLabs new search utility encourages searchers to specify a geographic location ahead of a time. Then Google's results would only deliver those content listings that are appropriate to that identified location. Marketers call this geo-targeting. SBIers should call it manna-from-the-cyberheavens. It means that your SBI! site, rich in content, and qualified with Google for their revenue sharing ad network, can now have a share of all national ad campaigns that qualify by geo-keywording, as well as all local business ads that can run on the Google search results pages. You can become an expert in selling PPC campaigns locally and if your SBI! content qualifies, you can have those ads appear on your site as well as Google search results. When a click happens on your site you gain a revenue share, when the click occurs on your customer's keyword ad on Google's results page, you get no revenue, but your customer loves you for it by gaining more attention to their product offering. This sets the stage to sell them their own SBI subscription web site. Take SBI! to Main Street and teach locals how to go global, to sell even more local using GoogleLabs' location sort. How Google does it. Google scans the information on a Web site and uses it to make a best guess estimate of the location of that site. Logically, that may include indexing city names, zip codes or even phone numbers off of the Web site, and then running a comparison of a database to match them to a location. For now, during beta testing, the results are limited to the United States. Reports are that Google hopes to expand it to other countries in the future. This is big. And bigger still for anyone using SBI! for attracting customer traffic. Google, with its iconoclast graphical personality (birthday candles and streamers incorporated in the opening screen on their recent 5th birthday display, math formulas for Einstein's E2 recognition), and its nest of search-me competitors are creating a new, and powerful tool to influence consumer decisions. The consumer's short list of site search info and preferences is today's most powerful retail message for attracting new customers and closing local sales. Being able to make those search results relevant to your home town area or to any geographic location, further elevates the potential influence of all search engines offering targeted accuracy. The local community merchant is where well over 80% of all retail transactions are completed. However, as anyone who has ever sold web site participation door-to-door knows, a web site is perceived by local business operators to be barely relevant to their daily sales effort. That was the case until GoogleLab's trial search box. The addition of Location sort, changes everything, forever, even if it remains an option like groups, News, or catalogue comparison shopping on Froogle. Local sort means that anyone with a business interest or message to get out in a cost-effective manner is now a candidate for a SBI! web site. Google by introducing a second search-qualifier box for content, with undoubtedly more boxes to come, encourages a drill-down results feature based on geographic location. Google is serving notice that if a Web site highlights their geographic location as being relevant to what they have to offer as content, it will be found. Here's what it can mean for any SBI! owner or 5PillarClub affiliate member. As SBI! web site that is sorted by Google's location sort is now as important as having telephone service. It means that a comprehensive web site content is now critical and must be properly optimized for sort by location. With Google influencing over 75% of traffic delivered to most sites, according to published 2003 traffic surveys, this engine's sort by local address potentially changes everything about local advertising expenditures. There is new impetus to sell SBI! to every local business establishment. Just as you cannot be without a phone, you can no longer afford to be in business without a traffic-effective web site. You can take your SBI! site and target any community, any industry, any region, any theme or concept that has some relationship to your geography, whether it be desert heat or mountain winter, and become a content publisher. This not only allows you to sell your community merchants and local manufacturers on the marketing and traffic power of SBI, but when twinned with the advertising power of Google, you also have a huge potential for additional revenue generation. You can use your SBI! keyword research functions to place your customer on the Google search engine results page for specific products and services. These ads are triggered by the community or regional names and can supplement your editorial content efforts. You load your SBI! site with relevant content to the customer's location and products and provide a directory guide to your local community and its businesses. Submit your content site to Google for acceptance in the advertising network. With Google's acceptance of the site, the same geographic keywords trigger the very PPC ads you helped your customer and local business owner create on your site. These ads have the potential to earn you additional revenues when clicked through from your site just the same as they do Google from the results page. You and your client are participating in one of the most sophisticated advertising solutions ever devised, since banks started advertising car financing loans in the 50's to help sell more cars and increase financing volumes. What you have accomplished for your client advertiser and potential SBI! client is a powerful global reach marketing campaign for the keywords around their business products. What you have done for your own community focused SBI! site is added 24/7 revenue potential from one of the most powerful pay-for-performance advertising program that exists today. Until Google showed its hand and their potential to reliably sort by location according to defined criteria like street, postal code, community name, this kind of linking of SBI! and search engine ad transactions was more difficult to imagine or propose. Looking back, 2003 may be a historical milestone when the power of a web site to market global went local and never looked back. Now in the true sense of SBI! advances, which are slightly ahead of their time, this integrating of local and global search advertising concept is also slightly ahead of its demonstrated potential. Google's search-by-location is reported to be in rough beta test, and the initial results are spotty. For any SBI! owner, however, this means that all sites must now add pages and content that clearly identifies what geo-local address they are in, and optimize their pages for that location(s). If it isn't relevant today it will be, and soon. Increasingly, those that benefit the most from this new revolution in how people find their local business and service suppliers will be those people who put their content in an SBI! template. The SBI! method helps all search engines in nanoseconds effectively select which site can best answer the user's question, and now as a result of the geo-coded content provided, create a defined community, short list. Your business needs to be on that list. Google-enabled SBI! rocks. David Jonah jonah2009@rogers.com airplane-and-helicopter-charters.com monctoncommercialrealestate.com telecommunications-equipment-finder.com David Jonah is a former community newspaper publisher and local business marketing consultant who is now a full time certified SBI-Webmaster creating keyword enriched content from his ocean-side office on New Brunswick southeastern coast. He started with SiteSell's MYSS! ebook in 1998, and is currently developing a new keyword-advertising concept in online community guide publishing, using SiteBuild-It's infopublishing.sitesell.com concept, for living in and visiting Moncton, New Brunswick. KEN'S COMMENT: Thanks very much, David. I agree. This is simply HUGE for local businesses with local clientele. Over the coming weeks, we'll add follow-up articles to this -- Overture has just launched a beta version, too. And we'll tie it all together into the "Local Business" section of the TNT HQ as the dust clears. But one thing is already clear... we've been talking about how local business (with local clientele) will be a huge trend in the coming years. Those of you who have a local business and are using SBI! to enhance it... keep on doing what you're doing, and follow David's advice above. For those of you with friends who do have local businesses with local customers, please do them and us (and yourself through the 5 Pillar Affiliate program) a HUGE favor... tell them. Those great, big, heavy paper Yellow Pages are dead as doornails. They'll only understand that in 2-3 years. But, once high-speed adoption exceeds 50% (ie., more than half of people are 24/7 connected to high-speed), folks will use Google and other local search engines to find a business that may only be minutes away. As David says, what this means for you, is to prepare accordingly NOW. And get your friends to do the same. This is another MAJOR FUTURE TREND of e-commerce.