Small Business Search Marketing

SBSM reader Doug recently wrote in with a question that describes a very common small/local business situation:

My business is home based. I do have a UPS mailing address. I have a business that is service based and typically go to clients homes in many areas. Did I miss, or do you have any suggestions in regards to setting up maps for this situation? I don’t want customers to think I have a business location somewhere I don’t, just that I serve their area. Any suggestions?

Here’s how I replied:

You describe a situation that’s not uncommon — you want to cover a lot of geo areas, but you’re only located in one. My wife’s a real estate agent covering 10-12 different cities, but we can only list her in the city where her office is located. A lot of companies try to go further and create fake listings for every area they cover, but Google has been cracking down on this and just announced “Business Listing Quality Guidelines” –

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

I think your best bet is to build out your listing as much as possible — mention all the areas you cover, discuss those areas on your main web site, try to get links that are related to each area you cover, etc. But I wouldn’t recommend creating new business listings for each city. You’d risk getting banned altogether.

Your turn: Did I answer it well? What would you say or add?

Search agency TMP Directional Marketing today published its 2nd annual Local Search Usage Study, conducted by comScore, which takes a look at local search behaviors. There’s some pretty interesting data in it:

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%).

Charles Laughlin and Greg Sterling have some additional analysis.

Follow along with me, please: The story begins on Sunday, when our local newspaper runs an article about a local military man named Burke Jensen who’s facing legal action because his new home isn’t landscaped.

Shortly after Jensen and his wife bought the house, he was sent to Kuwait. His wife went back to live with family on the East Coast during her pregnancy. So, the home is in a new neighborhood, nobody’s in the house, and the yard isn’t finished.

That’s when the local developer, Chick Edwards, makes the mistake of opening his mouth. He gets angry that the yard isn’t done, that Jensen is violating the homeowner’s association covenants, and calls the Army Reservist a “clown.” Here are the developer’s quotes from the Sunday paper:

• “I really don’t give a (expletive) where he is or what his problem is.”
• “It doesn’t matter to me.”
• “(Jensen) doesn’t have the right to walk away from his obligation.”
• “I have most of the property still, so I am the homeowners association.”
• “This is a contract. I don’t like the way his property looks. This clown gets to do what he wants and I’m as mad as hell.”

Uh-oh. The developer obviously screwed up by opening his mouth like that about a guy who’s halfway across the world serving our country.

Online Conversations and Reputation Management

That one print article alone is a problem for the developer’s reputation. Tens of thousands of people probably read it and got angry. But, this is 2008 and we’re in the age of conversation. And our local newspaper just so happens to allow readers to comment on their stories online. You can imagine what people said:

“Sorry you’re such an awful, awful person… maybe you’ll learn when no one else buys your lots, you *******.”

“I for one will let everyone I know NOT to even consider purchasing a lot from you. You can have your development all to yourself. You deserve yourself as a neighbor.”

“I can’t understand how you could be so cold! Mr. Edwards I think you should have to take Lt. Jensen’s place in Kuwait while he comes home to clean up his yard for you.”

“You are not worthy to be living in the United States that our sons and daughters are fighting for right now. May God, karma, or whatever you believe in come full circle and bite you where you live.”

They also post his phone number, web site address, and call for others to tell Edwards directly how they feel about him.

Today, the Internet makes it easier than ever for people to spread the word about businesses they don’t like or don’t respect.

And it wasn’t just on this one article, either. The conversation continued in an online letter to the editor about the situation. It continued in an updated story about local residents coming together to fix the yard for Lt. Jensen:

“I am simply amazed that a member of this community can think that treating people like this will gain them recognition or business in some way. My wife and I are in the market for a new home with a couple of acres of land, but I will be sure to skip this offering while looking.”

“I’m sure he’s pleased that Jensen’s yard is being done, but I hope he realizes that it has cost him some seriously bad publicity.”

Viral News and Reputation Management

It has cost the developer some “serious bad publicity,” and not just on our local paper’s web site. In 2008, conversations spread quickly and easily.

• A Seattle radio station picked up the story and got the developer on-air the next morning, where his excuse was something about having “a bad hair day” when he spoke to the newspaper.
• The Seattle Times picked up the story, and two days later it’s still the most read article on their site.
  
• Even Seattle Times’ readers are blasting the developer online.
• The story hit social news sites like plime, on craigslist, and blogs as far away as Chicago.

How Does It End?

According to reports, the developer has stopped answering his phone and is getting bombarded with angry emails. Although local real estate agents would never admit to it, chances are good that a lot of them would warn their clients about moving into Edwards’ development. And he has about zero chance of ever restoring the Google SERPs on a search for his name.

No doubt this is an extreme example, but I think it proves the point I made a couple months ago: small businesses need to be concerned with reputation management. You may never anger your customers like Chick Edwards did, but this is a lesson in how bad things spread quickly online.

Timed to coincide with a local search session at SMX East, Greg Sterling posted a Q&A about Google Maps and local businesses on Search Engine Land today. If you’re a small business owner with questions/concerns about your local business listing in Google Maps, I’m guessing this Q&A will have some helpful, interesting information.

One of the questions that Google’s Eric Stein answers is about how to handle situations when one small business purchases or merges with another:

Q: How do you handle mergers? We purchase/manage many facilities and need to change their name and contact info. But the third party sources make changing the name almost impossible. We were told by one third party submission company that we had to pay them to change the company name and if we stopped paying the monthly fee they would switch back all our data to the old inaccurate data. In the end if we don’t pay the information is not correct and the users get less relevant results.

Google: You should claim the old listing in Local Business Center, by finding the listing on Maps, clicking More Info, Edit, then Claim Your Business. Then, once you’ve claimed the business, update the name and contact info.

If you can verify neither the old/acquired business’s address nor phone number, then you should create a new listing with the new info, again using LBC. If the old listing continues to show alongside your new one and you can’t claim/verify it, you can click More Info, then Edit, then Remove Place to flag the old listing for deletion.

The whole Q&A is very detailed like that. Definitely worth five minutes of your time.

GroupThink is where I turn the blog post over to you.

DMOZ, AKA the Open Directory Project, has long been thought to be dead by most of the SEO community. “Submit and forget about it” is the common advice we’ve been giving out for a couple years now; obsessing over getting that trusted directory link just isn’t worth it. Worse, just last week Google dropped a part of their webmaster guidelines that recommended getting a link from DMOZ (and Yahoo).

But there may be life yet in DMOZ. Just last week, a post on the DMOZ blog hints that big upgrades are coming soon:

What does AOL have planned for DMOZ in the near future?
While it’s not quite ready for its prime-time debut, we can tell you that we’re actively working on an all-new DMOZ that incorporates an updated UI and an overhauled back-end infrastructure.

So, I’ll pose the question to you (those of you who aren’t busy at SMX East): Is it too late to save DMOZ? Can the Open Directory be revived and become more than just a “submit and forget it” link target?

Comments are open!

One of the slides in my 90-minute Local Search Workshop presentation shows market share among the major mapping sites. I’ll need to update that now, thanks to new data that Heather Hopkins of Hitwise shared with me this week:

The chart shows the gains Google Maps is making on MapQuest, and how both Yahoo and MSN Live Maps are lagging far behind in this category.

Google Maps also received some high praise this week from financial analysts. I wrote much more about all of this today on Search Engine Land:

Google Maps: #1 In Features, Market Share Rising

You can also read more reaction on TechMeme.