SMX Local and Mobile Coverage – Who’s Making Money?

This session is a panel with individual presentations moderated by Greg Sterling. Here are highlights of the speakers presentations.

David Mihm – David wrote the excellent Local Search Ranking Factors report, and reviewed the top 6 factors in his presentation.

Claim your local business listings in Google and Yahoo.
Your local business listing address should be in the city of the search
Proper categorization of your business listing
Product/Services keywords should be in the title of your listing
Proximity of your address to the city centroid
Validation with third party data providers

This is a great report – click the link above for that report, some blog posts about it and his presentation.

Dan Hobin – G5 Search Marketing, they have a platform that helps track leads, conversions and calls. He showed me a demo of it, very nice reporting and visual charting. They do PPC and SEO and they also help track print Yellow Pages… he showed an example of a campaign where the cost for print yellow pages is $193 per lead, and $580 per customer!! This is vs $13 and $46 for AdWords and $5 and $18 SEO. WOW – no wonder many businesses are relying less and less on print yellow pages!

Ian White – Urban Mapping, Inc. shared some very interesting stats they’ve gleaned from all their geographic data and searches:

.05% of search queries use the ZIP code
2% of search queries use neighborhood terms
5% of search queries use city name
40% of search queries are inherently local!

I know the top 3 do not add up to 40%, but presumably there are other indicators of “local intent” in a search query. The actual 40% number is debatable.

Bryson Meunier – Resolution Media. Bryson is talking about mobile, and the importance of having a strategy vs just jumping in. He showed an Android mobile app “Call a Cab” and a Weather Channel app for Android. He pointed out that Google Analytics does not track mobile visitors. http://brysonmeunier.com has some links to analytics providers that do.

Mobile users search differently than desktop users. Google suggest has a mobile version that is different than their normal suggestions.

Think of mobile as the beginning of something huge, its a marathon not a sprint. Build links, they can be even more important. You can track mobile links in Google Webmaster Tools. Another tips, join Mobile SEO Google Group.