ONERank Internet Marketing Blog

Local business listings began with a basic business directory more than a decade ago. Chances are, your business has a local listing wherever you have a physical address location. Check it out — go to Google, type in your company name. You’ll probably see a map locating your business and an address. Of course all you may find other information too.   Local business listings are treated passively by many businesses.  But that could be a mistake. You’ve probably read that prospects have something specific in mind when they are shopping. So try this test. Go back to Google, type in the name of a product or service your business provides plus your hometown. Did your business show up? If it did: congratulations. If it did not: you’re missing a major marketing opportunity.

Times have changed.

From a marketing standpoint, the use of local business listings has exploded with the increase of social media and mobile devices. Consumers not only use these interactive yellow pages to locate a business, product or service in their area; they are also posting reviews of those products and services.  Today, there are over 60 local business listing websites on the Internet in five different categories.  They include the search engines, social communities, 411 websites (aka yellow page type websites), GPS websites and that age-old business directory.

You can no longer be passive.

To make your interactive yellow pages listing a stronger marketing tool, you must first “claim” the listing with all the search engines, social communities, websites and organizations that lead people to it. Once you prove the listing is really yours you can update it with your business marketing material. Businesses are realizing the importance of this claiming process.  Once you have claimed your local listing you can update information with text, keywords, business descriptions, products, services, photos, videos, coupons, and more.  Some websites, such as Google, allow you to use all these options while others charge a fee for enhanced listings making this information present for local consumers through web or mobile searches

So what’s the “security challenge”?

The claiming process is crucial to security because if the wrong person gets access to your business local listing they can direct customers to a different location by phone or website address.  Additional damage can include incorrect information on photos, videos, coupons, and more.  Because consumers are using local business listings to locate a business, product or service in their immediate area, the security around local business listings must have a high priority for any local listing website.

Remember phishing?

Phishing was described in 1987 before the Internet was a commercial boom.  The first recorded use of phishing was in1996.  The question is whether the business industry is going to wait for something similar to occur using Local Business Listings. The security holes are quite evident with Local Business Listings and I don’t think it takes a genius see what could happen if businesses do not “claim” their listings – the first step in closing those “holes.”

When hackers capture a Local Listing it’s called “high-jacking.”

It is absolutely important that businesses not passively wait for local listing websites to put the appropriate security in place before you claim your listing. Installing security starts with the obvious claiming process, but many sites allow data to be inserted from other databases on the Internet and I am not sure there’s good security around this later process.  If someone wanted to hijack a local business listing, they could easily insert the wrong information through a low level business directory that sells its data upstream or inserts its data directly into a higher level local listing website.

While the top search engines like Bing, Google and Yahoo have “some” front-end security; their API’s (Application Programming Interface) makes them vulnerable through the back door.  Data is provided to their local listings from 3rd party sources including “get listed” services.  Additionally, if someone cannot claim a listing easily, the process within these local listing websites allows for additional listings with the same address to be submitted by anyone.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

I can tell you from experience that without fail, one of the most common reasons websites suffer from a low conversion rate is because they fail to make a statement.  There’s no “push” – no energy and no interest in the offer.

So how do you grab your readers’ attention when they’re in that scrolling and scanning state of mind?  You hit ‘em with bullets!  When used correctly, copywriting bullets slice through your buyer’s defenses and get them off the fence and actively engaged in your content.

But so many people stop short of turning ordinary “here’s how it helps you” bullets into extraordinary “I’ve GOT to have this” bullets.

Copywriting Bullet Examples

Let’s say we’re selling a product that helps treat heartburn. How many times have you seen text like this on a web page?

With “Heartburn B Gone”, you’ll:

• Prevent heartburn from coming back by turning off overactive acid pumps in the stomach.
• Be able to eat your favorite foods again
• Save money on expensive antacids and prescription medicines

Yawn.

There are some benefits sprinkled in there, sure.  But nothing that makes me bolt up out of my chair and say “FINALLY! This is just what I’ve been looking for!”

To make your bullets more convincing, add in some livelier examples that your reader can truly relate to.  One of the best ways to do this is to put that added piece in parenthesis – like this:

With “Heartburn B Gone”, you’ll:

• Prevent heartburn from coming back by turning off overactive acid pumps in the stomach. (EVEN if your heartburn erupts like a geyser, you’ll be able to quiet belching and pain once and for all!)
• Be able to eat your favorite foods again (Go ahead and cook up a batch of your world famous 4-Alarm Chili – and go back for seconds!)
• Save money on expensive antacids and prescription medicines (Even if you know your pharmacist on a first-name basis and ask for your prescriptions as “the usual”!)

By adding a real-life benefit to your bullet points, you get your prospect thinking “Wow, I’d LOVE for that to happen!”

Don’t Give Away Everything!

A common mistake used when writing bullet points is to give away your best information up front, in the hopes that it will entice people to buy the product.  For example:

Learn how just one capsule of Vitamin E a day can help clear up your skin almost overnight!

“Oh really? Is that all I need to do?” – and the prospect rushes out to buy her vitamins without giving your product a second look.  Try this instead:

Learn how a common vitamin that you already have in your home can help clear up your skin almost overnight! (But you don’t take it by mouth – do THIS instead for radically softer, blemish-free skin!)

We’re not saying what vitamin it is – other than the fact that they probably already have it. And we’re telling them that there’s a special way to use it – both of which they’ll find out by buying your product.

Using Bullets Effectively

The “silver bullet” of bullet copywriting is to fire off bullets that are filled with curiosity – so that when they hit the mark, your reader is always left imagining how much better off they’d be as a result of ordering your product or service.  Test it for yourself and see how it works for you!

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

As SEO practitioners and content writers, we are taught to do two things with regularity when creating: link internally with great frequency, and also do our best to spread the link love by linking out to others.

The SEO and time-on-page fundamentals that these things revolve around haven’t changed, but much of our thinking about what this does has. Research has shown that the act of linking dramatically drops readability, and also severs the ability for retention.

In the most recent issue of WIRED, there is an article titled “Chaos Theory”, which is an adaptation of a piece of Nicoholas Carr’s book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”. Within, Carr details two studies that delve into the perils of linking out:

“In a 2001 study, two scholars in Canada asked 70 people to read “The Demon Lover,” a short story by Elizabeth Bowen. One group read it in a traditional linear-text format; they’d read a passage and click the word next to move ahead. A second group read a version in which they had to click on highlighted words in the text to move ahead. It took the hyper-text readers longer to read the document, and they were seven times more likely to say they found it confusing.”

Carr continues a paragraph down:

“A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse.”

As SEOs, this has obvious dilemmas for our work. We are extremely more likely to link out due to our craft, and as such, extremely more likely to make the content we create more difficult to understand and retain. For example (and the only time I will do this during this post), look at Aaron Wall’s recent entry SEO is a Zero Sum Game. Wall links out 47 times, and that, mixed with the difficult subject matter, makes the post essentially incomprehensible.

SEO shouldn’t get in the way of user experience, and as these studies suggest, the way we create content definitely does. There are ways around it, thankfully, although it takes conscientiousness to implement them.

It is my suggestion that SEOs should make a concerted effort to not link out within the main body unless absolutely necessary, and instead, take the extra three or four minutes to summarize the link you would have used. We can still get links in the content, where studies show that links offer more juice, we just have to do so at the tail end, after we‘ve summarized our point.

Consider creating a “Additional Resources” addendum, where you can link out to multiple places without concerns about readers not understanding the content. You also have the ability to create blog posts like term papers or Wikipedia entries, with footnotes addressing anything that needs to be linked to.

Of course, this isn’t always necessary, and the more vanilla your topic, the less it matters. If you’re creating content a la “50 ways to..” that really has no lessons or long-term intentions attached, link away, as dragging your users all across the internet will have little to no implications on the retention of ideas. In cases like Wall’s, though, where he is trying to instruct a point and create understanding, his act of linking out so often actually greatly disrupts his original intentions.

Studies like these should mark a fundamental step forward in the way we learn online. As the article continues, much of the way we consume content is very “surface” level, and because of that, skimming has become our dominant mode of thought. If our goal is to progress and not simply consume, we have to take steps away from this mode of thinking.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.