The government is choosing a watch-and-see approach to online advertising, deciding to stall the inevitable hands-on, for now. At Thursday’s U.S. House Small Business Committee hearing on online advertising, Google was one of the main topics of conversation, though they did not officially participate.
One of the main topics of discussion from the committee members was their concern over the recent Google/Yahoo deal, and the possibility for governmental regulation on online advertising. It is probably that the merging of such online Search Engine giants was the impetus for discussions on regulation. When any sector grows so big so fast, the need for regulation to serve as consumer and business protector is always discussed. Unchecked growth in a market with few competitors can lead to price and practice gouging, but for now the House is not instilling regulatory measures.
CickZ has quotes from many of the participants in the house discussion.

“Do we allow market forces to play out?” Gonzales wondered. “I’m a strong believer in that…up until the point that we feel that there is a disadvantage…and the consumer or the businessperson is no longer on a level playing field or treated fairly.” He also briefly expressed an interest in user tracking as it relates to ad targeting.

Now if this was about any other sector in the business world, the merging of the two dominating corporations in the field would almost assuredly bring about regulation, so why is the government still choosing to watch and see how the market will play out in all of this? Probably because the online advertising business is still considered new territory and there isn’t enough understanding of the practices to instill regulation, yet.

Mike Blumenthal created a very insightful post regarding the Local IYP market share values. In the article he poses his ultimate question almost immediately:

Does the IYP/online business directory market share matter or has the battle already been decided? Has this category been relegated to just another niche search area where money can be made but market dominance is not possible?

Mike drills down on his comparison and discussion of the dominance of the Local Search stakeholders with some impressive number crunching that is worth taking a look.

So this brings us back to the crux of the problem, and the decision that businesses must make when considering their local advertising strategy. There are so many markets available for Local, but if the top 2 stakeholders control 70% percent of it, is it worth it to concentrate all of your advertising budget on a piece of the remaining 30% share? This is especially important if your strategy is focused so narrowly that it ignores the components needed to be at the top if its game in the larger local markets, such as Google and Yahoo.

While companies ranking the top Local markets seem to make impressive lists, it doesn’t really matter if your Local Market choice comes in third if that third piece of the pie is only a crumb.

While a growing niche market is turning to sites like Yelp! For Local reviews and recommendations, simply promoting your business on sites like this will not push you to the top of the common Google or Yahoo searches.

Again the wisest choice for your Local Advertising strategy is to look into your specific market and make the choices that are going to serve you best. While it may seem focused to drive your advertising budget towards one or two specific Local advertising markets, loosing sight of the ‘Big Guys’ will not be to your advantage.

The fashion industry has had a love/hate affair with the internet for some time now.

The first factor is that fashion was traditionally a print business. Consumers poured through magazines to get photos of the latest fashion trends. What the models were wearing, what the celebrities were wearing, all it was visual and all of it was in print. The fashion industry was firmly in bed with the print industry. But times change.

Along came the internet, and with it, easy and almost instantaneous access to photos of what celebrities and models were wearing. The fashion print industry took a nose-dive, but the fashion industry itself, stores, outlets, etc., took off.

The story went a little like this:

1. Consumer saw a brilliant new gown on Celeb. A.
2. Consumer searched internet for designer
3. Consumer purchased the gown (or a knock-off) off the internet

But the story didn’t end there:

4. Consumer received gown and it either didn’t fit, or just wasn’t right for them once it was actually on
5. Consumer returned it

Fast forward a few years, and perceptive consumers are putting the fashion industry on the Local Search Marketing Map. How?

Like this:

1. Consumer sees a fabulous outfit on Celeb. A.
2. Consumer searches internet for designer
3. Consumer locates the nearest merchant selling the outfit using a local search
4. Consumer goes to the merchant to try on the outfit, and purchases it or buys another

The bottom line is this: Service providers aren’t the only ones reaping benefits from Local Online Advertising. The fashion industry is cozying up to Local Online Advertising because they provide the photos and the information, but local merchants provide the goods. Can the consumer purchase the clothing off the internet? Of course, but real fashionistas want to try the clothes on first.

As we discussed before, businesses are turning away from advertising and marketing using traditional media such as newspapers, television, and radio. Business owners are seeing their competition getting the edge by reaching a larger market share with online campaign using the same budget or less, and it just can’t be ignored any longer. It’s move on, or move out.

The current economic downturn is forcing consumers to research the best possible price for the best service, and the more consumers research businesses and services online, the more they are weeding out companies without an internet presence.

Robert Jaques at vnunet added his voice to the discussion on the internet’s increasingly large piece of the marketing and advertising pie.

Experts predict that internet advertising in the US will continue to “grow fast” in the face of an economic downturn that will force a reduction in overall ad spending.
IDC forecasts that current economic conditions will accelerate the transfer of marketing budgets from traditional to new media.
Internet advertising will grow about eight times as fast as advertising at large between 2008 and 2012, according to the analyst firm, while revenue will double to $51.1bn.
This growth means that the internet will go from the number five to the number two medium in just five years, making it bigger than newspapers, cable TV and broadcast TV and second only to direct marketing.

Robert also apparantly agrees with us that the online Video marketing boom will be one of the biggest factors in the general increase of online marketing.

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The advances and advantages of local mobile markets and GPS capability are moving
forward again. The past few years have seen advances that helped your customer
find you, literally, with mobile GPS. New appliations are coming now that turn
a 180 and help you find your customer and bring your physical business to them.

Digital Solid discusses:

The retailer (say, Starbuck’s) could aggregate cell phone data about your movements,
as well as everyone else’s who want the same services as you, and …
Anticipate through statistical means where to locate itself to fulfill those needs,
and …
Alert you via your cell phone where they are in real time (e.g., “We’re two blocks
away — care for your favorite beverage?”)
I didn’t expect this to happen overnight. In fact, two years was a pretty aggressive
time line in my estimation.

Therefore, I’m a little giddy to see the first part of the process being mapped
out and monetized. Check out the new Sense Networks product offering, for a peek
into the future of retailing that factors in predictive modeling of where customers
will be next.

Harvesting the low-hanging fruit, Sense Networks is focusing on helping find city
nightlife hot-spots. Its site explains how this product, Citysense, works:

Citysense is an innovative mobile application for local nightlife discovery and
social navigation, answering the question, “Where is everybody?”

Citysense shows the overall activity level of the city, top activity hotspots, and
places with unexpectedly high activity, all in real-time. Then it links to Yelp
and Google to show what venues are operating at those locations. Citysense is a
free demonstration of the Macrosense platform that everyone can enjoy.

I see this as the beginning of a location-free bank branch or coffee shop. Exciting
stuff!

The viability of marketing profits from live television has been in question for years. As time moves and technology improves, viewers, once chained to the chair and forced to sit through commercials, are now captains of their domain; using TiVo and DVR to skip advertisements and renting entire series on DVD, avoiding the promotions all together.

This makes companies, who traditionally advertised their local business on TV, very twitchy.

The situation grew even more dire for local advertising on live television when the 2008 statistics began to show that many viewers are embracing TV on the web, essentially downloading or streaming their favorite show on their computer…with nary an add in site.

emarketer.com has in interesting blog up on the online television trends.

“Unfortunately, while online users are viewing more content,” says Ms. von Abrams, “producers, broadcasters and advertisers are seeing little return on their online TV ventures.”
The proven formulas for making money from television content are under threat.
“Historically, broadcasters’ profits have depended on restricted access to their material—viewers had to tune in to a broadcaster-owned channel and watch advertising that covered the costs of program production, promotion and distribution,” says Ms. von Abrams. “Advertisers paid a lot to be seen in prime TV slots on these channels, and (until video recording arrived) viewers could not avoid seeing ads.”

Companies will be forced to add an online television advertising strategy to their previously successful local TV ad campaigns in order to compete. Those companies that build a strategy to embrace a new online local TV marketing campaign will be ahead of the game.

When consumers are searching for a new product or service, they are increasing turning to online to research the products and services before buying. In the case of very large products or labor-intensive services, however, the research inevitably comes down purchasing locally.

The question always remains the same… “Where can I purchase this from?”

If a consumer in Massachusetts is looking for a pool heater, for instance, they might research pool heaters and prices to have a solid knowledge base of what they are looking for and what the common costs will be, however they will still want to purchase the pool heater locally and have it installed. A search on pool heaters will bring up companies from all over the country. Companies from Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and many national businesses will be competing for top spots on the search engines, but that will not help the consumer connect with what they really want; a local company. Your company.

The fact is that most small, local businesses are not getting the top hits on search engines, and so perceptive consumers are turning more towards local internet searches for the closest business that is selling the product they want.
Finding a service company in Florida will not help a potential customer in Massachusettes. Customers are online, searching for your business, so give them a break and help them find you.

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Here’s another reason to use Facebook. But there is more to online advertising than merely filling out a Facebook profile. One of the things that makes Facebook such a great place to network and advertise your local business is its local networks that you can join. Through those you can meet other local people to do business with.

But services like Yell adding applications for Facebook make it even better. Here’s what I like about this app:

Yell advertisers will get more in-depth exposure in the app than non-advertisers, but all the activity happens within Facebook.

But I like Greg Sterling’s recommendations as well:

The application only works for Yell coverage areas. In my opinion, the company would do well to either duplicate this for its Yellowbook subsidiary or combine the applications so that it offers US-UK coverage.

A mobile component (send to mobile) would be welcome as well.

Even without these applications, if you do business in a Yell coverage area then you’ll have a leg up on your competition by advertising with the service through its Facebook application. Not that Citysearch and Superpages also have Facebook networking tools that allow you to reach out to new customers and they’re available in the U.S. If you really want to make the most of apps like these, advertise within them and do your own outside-app networking and advertising as a “doubling up” effort.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) report, display advertising online is increasing. In fact, online advertising in general is improving despite recessionary concerns.

Display advertising is up 34% according to the report. Classified advertising is up 16%. All other statistics don’t look too bad either.

This is a good sign for all of us. It means that online advertising is growing, which means online business must be growing. And I think rising oil prices might have something to do with this. People are driving less. That means they are spending more time online and that means more online business in general. This could very well continue for a good many years down the road. What small business owners - locally as well as global - need to think about doing at this juncture, is learning how to make the most of their online advertising opportunities.

If you are a local business that is trying to optimize your website locally to gain the most traffic from people in your area or because you do a lot of off line business locally and you want to have a website that reaches your local target market, should you put your advertising banners on other websites within your area? Generally, I’d say yes, but that’s not always the case. Some times when you might NOT want to put your banner on other local websites are:

• When the website is your competition
• When the website is out of your niche
• If it serves a different demographic than you serve (for instance, you sell women’s clothes for ladies of size, but another website sells clothes for teen age boys)
• There is nothing to be gained from the added exposure

If you run a local travel website then you probably want to look at every opportunity you can to have your banner on other travel sites within your area. The local chamber of commerce may be a good place to get a banner link. The local visitor’s center and city hall may also be good places for links.

It all starts with the proper research. Is your target market local prospects or visitors from out of town? Whichever is the case, you probably want your banner on other local sites that cater to the same market, but not the other.

Specific keywords may not be as important for a local business as for other businesses, unless the keyword is a geographic place name. If your primary keyword is your local home town, for instance, then you might gain from having a banner link on another website outside of your niche whose primary keyword is the same place name, but if your keyword is “motorcycle sales” and you just happen to be located where you are but do business over long distances then geographical place names won’t matter as much.

When it comes to placing banner ads on other local websites online, you have to weigh the advantages to you and to your target market. Will it pay?

Greg Howlett stepped on some toes with his post about SEO being a dying industry. Of course, he was just repeating what Shoemoney said a day earlier. Nevertheless, I like what Howlett said in this paragraph:

I think, however, that you would be better served by largely forgetting about SEO and focusing instead on building your brand.

That’s essentially what Shoemoney said too. Here’s a sentence buried within the meat of his post:

I don’t think anyone can argue that core SEO has gotten less valuable over the years and I see that trend continuing.

The overarching question is, are they right? And if so, what will this do for local search engine optimization?

Well, I do think that Shoemoney’s observation on SEO declining in value over the years is partially correct. It isn’t that it has declined in value per se, but that it has gotten more difficult to achieve for the average business. It is now more important to hire a professional SEO to help you rank better, but both Shoemoney and Howlett may have a point in that the current trend of hiring an SEO who strictly does technical SEO is going to fall by the wayside. If your SEO is not proficient in branding and marketing strategies then you might as well ditch him for someone who is because that is the future of SEO in general and local SEO in particular.

Branding has always been a core aspect of business marketing, whether we are talking local business or global business. Online, it’s even more important because people do not want to do business with someone they don’t know. You can have the best SEO in the world, but if you can’t built trust with your target market then your business will die. That’s where branding comes in. This principle is no less true if you operate a local business, but with local branding you have the added advantage of being able to draw your customers to your physical location to meet you face to face. Still, you’ll need to rely on branding to make that happen.

The future of local advertising online lies in your ability to create a brand that people will trust. SEO will just be a part of that branding process, though I don’t think that SEO will necessarily die out. It will simply be incorporated into the branding process. I think that’s what Greg Howlett meant with his follow-up post, and I can see the same the trending as well.

I found this to be rather interesting: Off line advertising giant Live Nation is partnering with online pay per click up-and-comer AdBrite to distribute local advertising online. The good news about this arrangement is webmasters no longer have to rely on Google and Yahoo! as revenue sources.

The idea is to advertising music venues through geo-targeting efforts. It makes a lot of sense because concert promoters plan a schedule for bands on tour, scheduling those bands to play in major cities around the world. If they can advertise their concerts through geo-targeted efforts online then they can be very effective in reaching their target market through local websites. Local website owners win because they can earn additional revenue through their websites.

Another encouraging thing about this arrangement is that AdBrite is successful in this endeavor, and I see nor reason why they shouldn’t be, then local advertising opportunities for webmasters who want to expand their PPC offerings could be developed through AdBrite. Currently, AdBrite is somewhat limited, but growing. I’m anxious to see what happens in the future.

Debra Mastaler asked a great question on her blog, Link Spiel:

what’s better at giving us the quick qualifying factor like the PageRank toolbar?

In other words, she wants to know if there is a resource that webmasters can turn to in order to find information on authority - a kind of one-size-fits-all way to determine which sites are the greatest authorities within their niche. Then she recommends Myriad Search.

I hadn’t heard of Myriad Search until I read Link Spiel’s post on it. Then I tried it out. It seems a bit limited, but it does do what it promises to do and deliver results from the four top search engines for a particular key phrase. It looks like a good tool for competitive research.

Just for giggles, I performed a search for “Gettysburg Pennsylvania.” I wanted to try the local angle to see what would happen. You can see the results of that search here.

If I were truly interested in building a website to search the local market of Gettysburg Pennsylvania and wanted to use that place name as my primary keyword then this search for that key phrase is very telling. Here’s what I see:

• The most authoritative site for that key phrase is www.gettysburg.com. Not surprising.
• The most authoritative site for my key phrase is No. 1 on 3 of the top 4 search engines.
• It is also No. 2 on the fourth search engine (Yahoo!).
• The second most authoritative site for the local place name I’m interested in is a government website (the National Park Service) - very important to know that for competitive analysis!
• The Gettysburg Welcome Center’s website is the the third most authoritative site on the local key phrase.
• Also, GWCs website has only half the authority as the No. 1 most authoritative site - great information!
• Coming in below GWC are Gettysburg College, Wikipedia (who’d have thunk?), the local newspaper, and various nonprofits, tourism websites, and local businesses.

Now I know what the competitive landscape is for my key search term. But what if I wanted to compete locally for the key phrase “auto mechanic?”

Well, I tried using my first key phrase along with “auto mechanic,” putting both key phrases in quotes and all I got back was a bunch of useless websites. So let’s try it without the quotes. Here are the results of that search.

I can see who the most authoritative site in Gettysburg for the term “auto mechanic.” It truly is a competitor and I know where he ranks in each of the search engines. It doesn’t look like any of my other competitors are even close. After Mike’s Towing and Recovery, it’s government websites and the Chamber of Commerce of Gettysburg. The next real competitor is an About Us page for Eagle Software, which makes software for auto shops. It looks like I have an in here if I was an auto mechanic in Gettysburg.

So you can see how useful this tool is for doing competitive research at the local level. I hope you get some use of it.