Infoserve Group

The award-winning Hovis commercial about the boy going for a loaf of bread and journeying through the decades until he arrives back in the 21^st century began a nostalgic trend.

The cleverly reworked Milky Bar Kid and Persil Mum showing the commercials through the ages quickly followed.

Having discovered that nostalgia reinforces strong brands and sells products it won’t be long before others follow suit.

But this approach will not work for everyone, especially those companies overtaken by technology.

Take Yellow Pages for example. As brilliant and memorable as the commercials were, we are unlikely to hear the ‘Good Old Yellow Pages’ strapline being repeated.

Although it is accurate, as online marketing has all but consigned paper directories to the bin, Yellow Pages will not want to bring attention to the ‘old’ method of business search.

Re-running the cult JR Hartley commercial would only serve to demonstrate the time consuming method we once used. Today, Mr Hartley would not have to ring countless bookshops to ask if they had his book. A quick search on the internet and he would have found it in a couple of clicks.

Business marketing in paper directories was fairly straightforward in those days. Pay a lot of money for a large advertisement and the perception is that you are a successful and trustworthy company. The bigger the advertisement the more likely you were to be chosen.

The consumer of today is much savvier. They can do a lot more research about a company via online local search now. Not only can they find the product or service they need quickly but by clicking on enhanced listings in an online business directory or a well optimised website they can take a look at the company’s website and find out much more about them.

Mind you with Government statistics suggesting that nearly 50% of SMEs do not have a website, even though an effective one can be produced for less than £100, it demonstrates a lot of companies are still missing out on potential customers.

Perhaps some are still clinging on to listings in paper directories. But even Yellow Pages must have realised the writing was on the wall when they brought out the TV commercial of the small boy standing on one of their directories to kiss a girl. The pay off line explained that there were so many other uses for Yellow Pages than looking for a plumber to repair a leaky tap.

Having said that, one part of their marketing campaign still holds true today.

You can still ‘Let your fingers do the walking!’… Except now they are more likely to be using a keyboard rather than thumbing through a paper directory!

It’s clear to see that lately Google have been focusing on local search results, there are more and more businesses appearing for local search terms and the features of the Google Local Business Centre are increasing.

Now it appears that Google doesn’t want to stop there, they have been testing out Google Local Ads in San Diego and San Francisco, an example of how these look can be seen below.

It appears to be an extension of the Sponsored results that appear at the top of the Google search results. The impact of this means that organic listings for these types of searches are being pushed down the page, clearly showing Google’s intentions for Local Search.

Google Local Ads work in a similar way to Google Adwords, whereby you pay for the listing itself. The difference however is that you don’t  pay on a Cost Per Click basis, you pay a fee every month. This fee will vary depending on the competition for that keyword and for that area.

Google Local Ads will soon be released in the UK, you can find more information on it at the Google Local Ads page.

Infoserve Marketing Provide a FREE Google Local Guide which can be found here

Follow Infoserve on twitter for alerts on Google Local news.

With the vast majority of business searches now made online and the success of paper directory and traditional local newspaper advertising methods in decline, more and more companies are beginning to recognise the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) to help them improve the natural ranking of their website within the major search engines’ results pages (SERP’s).

In 2008 the number of local searches for goods and services performed online increased by 58%, reaching a total of 15.7 billion searches for the year, whilst total online searches for 2008 reached 137 billion and today that figure is higher still.

The search engines list over one billion websites, the majority of them fighting for the top positions in their industry sector. This makes it vital for online companies to employ the services of a search marketing expert to help potential customers find them on the internet. Very few searchers go beyond the first two pages in the results, often not even to page 2, and the need to rank prominently on page 1 has driven this demand.

The constant review of multiple websites ranking positions is incredibly labour intensive and so many companies choose to automate their search queries. This can - if done abusively - impose stress upon a search engines resources and result in a ban being imposed upon the IP address of the user.

Infoserve’s SEO strategy combines the use of search engine friendly querying tools, techniques used to make a website more accessible to the search engines and users and the constant review of a website’s performance in the SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) in order to increase the visibility of a website in major search engines.

One such tool is the Ranking Report Software by Caphyon, which has been developed to emulate a manual search, therefore saving the user the inconvienience of incurring a search engine’s wrath and being denied the service.

With the help of the Advanced Web Ranking Tool you can choose to track the ranking of multiple websites through over 1000 search engines and generate monthly reports making it easy to get a quick overview of the evolution of a particular website. The Advanced Web Ranking Tool’s project management system can manage hundreds of different site results at once, using scheduled updates to avoid the task of manually updating each individual project.

The Advanced Web Ranking Tool can also help with the all important task of keyword research, helping you to find the most used keywords that people use on a daily basis to find the products and services you are hoping to market. It helps you to research and analyse new keyword ideas, identify search trends and get more information on finding niche market related keywords, by bringing multiple keyword research tools together in order to make your research much easier and more accurate.

Another important aspect of a successful SEO campaign is link building. The search engines view good quality inbound links to your site from sites with related content as a recommendation of your website. The more relevant and authoritative inbound links your site has from other successful sites within your industry sector, the more relevant and authoritative the search engines will deem your site to be. Successful link building strategies are based on establishing your competitive position in the online marketplace that already exists around your specific industry sector.

So monitoring these links on a regular basis is crucial, and the Link Popularity Software by Caphyon is a great tool to help you keep track of your websites inbound links. You can utilise this tool to find out who is linking to your website and which keywords they are using to link to you, you can also check on your competitors websites and find out who is linking to them.

Being able to keep a tab of paid for links can also save you money, if a link is broken or has been taken down the Advanced Link Manager Tool will notify you, it can also tell if the page rank of a linking page has dropped giving you the opportunity to renegociate the cost of your link. The Advanced Link Manager Tool can also help with the difficult task of finding new link partners, the Potential Refferers Wizard allows you to search all of the available search engines, using advanced search criteria to look for future partners who you may wish to exchange links with, listing them in order of page rank. So you can choose to eliminate any low ranking websites from your list of potential link referrers.

Infoserve’s SEO capabilities have expanded rapidly with the help of such tools, giving their SEO experts more time to spend on the one aspect of SEO they have not yet developed a tool for - good, old fashioned, human analysis.