Google Local To Charge For Highlighted Listings

In Googles great effort to find ways to generate more money outside of their adwords and adsense programs they have found a way to generate $25 monthly.  Yes, its true Google wants to offer you a listing enhancement for your Google Local listing.  Here is how I found out….

A few weeks back I was checking my local listings I keep for clients and saw an ad for it there smack in the middle of the page.  Below is a screen shot of the listing.

I didn’t really bother with it because it didn’t look like something that would make much difference.  Well, yesterday my client in San Jose called and said Google called me and said that they wanted to sell me a listing on Google Maps.  I said “I promise you weren’t speaking to Google”.  Knowing the market and how much he gets solicited I knew he was taking the bait for some scam.  Google only speaks to high end Google Adwords clients as far as I am aware.  My client convinced me to call him and had an extension and a name.  I thought I was going to bust someone lying but sure enough it was Google.  Really, Google hired sales people to call on local owner verified listing?  Its odd but ok, I am listening.  I spent about 30 minutes on the phone with him gathering as much info as I could but I could tell he didn’t have much.

Here is what I learned…..San Jose CA and Houston TX are the only cities with this available to them.  You have to have a owner verified account and a certain amount of impressions.  My client has over 1800 impressions on his Google Local Listing.  You can image how long it took me to ask “can I have it for my business?” and he said “I am sorry it is only available in two markets”.  He did say it was coming soon and that they have a plan to roll it out nationally but he was not included in that plan so he did not know when.

I asked him for stats on click through rates and if they are increasing and he said “I am not sure we are planning on going over that after the program is 60 days old.  They obviously don’t want to release any data yet.

My theory is…If they have hired sales people then they are serious about this and that they want this to become the standard for all listings.  This would mean everyone would be paying $25 and no one would stand out.

Non the less it is interesting and I believe I will ask my client to be a test dummy for this project.  I normally test everything before passing it over but I obviously can’t get it.

Ryan’s Christmas Story

Its midnight on Christmas, I am up all alone..Presents are wrapped and stockings are stuffed, only the light from the Christmas tree glows. ESPN turned way down low, this is the best time of the year. I can picture my daughters face now, big ole smile with no teeth and a glare in her eye..clapping her hands from the joy inside. I wouldn’t trade my life for a million bucks..I’m more excited now then I ever was.  I can’t sleep just thinking of the morning…this is the first Christmas I don’t matter.  Jesus, your gift to me was Evie Grace and that alone cannot be replaced with ps2′s or wii’s but time with family is whats most important to me.

Merry Christmas!

Are Meta Keywords Dead For Real?

Apparently at the SMX convention Yahoo casually explained they didn’t use meta keywords at all in their search.  So does anyone?  Yes, a few of the smaller search engines that have their own algorithm but lets face it, if the big three Google, Bing, and Yahoo don’t use them is it worth the time to build them out? NO!  I believe the day of keywords on each page of a site in the meta section is dead.  This is a call for more creativity with keywords in your content.  I believe this is a good move if it was indeed a recent move by Yahoo.  The way it was explained they may not have been counting on meta keywords for some time.  Oh, well at least we know now and we can move on.  No more meta keywords….hopefully EVER!

Watch Video: Video about Yahoo not using meta keywords

Great Article I Wanted To Share

So everyday I wake up and read about search, web design, and online marketing.  I don’t do this very often but I came across an article about design I would like to share.  This article explains a lot of what I tell my clients about usability and navigation.  This article was written by Kim Krause Berg.

http://searchengineland.com/want-better-web-design-watch-real-users-26958

Social Media’s Impact On Business

I recently wrote a blog about how to use social media as a business tool offering the do’s and don’ts of social media marketing. So now I want to share with you just how big this is. To fully wrap your head around what social media is and how it is changing the market place you need to fully understand the impact social media is having in people’s lives. People now check their social media sites more than their email. What does that mean? Social media has become their means of communication.

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