While using the Google NZ and Google AU search engines today I noticed the preferences link had disappeared from its usual location to the right of the basic search box. It was replaced by a new Search Settings link at the top right. Here is the new home page:
Compare it with the Google.com home page:
Nothing major, but we get Groups, while the global version gets Shopping.
Saw via the Kelsey Group blog that the New Zealand Yellow™ publishers have asked Tradesmen Direct (TD) to remove a claim on their website that it is the largest directory of tradespersons in NZ.
TD claims to have 18,000 trades listings, whereas Yellow claims to have more than 10,000 listings for builders alone, never mind electricians, plasterers and other tradespeople.
Details: Nelson Mail
It appears that TD has removed that claim from the website, or it’s well hidden, but I was surprised that Yellow even bothered to contact TD. It probably gave free publicity to TD.
Speaking from an SEO perspective, Yellow™ has nothing to worry about from TD. Barely 1000 pages have been indexed and none of my test searches (google.co.nz, pages from NZ, but done in Australia) had TD above Yellow.
The search for Manukau car valet was great, with four Yellow results in the top 20. TD had a valid result but it was at #67.
Yellow fared well with Lower Hutt pest control, with five results. TD had none in the top 100.
I next tried a couple of heartland searches, for TD is based in Nelson and Tahunanui is nearby, hence Tahunanui plumber. Yellow had six results (!) in the top 20 – two from its main www domain, two from a duplicate www2 subdomain and two from its maps domain. If you can accept that gasfitters are usually qualified plumbers (?) then all its results were on target. A TD result was much lower but it was the home page and thus not a relevant page.
Nelson plasterer would surely be a cinch for TD, I thought. No cigar for the first 100 results. Yellow and its three subdomains (www, www2 and maps) were there.
Nelson carpenter was a disappointment for both. Yellow had a result at #90, but TD had none.
The search for East Tamaki carpenter was interesting. Google picked two results for Yellow for unrelated businesses (Steel processing and Industrial fasteners) located on Carpenter Road, East Tamaki, not actual carpenters. TD didn’t show in the first 100 results. However, on the TD site, the same search produced two results for unrelated headings (Sheet metal engineers and Forwarders):
The Yellow site had no problem in finding five real carpenters in East Tamaki.
Of course, TD’s PHPMyDirectory script is no match for Yellow’s industrial strength platform powered by Local Matters.
Christchurch fencing contractor had the usual six results for Yellow but none for TD. I had had enough of testing by this stage.
Businesses contemplating advertising in an Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) or business directory should take the time to search for their own category (heading) in Google and a few other related categories to see if pages from the IYP rank in the top 20 results. New IYPs need to get SEO right from the get go if they are to get anywhere. I use the PHPMyDirectory script for a couple of free directories and can vouch that it is not optimised out of the box. It needs tweaks.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9815bvJrKw[/youtube]
It’s also about apples and oranges. Mature businesses such as Yellow can provide wider reach than just the website channel – print, voice, mobile and now the Sheep Launcher-beating Yellow iPhone app!
My colleague Wayne Aspland has written a concise summary of the 34-page Sensis® e-Business Report, which was just released. Read his post, entitled Sensis® e-Business Report: Half of Australia’s young adults have used the mobile Internet.
Here are some insights from the report:
The last point is very interesting for Yellow Pages® advertisers, particularly when you see the factoid in Wayne’s post that mobile usage almost tripled in one year.
Greg Sterling’s blog has a guest post by Alex Algard, CEO of whitepages.com, which begins with a thought-provoking statement:
The Right Course: Opt-In for White Pages and Opt-Out for Yellow Pages
His website has launched BanThePhoneBook.org, because:
We at WhitePages are passionate about building awareness of the waste created by the white pages books and providing them only on an opt-in basis, but I think it would be a mistake to draw similar conclusions for the yellow pages.
Call me cynical, but people who are passionate about the environment tackle the core issues, not specific products. They chain themselves to logging equipment or camp atop tall trees that are about to be felled. They join GreenPeace and similar bodies. Perhaps Alex does all that as well. 
The whitepages.com blog contains statements such as:
The environmental impact and economic costs are mind-boggling: WhitePages estimates that 5M trees need to be harvested each year to print ~147M white pages phone books. And the costs to recycle these books each year costs taxpayers an estimated $17M. (Are you kidding? Any way you look at it these estimates, the numbers are absolutely staggering.)
and
Consumers are unaware of the environmental waste of printing the WPPB: When asked if they knew that millions of trees are cut down each year to print the WPPB each year, 74% of survey respondents answered ‘No’. And Less than 16% recycle their old books (that’s nuts).
Quite rightly, one of the comments came from Ken Clark, a consultant to the Yellow Pages industry in the US. He questioned the above figures and pointed to an eye-opening, well-illustrated article about how paper used for US directories is made by NPI – no trees are cut down expressly to make directories. Ken says that the paper is made from four ingredients:
It’s great to support online services (it pays my bills), but singling out specific print products to “ban” and setting up a website to that end only fools the gullible or the ignorant. If I surveyed consumers and asked questions based on made-up facts, of course I will get the answers I want. Not everyone uses the Internet for everything, even if the stats show that almost every home is connected to the Internet.
Many directory company websites have information about recycling and links to authoritative sites on the subject. My employer’s site is no exception and I was a bit surprised to see them mention that some people use the directories to prop up monitors. It’s no wonder that the spine also carries advertising!
In many First World countries, the printed White Pages are delivered to every household because the law requires it. These books contain essential information that citizens may need in an emergency, such as poisons, first aid, life lines, etc — at least in Australia. Check yours before you chuck it out and blog about it.
While discussing the previous post, SEO ranking of US IYPs across 274 cities, Chris Silver Smith pointed out that Americans are not likely to specify the state abbreviation when searching locally, unless the location name occurs in many parts of the US, e.g. Springfield. So I ran a quick check for (location) divorce attorney across the 274 localities. Here is the result:
Superpages.com improved in the higher ranked results. To save you from opening the earlier post, here is the earlier check with the abbreviated state inserted, e.g. Salinas CA divorce attorney.
For Superpages.com there isn’t much difference in the weighted score; however, for the other sites there are slight differences in positions or they fall out completely.
I did a Bing check as well, which shows good rankings for IYPs not listed above. I’ll upload it soon.
As the in-house SEO for the Aussie Yellow Pages® Online I follow the local search scene, such as it is, but I rely on the writings of North Americans for detailed analyses of US IYPs.
For example, Greg Sterling. Back in 2007 he wrote Using IYPs as an SEO Strategy, where he wrote about the Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) being a proxy for search engine visibility through good SEO. In the comments below that post, Chris Silver Smith writes about his time as SEO for Superpages.com and some of the considerations for Google/Yahoo/Bing SEO for IYPs. Next, David Mihm who specialises in Local SEO.
Another local search specialist is Andrew Shotland, who has just published IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009. This article was picked up in my alert for Kelsey Group Blog. Andrew’s rankings intrigued me. I had not heard of some of the IYPs he mentioned – not surprising when they don’t appear high in searches.
I have been checking mostly Australian/New Zealand/European IYPs for signs of SEO for two years, but Andrew’s article got me wondering whether you can assess the SEO of an IYP by checking 20 keyphrases across 20 cities. I am writing a review of Axandra IBP 11.5, so I thought this was a good exercise for my project. I didn’t want to replicate the whole exercise both as a professional courtesy and through a lack of time (as well as personal relevance).
Usage is king
For any YP/IYP sale of an ad, usage is a crucial part of the offering. After all, advertisers pay for a listing because they expect consumers to find the listing, contact them, and finally buy. If consumers don’t use the directories, advertisers won’t renew.
Usability experts at an IYP work hard to make the site usable; this only matters if there are users, which is where marketing comes in. Traditional marketing and search marketing are equally important. Brand capital brings in the direct and bookmarked visits; SEO brings in search engine visits; PPC fills in the cracks, (unless you have the budget to cover every heading).
SEO at IYPs
SEO has been neglected at some IYPs, while some actually closed their front doors to the search engines in the early days. A handful have embraced SEO with gusto (and succeeded), as can be seen in Andrew’s analysis.
A reality that some IYPs face is not appreciated by some commentators; namely, there isn’t a shortage of SEO know-how but there are limited resources to apply that knowledge. I haven’t looked around, but I suspect that a typical, self-respecting IYP is not a LAMP machine sitting under someone’s desk.
Regardless of the platform, IYP developers are usually busy with ongoing feature enhancements, bug fixes, etc and use some respected testing and deployment methodology. This sometimes delays implementing the “obvious” SEO tactic that others are eager to point out. The SEO can’t walk in and ask for an edit to robots.txt, for example, and get it done on the spot.
Scope of the tests
I have been running fortnightly ranking checks of our own top 100 headings across two metros, giving me 248 keyphrases. Why 100 headings (categories)? It’s a round number and as we have over 2700 of them, I monitor only the most valuable ones. It’s good to compare ranking trends with organic traffic measured internally. But this post is not about the Aussie IYPs, so back to the US.
“Valuable categories” – what does that mean to an IYP? Lots of different things, such as:
Inside an IYP, different people might have different lists of valuable categories. The retention manager monitors churn categories; the PPC manager needs to know which categories need more traffic, because they aren’t getting organic traffic; the sales managers want to know where traffic is going to, so that they can sell to those niches; and so on.
Take, for example, restaurants or pizza. In some geos, you can’t sell them an IYP package easily because they are always full and are price sensitive. They get a free listing, anyway, but the ones who take out a display ad reap the benefit of increased visibility. The food categories usually get among the highest number of searches at the large IYPs, SEO or no SEO, so it’s not a priority area for me.
For my IBP review I decided to run four sample tests across 28 US IYPs:
I say tomahto, you say tomato
I chose four keyphrases:
One has to be careful when choosing keyphrases for a test. The larger the IYP, chances are that they have a formal approach to taxonomy. Sometimes, this language is not conducive to SEO because ordinary folks don’t use formal language in a Google search.
Using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to count instances of searches can help. For example, last month in the US, more people used the word “attorney” than “lawyer”. I first opted for “lawyer” for the heck of it (then I tested both).
Breadth of the tests
I wouldn’t be happy testing just the top 20 metros because local search is spread over all suburbs (cities) and that some categories are intrinsically hyper-local, e.g. doctors. I would not do a Google search for Melbourne doctors if I had just moved to this city and wanted one close to my home.
Methodology
The US Census Bureau has a handy list of 274 cities/regions with a population greater than 100,000 people. I chose this list to conduct my tests. One of the flaws in this approach is that some IYPs that are tied to print directories do not cover every part of the US, so including them in a national analysis might be unfair. Therefore, I am not presenting a set of national rankings here. I used the same weighting factor as did Andrew, namely, a #1 ranking is worth 10 points, #2 is worth 9 points and so on. (One could argue about this but it’s fine for this purpose.) I am running the tests on google.com (not .au) from Australia, so there will be some variations compared to tests run in each of the 274 localities.
IYP Rankings Test 1: Dentist
This is a list of keyphrases such as Abilene TX dentist, Boston MA dentist etc for the top 274 localities.
The table above shows ranking instances in the left half; for example, Superpages has 113 #1 placements in the Google SERPs; 24 #2 placements, and so on. In the right half you see the weighted scores – 113 x 10 = 1130, 24 x 9 = 216 and so forth.
IYP Rankings Test 2: Divorce Lawyer
This is a list of keyphrases such as Jackson MS divorce lawyer, Fayetteville NC divorce lawyer, etc for the top 274 localities.
The rankings for this keyphrase set are quite different. Superpages reigns supreme, but IAF.net ranks #2, not second last as per the first test.
IYP Rankings Test 3: Divorce Attorney
This is a list of keyphrases such as Peoria AZ divorce attorney, Fayetteville NC divorce attorney, etc for the top 274 localities. (Yes, Virginia, there is a Peoria in Arizona – I didn’t know this before.)
IAF.net is again in second place after Superpages.com. Magicyellow.com is nowhere for “attorney” but seems to be doing well for “lawyer”. The rest are more or less in similar positions as in the previous test.
IYP Rankings Test 4: Denver Suburbs Doctor
I noted a comment made by Chris Silver Smith on the post referenced at the start of this post:
While Superpages.com is nationwide, they’re not the dominant printed directory provider in every market, and the websites of the dominant provider often have higher traffic levels than other sites for that area. For instance, I’ve seen a number of stats showing that Dex directories (owned by R.H. Donnelley) dominate online yellow pages market share for cities in Colorado where their print directories are dominant.
So I found a list of 92 neighbourhoods in Denver, CO and chose a very local service provider that I’d expect to find in each residential area for sure – doctors. This would give me a feel for the depth of coverage within a major metro.
Boy oh boy. Superpages isn’t dominant here but CitySearch and YellowBook are.
Not Tested
I did not test rankings in Yahoo and Bing. I lie. I started to check the keyphrases across all three engines but IBP kept failing, but it was fine with Google on its own. Something to pass on to the vendor.
Although I have the data, I didn’t have the inclination to test the reverse, namely, for a given locality, which IYPs rank high, or rank at all? For example, not one of the IYPs rank in the top 10 for Birmingham AL divorce attorney, Burbank CA divorce attorney and 49 other localities. Yellowpages.latimes.com ranked high for the Burbank entry, but it wasn’t in my list of IYPs. In this niche, law firms and verticals have the top spots.
It’s well and good to see which IYPs rank high in Google, but do they have market share in the same proportions? I don’t have access to Hitwise USA stats, so compete.com will have to do.
Click the image above to see a larger version.
The fifth site here is IAF.net. According to this tool, Citysearch.com (green line) is declining in visits and Yelp.com (orange line) has just caught up. Yahoo Local (red line) is climbing, while Superpages is slightly declining – it’s the blue line.
Why some rank high
Across my limited testing (and Andrew’s analysis), superpages.com does rank high consistently in the organic search results. Whatever magic Chris cooked up during his tenure there, it’s still working. Without probing too deep or giving away their secrets, here is what I see:
Why some rankings suck don’t do well
I’m not naming names, but some of the IYPs not ranking well (or at all) show some of the following shortcomings:
Conclusion
My conclusion is that there isn’t a simple way to rank the US IYPs unless one could check every keyphrase for every heading across every locality. Google doesn’t like the use of automated ranking checkers and the sheer number of possible keyphrases makes this an unrealistic project.
For example, IAF.net is last in Andrew’s list but in my limited testing it is in second spot within a niche. Perhaps IAF concentrates on selling to the legal category. Too many unknowns for my liking.
From the IYP’s viewpoint, there’s not much point ranking well in headings where it’s difficult to sell a paid listing. They know their valuable headings and they’re unlikely to tell others, but they won’t be identical.
What is certain is that consumers will use Google and other engines (that’s going to be just Bing soon), so it is imperative for IYP business profile pages to appear in those search results. Getting the Google user to click through to the IYP is the goal, for this reinforces the value message. Will they recall whether they found the advertiser “in Google” or “in the Yellow Pages”? There’s a little challenge.
I played with the Microsoft Windows 7 beta and I am comfortable enough to make the switch from Windows XP Pro. The RTM is out and I am lucky enough to get a copy.
36 hours later I am still downloading Win 7 from the Asia server at about 35 KBit/s on a 1500/256 ADSL connection. 3 hours left to complete. Never mind.
In the meantime, I am thinking about whether I can risk switching from Win XP to Win7 as my primary OS.
Are any of you ready to do that? If you are, how are you addressing:
I appreciate that the answer is “it depends on whether a particular app has been updated for Vista/Win7” but I am talking about the ones you need to work immediately, e.g. Outlook sync, AV and backups.
Also note – by “you” and “I”, I am really thinking about the early adopters in October – the ones who don’t have MSDN/TechNet or journalist connections, or are not particularly loyal to one vendor.
My initial approach will be to install Windows 7 on a separate drive and add my current applications to it. I know the older apps will probably not work and that the brand name apps might get a free update or not work at all. But I am curious to see if all the little freeware apps I have collected will still work.
How are you planning to make the move to Windows 7?