Author: John Jantsch / Source: Duct Tape Marketing < All Articles Transcript provided by Verbatim Transcription Services Back to P
Transcript provided by Verbatim Transcription Services
Transcript
John: If you own a local business and are trying to attract local clients you must listen to this interview David Mihm, check it out.
This episode of the Duct Tape marketing podcast is brought to you by Active Campaign. This is really my new go-to CRM, ESP, marketing automation, really low cost. Any size business can get into it, starting at like $19 a month, you can keep track of your clients, you can see who is visiting your websites, you can follow-up based on behavior. Check out Active Campaign, there will be a link in the show notes but it’s ducttape.me/dtmactive.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Mihm, he’s a digital marketing expert for small businesses, founder of getlisted.org, a company he sold to Moz about five-six years ago, and he’s also co-founder of the local university conference series and currently he’s got a new thing going, start-up called Tidings, which I’m going to butcher the description but he can come back and tell you more.So David thanks for joining me. How’s that?
David: That’s pretty good. Thanks John. Great to be with you again and great to be with your audience again.
John: So I guess I’ll start off with because you write so much about local digital marketing, local search stuff. What’s going on right now in local that we need to know about that you don’t think enough people are aware of or are talking about?
David: Yup. So I’d say there are two or three things that come to mind. In fact I was actually tweeting with a few people, both yesterday and this morning about this exact topic. I would say that the first thing is that at a broad level, Google is essentially trying to keep as many people on the Google SERP as they can, that’s the Google results page. And so they are devouring click-throughs that used to go to either a small business website or even a big brand website that might have a local presence. A lot of that activity is just staying on the Google SERP right now and I think that’s a big change in the last two or three years that not enough — certainly not enough businesses and even not enough marketers are really aware of.
John: Yeah there’s almost not a question that you can ask Google right now that they don’t have the answer right there in the knowledge box right?
David: That’s exactly right and you know the — not only are they getting better at answering questions with knowledge boxes instead of websites but the amount of information and the kind of information they’re presenting there is really robust and especially for local businesses. I mean if you look at some of the later, more recently features that they’ve released are things like the hours that a business is busy versus empty, so that if you’re on a busy schedule you know hey maybe I should go to this pizza joint in the lunch hour I should wait until 3 o’clock when things have died down a little bit. They’re pulling in things like critical reviews so if a business is on [00:03:32] or Eater or some of these other — depending on your industry you know maybe it’s something like Superlawyers if you’re a lawyer. They’re pulling in the list of human curated list of successful local businesses and showing those right in the knowledge panel. So kind of as much information as you want to know about a business they’re trying to present on the Google SERP, which you know as a small business you may still be getting those customers but I think from a website standpoint, your website is really — it’s becoming a way inform Google about your business but not necessarily something that as many customers are seeing these days.
John: Yeah so that leads me to my next question where’s the best place to hide a dead body?
David: [Laughter]
John: It’s the second listing on page one.
David: Okay. Very good. Yes. For sure and especially if you think about you know, so many local searches are actually mobile and in an industry like food and beverage or even healthcare, two out of three or three out of four of those searches are happening on mobile devices. And sure enough, I mean the second listing on Google on a mobile phone is often four or five scrolls down your phone and so if you’re not — as I’ve been saying for the last six months or so it used to be if you’re not on page one of Google you’re invisible, well now it’s like almost exactly what you just said if you’re not number one in Google you might be invisible because of how much space these knowledge boxes and knowledge panels are eating.
John: And where does voice search go with that? What results are you getting from voice search?
David: That’s exactly right and I think voice is — it’s certainly informing a lot of the product decisions that Google is making. I mean voice search in our car and we don’t have access to a screen, even if we do have access to a screen that’s not something Google wants to distract people from driving right? And so the number of results they can “show” or read back to you is inherently limited by that form factor. And so I think you’re starting to see — it’s not like Google is using a different algorithm for desktop, for mobile, for voice, they’re using the same algorithm so you’re starting to see the same kinds of interfaces that you might see happening in voice search also happening on mobile and desktop.
John: What do you think about the trend to blend organic and paid. You know you’re seeing it in the — what do we call that thing now, the three pack?
David: Sure. Yeah.
John: And we’re also seeing an ad that has reviews in it and all kinds of snippets in it now an extension. Is there going to be a point where we can’t tell the different?
David: Yeah I mean I think it’s pretty — the line is getting pretty blurry that’s for sure and I think you’re right. I assume you’re talking about what Google calls home services ads? Where you have a — in most cases a manual application process in order to get included in the set of business that are eligible for these home services ads but if you look at the interface that’s presented I mean it looks almost exactly the same as the three pack and so from a consumer’s perspective they don’t necessarily know that these businesses have paid to get in there and certainly given where it’s positioned on the page, number one, you know I have to think those things are devouring a lot of clicks in the markets where there are currently piloting it in San Francisco and San Diego.
So I think that that’s one area where we’re seeing Google — again as you said blending the natural or organic results with paid results and they’ve been doing this in a lot of different industries as well. I think over the years the Google hotel finder has eaten a ton of organic traffic that’s now part of a — sort of a paid inclusion product. They’ve done insurance comparisons, they’ve done local inventory ads for car dealers. So they’ve definitely been experimenting in a lot of different industries and I think it’s only a matter of time before these kinds of hybrid ad units are rolled out across almost every industry and almost every metro area so I think it’s definitely something to pay attention to.
John: Well I’ve even seen — I can’t remember what the search was or where but I’ve even seen some three packs with one paid, two organic.
David: Yep. That’s something they’ve just rolled out. In fact Hawkings who — brilliant local search marketer just started her new business Sterling Sky, she actually tweeted a great example the other day, a screenshot of a search where a competitor is advertising on another small businesses name and actually showing in the three pack which is kind of for that business, a specific what we would call a recovery search for a specific business and so it’s kind of amazing that Google is allowing these kinds of things to happen but absolutely, they’re just blending in — they’re definitely blurring the line between paid and organic as much as they can get away with.
John: Do we both optimizing for the three pack anymore? Or has proximity pretty much taken that away?
David: Yeah I disagree with the whole proximity premise. It’s certainly important right I mean it’s certainly — you have to be close enough to a given searcher for Google to consider your business relevant but I think there’s plenty of other ways that Google’s evaluating businesses these days and the three pack certainly still has tons and tons of value. I mean I’m not really consulting that much anymore but I still have access to a lot of analytics from former clients and I see the visibility they’re getting from three packs and from maps results as provided by the Google my business analytics. They’re still getting a phenomenal number of impressions and click-throughs and interactions from customers. It’s certainly not something that I’m encouraging anyone to kind of give up on organic search or give up on local search, I just think that increasingly the number of winners have been decreasing and as you said Google is kind of blending more paid ads means fewer organic clicks so I think it’s just — until when — well you’ve been in this business longer than I have but when I go stated in the late 2000’s you know local SEO was a phenomenally — just a phenomenally positive ROI. It was very little effort and huge upside and I think it’s gotten much…
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