RSS Ray recently had the opportunity to ask search industry magazine publisher Boris Mordkovich some questions about how search marketing can work for locally-based businesses.

As founder and publisher of Search Marketing Standard , Boris has been directly involved in online marketing for several years. Through his publication’s work in providing quality search marketing articles, tips and interviews, Boris has put himself at the forefront of online marketing knowledge.
In addition to publishing Search Marketing Standard, Boris is co-founder and director of operations for MordComm, Inc . His company is responsible for several tools used by internet marketers regularly, including AdWatcher , a tool for tracking and managing ad campaigns, and Pay Per Click Universe , a popular information portal for search marketers.

-How did you get started in the field of search marketing?

My search marketing background started off, as for many people in the industry, by accident. A number of years ago, I was running a web hosting company when GoTo.com (later Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing) first launched. Although everybody was saying that their pay-per-click concept would never work, as people would not search paid listings, we decided to give them a shot and got terrific results for our hosting company.

Fast forward a few years, and I got so interested and involved in the search marketing industry that I eventually sold the hosting business and began developing a service to help advertisers track the performance of their search marketing ads and detect and prevent fraudulent activity. After a year of R&D, AdWatcher.com debuted.

Luckily, it has gone all uphill from there. In the next few years, I co-authored a print book on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, our company launched another website for PPC advertisers at PayPerClickUniverse.com, as well as a bid management service at AdScientist.com. Our plan was to develop a suite of services and informational sites to help others get involved in search marketing.

All of that eventually led up to the magazine.

-What was the motivation behind starting your magazine?

In late 2005, I was approached by a colleague who was working as an SEM consultant for a print wedding magazine, and he proposed the idea of a print publication for the search marketing industry. Although our experience with print was minimal, I liked the idea of doing a print publication. Plus, no one else was targeting that space in such a fashion, so we saw potential and decided to give the idea a go. We hired him as the editor-in-chief, recruited a terrific designer and half a year later, the first issue came out.

In terms of motivation, there were a few different factors involved.

First of all, we realized that it would be very difficult to launch a regular website or a blog and compete with the hundreds of existing ones that cover the industry so well. In order for us to develop an audience, we had to do something unique and something that hasn’t been done before. Launching the magazine allowed us to gather an audience of over 50,000 readers in just a little over a year.

Second, from personal experience I know that many marketers and business owners struggle to keep on top of all the latest developments in the industry. The useful and practical tidbits of information that they could actually use to enhance their business are spread over hundreds of blogs and thousands of articles. We felt we could do a better job at covering emerging trends and offering well-researched and well-edited commentary and insights without overwhelming the reader.

And, if the feedback is any indicator, we have been able to do just that. And that’s the biggest motivation one can ask for.

-How is your magazine different from other information resources people have available to them about search marketing, especially more what some may consider more timely information delivered via blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds?

I strongly feel that we are not competing directly against each other, but rather each resource tends to complement what the others offer.

Blogs are great because they offer instant information, news reporting, and various viewpoints. I personally subscribe to over a hundred blogs that I read on a daily basis to stay on top of the latest developments. We also have a blog on our website where several authors contribute on a daily basis.

I am also realistic enough to realize that blogs, podcasts, and RSS feeds have us beat in terms of delivering information instantly. However, with print, we are able to do something different.

With print, we are able to select a topic that we feel is practical and useful for our readers and spend the time and resources to research, write, and edit it to make it easy to understand and implement. We have top experts in the industry contribute to us on a regular basis to share their insights with our audience. And because they have a few months to research and write about the topic, and it goes through extensive editing, it turns out to be an excellent article truly worth reading.

Each issue contains solid articles with advice, strategies, and practical information that doesn’t get lost in press releases, news, and other content that’s not necessarily useful to the reader.

-Should local and regional businesses be advertising on search engines, or is that best left to national and international companies?

Local and regional businesses should most definitely advertise on search engines – more so now than ever before, as one huge trend in search is the move towards localized and personalized search. Consumers are moving away from traditional sources of local information, such as yellow pages and classifieds, and are accessing the same search engines they use for all kinds of different things to find local business listings. For example, according to a recent Nielsen/NetRatings study, 46% of the 2,866 surveyed reported using the web to find a local business within the previous 90 days.

-What kinds of local or regionalized businesses best benefit from geographically targeted paid search?

Anything and everything, really. Research indicates that people are increasingly investigating a potential purchase using online sources (seeking information on products, conducting competitive analyses, reading product reviews, etc.) to support a local purchase. Many products or services sought are almost inevitably local in nature – gardeners, home improvement sources, computer repair shops, hair stylists, etc. Even national or international franchise businesses, such as McDonalds or Burger King, offer products geared towards local consumption.

One key thing to remember, however, is that the major difference between local and general search engine marketing is that the goal of local is not just to bring people to your website, but rather get them to your actual front door where you can convert them into customers.

-Do people search using city names or zip codes for most of the information they are shopping for?

That is quite common. Increasingly, however, search engines try to guess the user’s location either based on their IP or on their profile information. For example, Google markets a free account you can use to easily access all of their services. Once you create that account profile, they use your geographic location to serve you local ads with Google search results.

Another approach that search engines are currently working on is using your search history to figure out your location. Here, if you typically search for things in Brooklyn, New York, the next time you search for something more general (such as an “attorney”), the search engine will try to provide you with results from the Brooklyn area.

-Is there any way I can determine the amount of search activity on Google within a local market for defined search terms prior to actually running a paid search campaign?

Tough question. It is definitely possible to search for keywords that contain your location on Google or Yahoo!, but it wouldn’t necessarily show the total search volume. Keep in mind that in addition to people searching for “x” service in “New York”, there are a lot of searchers who don’t input the actual location into their query, and the search engine simply uses its own data to determine it.

Furthermore, local search is not even entirely all about “searching” in the traditional way. For example, Google offers an option to create a local business ad that will be displayed when someone uses Google Maps to view your neighborhood. They also allow businesses to offer a discount coupon that the visitor can simply print out and redeem at your location.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, offers local listings for a flat fee. There is no bidding or keywords involved. Rather, they determine the fee based on your business category and the location. For many, this offers a simplified way of managing their local listings without the upkeep of managing traditional PPC-type listings.

All in all, you’ll find that there is a lot of merging of information, so that local ads are being displayed all over the place – regular results, maps, etc. This makes it pretty difficult to determine the potential volume without actually launching a campaign.

-Google only shows the number of impressions that were used within a given month for a search term. Is there any way to know the total number of impressions that resulted in someone clicking on an ad, including ads of other advertisers?

Unfortunately, no. Advertisers put a lot of effort into testing, optimizing, and improving their ads. And while they reap the rewards, they probably would not appreciate having all of their conversion data public for their competitors to see. After all, they are the ones that have spent the time and effort in coming up with that perfect ad.

However, do keep in mind that Google can estimate the amount of clicks you will receive from a certain keyword based on the keyword volume, your cost per click, competition, and so on. And that can provide you with quite a bit of insight into the campaign even before you launch it.

-What are some of the bigger mistakes you see local businesses making in their search marketing programs and how can they best be avoided?

The biggest mistake that we see is the “set it and forget it” type of thinking. Small, local businesses are usually so busy with other tasks that they simply set up the ads and just leave them on auto-pilot expecting them to convert. However, as with most things, that’s not enough. When a local business sets up the campaign, they need to do the following:

– Research all of the popular local advertising options, such as Google, Yahoo!, Local.com,
SuperPages.com, etc.
– Research all of the options each has to offer. The Google coupon system may not be their
most advertised feature, but it is a very effective tool that can influence a visitor to select you
over a competitor.
– Figure out whether your target audience lives exclusively in your area or could be visiting
from other areas. A restaurant or a night club might attract out-of-town visitors, while an
attorney or a car repair shop usually attracts locals, except for that emergency lawsuit or
brake failure.
– Spend time to research your keywords, develop your ads, and take advantage of all the
options a search engine has to offer.
– Develop a custom landing page for visitors. Remember that a visitor searching for local
information is interested in different things than someone searching for something to buy
online. The landing page should reflect that.
– Track and improve your performance. With the proliferation of affordable and effective ad
tracking services out there (shameless plug for our AdWatcher.com), there is no excuse not
to track the performance of your ads. And when you track, make sure to experiment with
new ads and new landing pages and always try to improve your conversion rates.

-What are some of the upcoming stories you are working on for the magazine?

It’s kind of ironic that you ask that because our next issue, Winter ’07, is actually focusing on the opposite of local search – international markets. The idea came from noting that a lot of advertisers are interested in expanding into markets outside of the United States, but aren’t really sure where to start.

Unfortunately, simply translating your website into another language such as French or Japanese is often not enough, because the search industry varies significantly in other countries. Google doesn’t dominate the market everywhere and, even where it is popular, there is a lot more to success in international markets than simply changing your ad account so your ads show up in search engines based in other countries.

For the upcoming issue, we recruited a number of local specialists from the UK, China, Russia, and Italy to give us an overview of the search advertising market in their own country and offer advice and resources for our readers on how to go after this market most effectively.

But that’s just the cover story. We will have a ton of strategies, trends, and advice for those businesses and marketers that simply want to improve their existing campaigns, as well.

-How can people subscribe to the magazine?

I’m very glad you asked. Typically, a subscription costs $15 per year, but we would like to give your readers a special deal – a one-year subscription to our magazine at no charge. Simply go to http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/free-subscription.html to sign up today.