The study found that the utilization of local online advertising is hindered by confusion about the best tactics and traffic sources to use, and how to effectively measure the results and return on investment.

"The data shows that national advertisers clearly understand the Internet drives in-store sales and they’ve begun to integrate local into their marketing mix," said Greg Sterling, Principal of Sterling Market Intelligence.

"However, they’re all over the map in terms of traffic sources and success metrics; there’s a general absence of consistent tactics and understanding of best practices for local."

Close to half of the survey respondents said at least 25 percent of their in-store sales were driven by online marketing and over half reported using different messaging strategies for different geographic or local markets.

National advertisers are clearly trying to leverage local online advertising to increase local leads and drive sales, but this study shows they’re having a tough time figuring out what’s working," said Ed O’Keefe, VP of Performance Marketplaces at Marchex.

"The good news is that there are techniques and products available, such as business profile pages and call-tracking, to help advertisers drive local leads online and track effectiveness of their local online advertising efforts."
 

 Matt McGee

(Coverage of the Small Business Marketing Unleashed conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Keep an eye on WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.)

Matt McGee, the SEO manager at Marchex, pointed out that the main search engines tend to dominate local search, with Google being the winner.  Since you’re presumably already trying to make friends with Google, SEO factors should resolve themselves nicely.

Other local search issues to consider are your business’s name, its address, the categorization of your business, listings in local and yellow pages directories, and reviews, ratings, and other user-generated content.

Some of these will be hard to change, but for something that’s easier, McGee suggests, "It’s not just good enough to put your address on every page of your site, put local phone number also."  Create a directions page, as well, and use geographic locators like zip codes or area codes in titles and anchor text.

Finally, consider actually seeking customers, as opposed to waiting for them to come to you.  McGee gave a long list of places (including Flickr, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Answers, outside.in, Placeblogger, Yahoo Groups, Google Groups, and Freecycle.org) where local groups exist and your business should be visible.

WebProNews Video anchor Abby Prince contributed to this report.

Moderator: Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

Speakers: Lise Broer "Durova", Administrator, Wikipedia

Jonathan Hochman, Founder/President, Hochman Consultants

Matt McGee, SEO Manager, Marchex

Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts

Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central

Danny Sullivan introduces Matt McGee, the SEO Manager of Marchex who is the first speaker of this session and starts talking on Yahoo!Answers. Matt says that Yahoo! Answers is good for those who want to use it for their expertise and knowledge for businesses. Not exactly for those who want to use it for widgets etc.

What is Yahoo Answers? A simple place where people post questions on topics from any wherein the world. Insanely busy, there is a continuous stream of questions and answers. As with other social media sites, you have to create a profile account for yourself which has a URL link to your website. Anyway, Yahoo! Answers is for boosting traffic and not for link building. In terms of reference, it only falls behind Wikipedia.

A simple Q&A site that is incredibly busy. There is a constant stream of questions and answers. The great thing about Yahoo! Answers is that unlike other social media sites, it is okay to promote your brand here. However, it better be credible enough. Another benefit is that as long as your give answers, it is okay to add links. This specifically applies o those who are prominent members of the community. Matt received a big jump of referral traffic from Yahoo! Answers albeit a low bounce rate. Yahoo! Answers also generates a hue amount of Search traffic. Not as big as wikipedia but it is potent enough.

How to use Yahoo! Answers:-

• The interface is easy to use, and there are a lot of categories so it’s inundating to browse. They have RSS feeds for every category on the site and every subcategory.
• Sort wisely. View by date or view by number of answers. Matt says that it’s better to sort by date and then he finds questions that are about to expire so that he can provide a more meaningful answer so that he can get points. If you sort by number of answers, if you sort for most answers, those are answers that get a lot of traffic and it helps to get eyeball exposure rather than point exposure.
• Sign your name when leaving a question or answer – why? Spammers don’t leave their names, so you don’t want to be construed as a spammer.
• Don’t spam!

The second speaker is Jonathan Hochman, the founder & president of Hochman Consultants is here to talk about Wikipedia. Mind you, Wikipedia ranks 1st on Google for the query, ‘social media.’ The guy recently became a Wikipedia administrator, so listen up.

Wikipedia receives a massive amount of traffic share over Digg and del.icio.us. To be able to market in Wikipedia, you have to be a contributor of unique and truly worthy content. If you only go to wikipedia with the sole purpose of selling or marketing then you will not be welcomed.

What marketers should do in Wikipedia:

• Answer questions
• Interact with editors
• Donate images/media with an appropriate license
• Report problems
• Request changes via talk pages
• Build goodwill
• Most importantly don’t spam. You’ll hit the MediaWiki spam blacklist and you don’t want to get there
• Participation betters reputation.

Popular Newbie errors

• Don’t pick a promotional username – those are called role accounts that are not allowed.
• Don’t start stories for yourself.
• Don’t violate copyrights.
• Don’t write about something you’re close to.
• Don’t edit stuff that you have conflicts of interests in.
• Remember that information in Wikipedia spreads virally, such as images.

3 links

• Wikipedia Business FAQ
• Wikipedia Conflict of Interest
• Wikipedia Search Engine Optimization

After the Wikipedia administrator, its the turn of Stephan Spencer, Founder & President, Netconcepts who is here to talk about Wiki from an SEO standpoint.

Its important to be a good and honest participant. Such as building edits that are not reverted back (clear up spam, fix typos, adding to the value to the site that is clearly noncommercial). Create a profile that that tells other users who your are and how you are an outstanding member of Wikipedia. Do this to receive credibility. A Barnstar award, that approves your contributions.

Connect with the main editor to talk to come to an agreement with him about changes. In case you include links, it serves better as these work as references substantiate claims that add value.

How To Create New Entries?

• Log in with a virtuous profile.
• Be cautious as you can get deleted. AFD (articles for deletion) or the speedy delete. You don’t vote in AFD, you have a discussion.
• Use lots of references: clear the notability hurdle. Get press mentions.

Notability:

• Do not include press releases to create notability.
• Talk about this with other people via the talk page if it’s connected to your brand or your company.

As many tools are continually getting developed, incase you are misusing any of the services, you will be caught.

Notability:

- Don’t put press releases to establish notability.

- Discuss this with people through the talk page if it’s related to your company.

How do you make sure your investment isn’t reverted? Social networks rely on friends. Make sure that they are on top of these

changes – work with the people in the community.

Wikipedia has its own politics: Jimmy Wales doesn’t like being "co-"founder of Wikipedia so his friends try to make the edits. He also

wants to bury his history in the porno industry. But the rest of us know – or we do now.

As new tools get developed, you may be found out if you’re manipulating the content.

Next in line is Don Steele, Director of Digital & Enterprise Marketing, Comedy Central who discusses how to use Wikipedia the right way.

Fond of sharing his success with Comedy Central, here he is once again talking about it. He cited that in Wikipedia they used an entry called “more crap” that was used to market both Comedy Central and South Park, while also giving reference to P.F. Chang’s and Bono. Of late, Comedy Central has linked to their site on behalf of Wikipedia’s individual biography pages. When Snoop Dogg roasted Flavor Flav some time back, a URL to the Comedy Central website went up on Snoop’s Wikipedia page. This drove a significant amount of traffic to the site.

Don, who is also an employee of Viacom spoke of the lawsuit between Viacom and Google (he works with Viacom). Apparently, he can’t voice his opinion, so he won’t become a part of it.

Its the last speaker of the session, Lise Broer "Durova", Administrator, Wikipedia who is here to discuss about Humans 1.0.

Her presentation was about answer sharing and how to make sure what we use doesn’t destroy our brand reputation or even our career. Lisa monitors cases and requests for withdrawal, and makes sure we are all doing it right. These Wikipedia administrators spend a lot of time and effort in ensuring that the site remains a high quality reference source. If you misbehave and do something that is in violation of their rules, they will put you in their Wikipedia Spam Blacklist. Be cautious while making edits and as Lisa says, “have class about it.”

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"Marchex is one of our trusted partners and continuing our relationship with them is consistent with our goal to create the leading advertising marketplace," said Hilary Schneider, Executive Vice President of the Local Markets and Commerce Division and the Yahoo! Publisher Network Division at Yahoo!

"Marchex’s network of Web sites effectively extends our advertisers’ reach and provides them unique local and vertical targeting opportunities across a broad base of categories."

"Yahoo!’s scale, broad advertiser base and robust platform enable Marchex to deliver relevant advertisements across our expanding network of local and vertical Web sites," said John Keister, Marchex President and Chief Operating Officer.

 Marchex separately announced that it has named Bill Day as Chief Media Officer. Day, the co-founder and former CEO of About.com, will run Marchex’s media strategies, including online content, consumer initiatives and advertising opportunities.

Marchex purchased VoiceStar for $20 million along with $8 million in additional investments through 2008. The acquisition is on track to be completed by October 1, 2007. VoiceStar will still operate from its headquarters in Philadelphia, PA.

"With the addition of VoiceStar, Marchex offers one of the most comprehensive online advertising platforms and agency services for local advertisers at scale in the industry. We can now offer local aggregators a private label search- and call-based marketing platform with distribution for their advertisements in search engines, vertical Web sites, and on our network of local Web sites," said Peter Christothoulou, Marchex Chief Strategy Officer.

 "Additionally, we can now also add proprietary pay-per-phone-call advertising units to our network of local Web sites, which allows us to increase the direct monetization of our own properties."

The VoiceStar purchase adds 100 local advertiser aggregators, including Comcast, The Cobalt Group and YellowBook USA to Marchex’s partners which already includes AT&T and Yellowpages.com.

The agreements are in addition to a series of similar arrangements Marchex announced with other participants in the online product shopping sector earlier this year.

Under separate shopping agreements with PriceGrabber and Google’s shopping search engine, Froogle, TrafficLeader’s merchant advertisers will have their products and services delivered in search results through each shopping partner, based on the relevance of their offerings to users’ search queries, using managed search feeds provided by TrafficLeader. As part of the agreements, TrafficLeader will also deliver images relevant to the merchants’ products and services within the search results.

These agreements further augment Marchex’s strategy to build out a specific product shopping distribution channel for its merchant advertisers, in addition to the existing search feed management services that are delivered into broader search and directory services. Combined with relationships already in place with Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, CNET’s mySimon and NexTag, Marchex now has agreements in place with what are widely recognized as six of the Internet’s leading product shopping providers.

“We are very pleased to make these additions to our product shopping distribution channel, enabling our merchant advertisers to deliver their product information to a larger base of consumers,” said Peter Christothoulou, Marchex Chief Strategy Officer. “At the same time, as we bring more merchants into this offering, it is increasingly compelling for shopping engines to work with us to gain access to more high-quality products.”

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In addition, Marchex set a distribution and marketing agreement involving its Enhance Interactive subsidiary and one of the Internet’s leading commercial search providers.

Under separate shopping agreements with Yahoo Shopping, and Shopping.com, TrafficLeader’s merchant advertisers will have their products and services delivered in search results through each shopping partner, based on the relevance of their offerings to users’ search queries, using managed search feeds provided by TrafficLeader. As part of the agreements, TrafficLeader will also deliver images relevant to the merchants’ products and services within the search results.

These agreements are part of Marchex’s strategy to build out a specific shopping distribution channel for its merchant advertisers, in addition to the existing search feed management services that are delivered into broader search and directory services. Combined with relationships already in place with CNET’s MySimon and NexTag, Marchex now has agreements in place with what are widely recognized as four of the Internet’s leading shopping providers.

“These agreements provide shopping-specific distribution and marketing opportunities for our expanding base of merchant advertisers, through several of the Internet’s most popular commerce destinations, while enhancing the shopping experience for our distribution partners’ customers by providing more merchant and product choices for every relevant search,” said Jerry Wiant, TrafficLeader CEO. “With the increased ecommerce shopping activity of the fourth quarter, we believe this is a very good time to broaden our base of shopping distribution partners.”

Marchex also announced today that it has signed a distribution and marketing agreement with LookSmart, a leader in commercial search services. Under the agreement, Marchex’s Enhance Interactive subsidiary will provide distribution and advertising opportunities for LookSmart’s network of online merchant advertisers, through Enhance Interactive’s distribution network of search engines and directories.

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