Being local in every community

Local Search is on the verge of becoming the Viagra of small business marketing. When I began writing about the value of Local Search two years ago, I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. I was neither the first person to advocate the value of Local Search to SEO nor the even the best advocate for it. But every time I mentioned Local Search, people seemed to take a “wait and see” attitude.

Now you cannot attend an SEO conference or read an SEO blog without someone extolling the virtues of Local Search and how “niche marketing” is the key to small business success. That’s the new buzzword, too: “niche marketing”. And it signifies the almost completely total disconnect between the SEO community and people who are trying to leverage local visibility into small business success.

Local visibility is not about Local Search. Local Search is about geographic-bound visibility. Local visibility measures the ability of any entity, large or small, to rise above other entities in a local landscape. I’ve been approached by more than one company and entrepreneur who wanted to create a vector of local search campaigns — people who want to achieve the one-site-fits-all success that major services like AOL City Search have achieved.

Can the home-based online startup really achieve that kind of visibility?

There are currently three typical approaches to building local visibility:

• Create template-driven plug’n'post “local” sites
• Create user-driven “local community resources”
• Co-brand local affiliates into a national image campaign

You won’t see many SEOs talk about the third option because it’s not yet relevant to small business promotion. Of course, small businesses have been banding together to form associations and partnerships for untold ages. But they don’t do that very much on the Internet. The “Best Western” mentality has not yet evolved to encompass the Internet.

The problem with plug’n'post template sites that try to create local content for every city is that they look like real estate or insurance spam sites. Every page is a doorway page, often with little unique content other than a change in city name. If I were to set up such a site, I would take the 1-2 extra weeks required to include additional unique content that was relevant to every community. I can easily think of ways to do this, but most people don’t look at content the way I do.

The problem with creating local community sites is that everyone is trying to create local community sites. I find myself competing with them increasingly in my own personal campaigns, only my competitors are not creating geographic communities they are creating namespace communities. The same principle applies, however. You set up a generic content Web site that invites people to comment about some topic in your topic-specific forum.

Most of these forums never take off. People may look at them when browsing the headlines on the “local community page” but seeing no real discussion the vast majority of people move on. The local community service sites may be able to spark more interest than the celebrity news/photo template sites if only because people are more likely to want to connect with their neighbors.

The challenge these one-site-fits-all providers face is that they really bring nothing unique to the table. How do you build traction with a template? Not everyone has the resources of a large international firm to build volume quickly. Multi-niche marketing is fast becoming saturated despite a lack of buzz among SEOs because it doesn’t take long for today’s Web entrepreneurs to realize that if they can launch a template-driven site for Tempe, AZ they can do it for San Antonio, TX at the same time.

More and more, I see template marketers turning to user-generated content as a strategy for creating relevant, unique local interest content. The problem is that local interest traffic already has many places to vent, refer, and discuss local businesses. The more forums and review sites that come into the market space, the more likely we’ll see a Local Search Meltdown toward the end of 2008.

Where one-site-fits-all has a better chance of succeeding (for now — everything gets spammed to death eventually) is to open the resources for local businesses to build their own visibility. Reaching out to local business is not easy, and it’s definitely not cheap. You have to advertise, promote, and persuade. But what you don’t need to do is build traffic in advance.

I’ve talked to some folks over the past few months who feel they need to create traffic to build credibility. The Credibility = Brand Value mentality has somehow arisen from misperceptions about how small business owners think. Small business operators are used to working in a vacuum. They usually have to build market share from the ground up. Getting them to sign on to a unique service that has no traffic is usually not a problem.

Where you can help the small business community is to help them leverage their combined local visibility to help each other without asking them to help each other. Small business operators don’t have either the time or the inclination to help their competitors build visibility and market share. But neither do they want to miss out on an opportunity to build their own visibility and market share.

So the one-site-fits-all approach has to master the art of herding cats. You see this in a few innovative sites where local businesses are described in some sort of detail accompanied by a promo link that looks something like, “Is this information inaccurate? Take control of your listing.” The link takes you to a form where you begin the process of registering your local business with the service.

So local business directories have been doing this for years, and the process is catching on. The problem is that local business owners don’t have the time or inclination to fill out everyone’s registration form. Nor do they know where all these forms are located. (Hint: That’s an opportunity for someone with entrepreneurial spirit.)

Where innovation needs to step in is by giving local businesses a real incentive to provide more information about who they are and what they do. The value in your one-site-fits-all service has to begin with the presentation you make to the first of your three markets: the local businesses in each community you reach out to. The most common mistake I see on community-template sites is that they incorporate advertising at the beginning of their business model.

Rule number 1: When you launch a community-template site, leave no room for Google Ads, Yahoo! Ads, banner ads, or any other ads.

Rule number 2: You must define a revenue model other than a classic made-for-advertising spam service. PPC ads should never be the reason you create one of these sites.

That doesn’t mean you cannot incorporate ads somewhere down the road. It means that you destroy all potential value and credibility by showing people you only want to use their content to make money on clicks. You’re in business just like everyone else, but you need to level the playing field and show that you are offering an equal partnership, not simply trying to exploit small businesses’ need for more customers.

The second market you have to address is the search engine community. Nielsen Netratings reportedly tracks about 60 search services. Now, while Google and Yahoo! may receive more queries than all other search services combined, that doesn’t mean you cannot or will not receive traffic from other search engines. There are many small search engines out there that send me more traffic than some of the so-called “major” search engines.

Creating content that is indexable by as many small search engines as possible significantly improves your site’s visibility. People use small search engines because they are looking for what they cannot find on Google and Yahoo!. And while it may seem like I am flouting the “make content for users not search engines” position, that’s not the case.

What I am saying is that you need to remove Google and Yahoo! from your community-template promotion strategy. They are your competitors and the day you can successfully use them to your advantage is further down the road than you want it to be. This is not about pursuing a niche. This is about reaching out to usable search resources that send people qualified traffic. Your first objective should be to catch as many little search fish as you can.

Rule number 3: Always promote your content through as many legitimate search engines as are capable of sending you traffic.

What that means is that if you find your site getting 1,000 visitors a month from 30 search engines and only 100 visitors a month from Google, Google becomes less of a priority for you. While it might be nice to have top rankings on Google for a lot of local keywords, it’s nicer to have traffic when Google doesn’t love you.

The third market you have to address is, of course, the actual user community — the people who want to learn more about their local business. You want to help these people in New York, Chicago, and Gainesville, FL. You want them to find your site, see your content, and say good things about your site on their blogs, in their forums, at their dinner parties, and at work when they are goofing off with their friends.

This market comes last. You build content first, you build visibility second, and you build traffic last. That is how you herd cats. You don’t build traffic without content or visibility.

To build the community-related traffic, you have to make your community-related content visible.

To make your community-related content visible, you have to have community-related content that is unique, indexable, and which complements the content of dozens of search entities, not just the major search engines.

To create community-related content, you have to partner with local business owners in such a way that you create value for them. Value doesn’t mean they get another free Web listing. There should be an ongoing relationship between your community-template site and each local business. Your service promotes their business. How would you pitch the value of that service if you could walk into the door of every local business? How would you deliver that service if you had to meet with every local business once a week?

Regardless of how you monetize the site, those business operators are your customers, your partners, your associates. Too many community-template sites treat the business operators as cattle to be slaughtered for the profit. Build a lasting relationship with local business operators where they feel some value comes from the relationship. Treat them as though they have just elected you to a 1-year leadership post in their community business association.

Be responsible and accountable to your first market, the local businesses in every community you reach out to.

Be informative and a rich source of information for your second market, the smaller search engines that will help you build your visibility.

Be innovative and flexible enough to impress your third market, the surfers who will come after you build the infrastructure they are looking for.

In the end, there is no such thing as a “niche market” for your one-site-fits-all service. You are the niche. The world is your market. It gets no smaller and no more local than that.