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Deleting Duplicate Listing Hiccup in Google Places

April 21st, 2011

Earlier today, I found a new hiccup in Google Places while trying to delete a duplicate listing. Well, it’s new to me. If you’ve had similar experiences, certainly let me know.

If you’ve deleted duplicate listings before, you’ve probably seen this:

Simple enough. Suspend the listing, have Google robo-call you the five-digit PIN, confirm it and you’re good to go.

This time something a bit odd happened.

After letting the front desk know that Google would robo-call with a five-digit PIN, I went back to hit the submit button. What popped up on the screen?

That’s odd. I haven’t seen this error before. The number was indeed correct. In fact, when I went back to the front desk they had the PIN already written down for me. Google not only robo-called once, but twice with the same PIN.

This was fine. We had the PIN. Upon going back into the places account where you enter the pin, this familiar image appeared.

This is great, but it’s missing a little something. Where’s this?

So, there’s no way to confirm the deletion. I did see a Marketing Pilgrim article this morning regarding a Google Places hotline being found. So, why not try calling this hotline? I did, left a detailed voice mail and as of this writing no call was returned.

I absolutely love Google for many reasons but am not surprised by all this. Google Places support is actually well-known to be as incompetent as the Yellow Pages Local Search Association’s opt-out program.

So, the duplicate listing sits, and probably will for quite some time. I’ll probably hit the “report a bug” button sometime just to receive a canned email ten days later.

This is the first I’ve seen this hiccup? How about you?

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Posted in Local Search, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Yellow Pages Association is now the Local Search Association

April 18th, 2011

This is interesting news, although not a big surprise. The Yellow Pages Association decided to replace the words Yellow Pages with Local Search. So, as of today they are known as the Local Search Association.

It’s not a big surprise to me because the term “yellow pages” is often thought in a menacing manner the more people who search online and don’t want the print books. I’d want to get rid of that term as well.

It’s interesting when I view their blog. Some of their posts are from those who have great credentials in local search including CityGrid Media and other association partners. Here’s CityGrid’s Neil Salvage on mobile and mobile payments.

Some of their posts are also from those whose expertise in local search is telling people that they should want to receive multiple print yellow pages a year.

Why do I say this? See what the newly-formed LSA President Neg Norton has to say on this informative Kelsey Blog post:

“He added quickly that this doesn’t mean the association will shift its focus away from defeating or overturning opt-in and opt-out legislation in San Francisco, Seattle or wherever else it crops up.”

This is local litter, the polar opposite of local search. Neg and co. knows this. Clean it up.

The cynic in me says the only thing they’re changing is their name. However, I’m sure they are adding more digital offerings just like they have done the last few years.

It does look like they’re assuming the role of online reputation management and social media gurus. In fact, just last year Superpages teamed up with Yext to offer their version of online reputation management.

One thing I notice is that Andrew Shotland from the Local SEO Guide is presenting about Google Places and SEO in Google’s post-Panda/Farmer world. It’s a good read and is really nice to see who I consider a trusted local search professional being represented.

Overall, I welcome the association’s name change. Any thoughts?

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Measuring Conversions in… Keyword Density Tools?

April 6th, 2011

Yesterday, I was digging into Google Analytics (GA) to find a group of organic search keywords that produced conversions (leads). This turned out to be an actual use for a “keyword density” tool.

Remember them? They’re the ol’ timey tools that tell you how often you should use your keyword phrases on each page. More on that below.

If you’re a seasoned search professional, you already know of similar tips. If you’re a MN local business owner/manager who has access to your GA, read on. It could be a fast way to mine your keyword/conversions data.

First, create a GA custom report such as “conversions (total goal completions) by keywords”. It could look like this:

It doesn’t have to be conversion by keyword. It could be whatever metric you’re trying to measure whether it’s a new lead, appointment made or dinner reservation booked.

Once you’ve made your custom report(s) you can run one and easily download it to an Excel file. I’m not going to use the list from yesterday to keep that anonymous, so I’ll use a fictitious group of keywords related to yellow pages which simulates a conversion. Here they are:

OK, if you’re not in search marketing, there used to be a lot of people who considered keyword density important by saying keywords had to be in page content “x” number of times.

There are many tools, but we found one called Keyworddensitytools that serves purpose for this experiment. Instead of using it for its intended use, you can copy the list of keywords that turned into conversions and paste them into their density tool. Note I have checked 2 words, 3 words and 4 words.

This is definitely a small sample, but you can use this to see how often the conversion comes in and most importantly, the percentage.

Keep in mind, the percentage denotes conversions from all 2, 3 and 4 word searches.

Depending on how much you’re targeting the term “yellow pages” they may be doing something right, or they may want to target the term more often. It does well in occurrences and percentage.

Here’s the same for 3 word searches.

And for 4 word phrases. Notice the long tail effect. None of the keywords have more than 1 conversion (kind of to be expected).

Note this won’t provide conversions for keywords phrases 5 or more words long so maybe there’s a better tool for this. I’ll tell you what though, it’s fast. Google Analytics itself provides most of this data as well, but this can be a neat tool if you really want to mine your data.

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