If you recall, I posted Fables for the Internet Generation. There I recanted some of the many fables my mentor, aSEOp, told me as he guided me through the often treacherous internet.

Today, children, I shall share some more.

The Ants and the Grasshopper

THE ANTS were spending a fine winter’s day bringing their code up to the HTML 4.01 standard, fixing bugs on the site and implementing SEO strategies based on the analytics data they collected in the summertime.  A Grasshopper, whose site was perishing with a lack of users, passed by and earnestly begged for a little cross-promotion to drive traffic to his site.  The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not update during the summer?’  He replied, “I had not leisure enough.  I passed the days in singing.”  They then said in derision:  “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance user-less to bed in the winter.”

Prepare today for the wants of tomorrow.

The Milk Woman and Her Pail

A FARMER’S daughter was starting up a new e-commerce site, when she fell a-musing.  “The money  this site will generate, will buy at least three hundred ads.  The ads, allowing for all mishaps, will produce a two hundred and fifty percent rise in traffic.  The traffic will result in the highest amount of conversions, so that by the end of the year I shall have money enough from my share to buy a new gown.  In this dress I will go to the Christmas parties, where all the young fellows will propose to me, but I will toss my head and refuse them every one.”  At this moment she tossed her head in unison with her thoughts, and she dowloaded a virus which crashed her server, and all her imaginary schemes perished in a moment.

Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.

The North Wind and the Sun

THE NORTH WIND and the Sun disputed as to which had the most popular news site, and agreed that he should be declared the victor who could first get a wayfaring man to sign up to his site.  The North Wind first tried his power and locked away all his content until the man signed up, but the more he insisted on signing up for content, the more the Traveler simply looked at TMZ, until at last, resigning all hope of victory, the Wind called upon the Sun to see what he could do.  The Sun suddenly shone out with all his warmth.  The Traveler no sooner saw the fantastic content  than he read one article after another, and at last, wanting to comment on an item, signed up and posted simply, ‘lame sauce’.

Persuasion is better than force.

The Silkworm and the Spider

Having received an order for twenty websites from Princess Lioness, the Silkworm sat down at her computer and worked away with zeal. A Spider soon came around and asked to hire a room near by. The Silkworm acceded, and the Spider commenced her task and worked so rapidly that in a short time she created a hundred scraper websites. “Just look at them,” she said, “and see how grand and filled with links they are. You cannot but acknowledge that I’m a much better worker than you. See how quickly I perform my labors.” “Yes,” answered the Silkworm, “but hush up, for you bother me. Your labors are designed only as base traps, and are destroyed whenever they are noticed by Google, and brushed away as useless dirt; while mine are ranked highly and viewed daily, as they are the sites of Internet Superstars.”

True art is thoughtful, delights and endures.

The Lion, the Mouse and the Fox

A LION, fatigued by having shot a music video featuring choreographed treadmill dancing that quickly became a hit on YouTube, fell fast asleep in his den.  A Mouse ran over his mane and ears, ripped off his idea in a television commericial for fizzy vitamins and woke the lion from his slumbers.  He rose up and shook himself in great wrath, and searched every corner of his den to find the Mouse.  A Fox seeing him said:  “A fine Lion you are, to be frightened of a Mouse.” “‘Tis not the Mouse I fear,” said the Lion. “I resent his familiarity and ill-breeding.”

Taking little liberties causes great offence.

If you enjoyed this, check out my original Fables for the Internet Generation post!

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In the UK we spend a metric shed load of money or to be more accurate £1.6bn in the first 6 months of 2009 advertising on TV.

This weekend is the final of x-factor (similar to American Idol), which is expected to attract an audience of 19 million people. Analysts are predicting the price of advertising slots to reach £250,000, which is over £8000 per second. (Check out that url by the way – WTF).

The 19million audience or the £250,000 advertising cost is nothing in comparison with the rate card for the superbowl where a 30 second slot will set you back $2.7 million. The last superbowl attracted 148 million viewers.

The £250,000 cost ignores any production costs. ITV suggest that you spend roughly 10-15% of your TV media budget on production costs, estimating that for most people it will end up costing between £2000 and £1million.

I’ve always been intrigued as to how effective TV advertising is. When we have recorded something (which we do more and more with V+) my wife and I compete to see who can fast forward the adverts at the highest speed possible without missing any of the “good” TV. Its probably a bad time to point out that we also watched last weeks X-factor results show, and by clever use of the fast forward button we condensed the hour long show into under 10 minutes of viewing.

Despite the fact that the first 6 months of this year was the first where Internet marketing spend was more than TV spend it still feels like the big brands haven’t really grasped the full power of internet marketing. As if to prove my point only yesterday Ian Lurie challenges Target to fix some of their SEO challenges. Yeah I know Target is US, and I’m talking about the UK, my point still stands. Bite me.

Just for kicks, lets take a look at what we could if we redirected some of that TV advertising spend for the X-factor final to an online campaign. To get a sensible figure, I’m going to assume that someone spends £250,000 to produce an advert (which I suspect is low for the adverts that will be aired), and that they only take 1 30 second slot at £250,000 (which is also going to be low). This gives me a nice £500,000 or a cool half a million pounds to play with.

Lets imagine we are aiming to sell more digital cameras, and have decided that rather than producing our latest advert with its rabbit balloon and cartoon no entry sign, we will pump the half million into advertising in one of the following ways.

Incidentally, it took me a good half hour of searching to find this advert. Finally, thanks to a combination of Yahoo! answers and random clicking through TV advert sites, I finally found out that the camera in question is a Panasonic Lumix G1. None of my brilliantly constructed “digital camera rabbit balloon advert” searches came good. One of these days I swear a big brand will crack all of this cross channel advertising stuff. The fact that there are two questions on Yahoo answers asking about the rabbit balloon shows that people are interested, but are struggling to find the camera. That’s potential customers struggling to buy your product..

So with my mini rant out of the way, lets look at alternative ways to spend £500,000 to sell more digital cameras.

Option 1 – Put it all into adwords.

It’s not, big, clever or sexy, but darn it can be effective. Lets take the most basic, adwords account possible, and simply exact match on digital camera. The keyword tool gives the Estimated Average Cost Per Click at £1.01. This means you can give your hard earned half million and give it to Google and in return you will get just over 495,000 visitors looking for digital cameras. If we can convert 2% of our visitors into camera sales, we will have just under 10 thousand new customers, and at over £400 per camera that’s over £million pounds of revenue. Not to bad really.

Option 2 – Run a competition

Remember a while ago, when twitter went crazy because Moonfruit were giving away 10 macs. 10 macs would set you back roughly 10 grand. We have 500 grand to play with so this should be a piece of cake…

Imagine if we took our half a million pound budget and pumped it into a big competition. If growing a marketing list is important, then what better way than a mass give away. How about signup to our email list and get a free camera, or free extra lens, or 50% off, or [insert something of value here]. I’m not even going to guess at metrics, but I’d put money on being able to make a splash with a budget of half a million pounds.

P.S. Thanks to Andy Beal, swerveball and Fearless_Shultz (who also pointed out twitter pulled moonfruit from the trending topics)

Option 3 – Create a viral thingy-ma-jig

A year or so ago, teh internets (which I think is what the cool kids call it these days) was awash with a video promoting TFL’s cycle awareness campaign. You probably remember it better as the moonwalking bear. According to Viralblog the budget for this was £250000, which is handy because that means we can have 2 hugely successful viral campaigns for our half a million budget.

I know that you can’t make a viral, and you can’t guarantee success but if you can’t make some noise with half a million pounds then you probably haven’t got much hope anyway!

So next, time you have a spare half a million and are thinking about a spot of TV advertising, why not take a step back and see what other options are available. Time has run out and I didn’t even really scratch the surface of what you could do.

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Being a good SEO involves research. You need to be constantly pushing the envelope on the data that you gather, the insights that you gain and what recommendations you provide in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Google Local is a particular area that I’ve been investigating recently both for clients and because I’m an SEO geek. I’ve found some interesting thing and some not-so-interesting things. Having done my own analysis however I thought it would be useful to make some data available to the SEO community as a whole, the data below is in a Google Docs and is freely accessible. I’d love to kick-start a discussion about the data and to hear other SEOs analysis and feedback!

Before I dive into the data and the analysis, here’s a quick primer on Google Local:

• David Mihm’s Local Ranking factors
• What is a citation anyway?
• Mike Blumenthal’s local ranking factors presentation

What’s In The Data?

Here’s an iframe embed of the data to get a quick feel for what you get. Contained in the full spreadsheet is Google Local data for a particular search phrase “Hotels in Seattle”.

• Summary – The summary information which contains the hotels which rank for the phrase. The top 7 are the ones that I see in the Google Local one-box. The remaining 13 are the ones which rank once you click on the map to explore Google Local rankings. The data contained includes the number of reviews, the number of citations and the distance to the centre of Seattle for each hotel.
• Sheet 1-20 – These sheets list the complete individual citation list for the relevant hotel. So for the edgewater hotel which ranks 4th we click on sheet 4 and see the full list of citations for that hotel.

Download the Data (as xls)

The above download is in XLS format, please email me or twitter me or leave a comment if you’d like the data in some other format. The link to the Google Docs file is here in case that’s easier for people.

My Own Analysis

I don’t claim to be the most knowledgeable SEO in the world about Google Local, though I’d like to think I’m getting there, I still look up to people like David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal. In particular, David Mihm’s Google Local Ranking Factors is an invaluable resource.

That said, it’s always nice to try and quantify exactly how important different factors are and do some analysis on which hypothesis are actually correct and which are just learned from the crowd and generally accepted as true.

I’ve got no ground-breaking insights in this post, but by analysing this data and other data I have come to the following conclusions:

1) – The raw number of reviews is not the only ranking factor.

We can see this by comparing for example the Renaissance Seattle Hotel and the Hilton Seattle Hotel – the Renaissance has WAY more reviews but still doesn’t rank.

2) – The raw number of citations is not the only ranking factor.

We can see this because the Grand Hyatt Seattle Hotel has an obscene number of citations compared to any other hotel in Seattle.

3) – The combined number of citations and reviews is not the only ranking factor

Although we’re getting warmer here (the sum column, E) this isn’t the whole story. If we look at the average sum of the top 7 ranking hotels we see that there are 3 hotels that don’t rank which have a higher sum than average – Renaissance, Grand Hyatt and the Crowne Plaza.

4) – Distance to centre (of Seattle) seems to play some part in the rankings

Looking at the data we see that the Edgewater Hotel has the highest combined total with many many reviews and a large number of citations but doesn’t rank number 1. Perhaps this is something to do with the fact that it’s a lot further out from the centre of Seattle than the other hotels – 1.3 miles to be precise, almost double the next furthest out ranking hotel at 0.7 miles (the Best Western).

5) Star ratings could well play a part in the rankings

Typically people have assumed that the raw number of reviews is more important than the sentiment of those reviews. However, this may not be true. Take a look at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, a very low combined reviews and citations score but 4.5/5 stars in total of the reviews.

6) Quality of citation almost certainly plays a part

Firstly, assuming it didn’t – citation spam would be big business! But digging into the data I see that the best western has a very low combined score but has citations from sites such as the New York Times. Same again with the Hilton, which has some very strong citations from authority sites. This suggests to me that quality of citation is important, or perhaps the number of citation root domains? (like with links, perhaps multiple citations from one domain don’t count so much…)

Note 1

There is still speculation that the ‘regular’ SEO factors come into play such as pagerank or strength of domain. I’m not convinced this is a factor. After all, Google Local Listings are attached to an business name (and address/phone number), not a URL. Sometimes there isn’t even a URL for Google to attach to the listing. This makes me think that regular on-page SEO factors don’t carry that much weight. I’d like to hear other’s thoughts on this though?

Note 2

It’s worth noting that in the data you might like to exclude the Crowne Plaza Hotel from your data analysis – when gathering the data I see that it’s missing an image which may imply a wider issue about data perhaps? Not sure what a missing image means but I doubt it’s good news for the Crowne Plaza. This is backed up by the fact that it by rights (i.e. combined citations and reviews score) it should rank, but it doesn’t… Screenshot of what I’m seeing:

Note 3

In a usual analysis I would have looked at the category of the listings, I don’t think this is a factor in this case since it’s a competitive SERP and all the listings are likely tagged with the Hotel category.

To Conclude…

What can you do to get better rankings? Get more citations and reviews! The combined number of these seems reasonably well correlated with rankings once you factor in distance from centre etc. Especially if you can get positive reviews and citations from strong websites.

But also, to conclude, we see that the algorithms are somewhat complicated. I’ve still not completely figured out why some sites rank and why some don’t but I’m getting close. I’d love to hear analysis from other Google Local SEOs who’ve been digging around in data. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours

Oh, and if you’d like to enquire about having Distilled manage your Google Local SEO then click here to get in touch…

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