After nearly ten years operating community portals in Australia I think I know a lot about what does and doesn't work online in regional areas.
One thing I do know for sure is that local search traffic flows are only a tiny fraction of universal search and this usually means that smaller businesses must adopt Long Tail techniques to attract 'low volume high quality' sales or leads.
It would also seem to follow that transactions with low cost products are going to be marginal at best - unless they are recurring and a 'lifetime value' approach is adopted.
In my experience most small businesses want or need a pretty quick rerturn so they are usually not prepared to put in the necessary hard yards.
One way Your Online Community is tackling this challenge in their directories SMARTPAGES is to promote the use of Phone Numbers in search engine results page (SERP) titles.
The usual 1-2.0% AdWords conversion rates can be boosted ten or even twenty times if you can get prospects to call up rather than just click through.
One can speculate why this practice has not been advanced to date but it seems likely to become the norm as more and more people use the internet to purchase local items.
Will talk more about this in future blogs.
In the meantime you can email me direct.
No comments:
Post a Comment