localsearch

Most expensive Adwords are Local

The Top 100 Most Expensive “Web Design” Adwords

It appears that the most expensive web design adwords are connected to local search. Designers pay a lot for keywords like ‘<city / state name> web design’.

For example, the most expensive ‘web design’ adword is ‘connecticut web design’, costs $49.71. Next is ‘houston web design’ for $27.87, after Houston comes ‘california web design’ for $19.63 and ‘boston web design’ for $18.16.

This is the table of the top 100 web design google adwords, as of September 18, 2006:

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Get Found Local launch is here

Get Found Local is finally under way. After many delays and having our official launch date pushed back by 60 days we are about ready to get going. There are still plenty of tweaks to do to the look and our message but the back end is ready to go and we can now help businesses Get Found Local. We just had to make sure that everything was working correctly.

Thanks for your patience. I know a lot of you have been ready to get started for some time and want to use our system. Thank you for your trust and your confidence.

There are a few companies and people we worked with that I would like to acknowledge for getting us along this far.

Our logo designer also came up with the look and feel of the site. Besides being a great guy and friend, Brad is amazingly talented. He is able to interpret my ideas and put them into a memorable, appealing look. Brad Wierck at Wierck Studio.

Once Brad designed the look of the site we needed to have it chopped up and made into a usable,  XHTML compliant website. Thanks to Jeff Cross of Middlefloor Media.

Our Backend programmer is really a champ. I love being able to explain the concept of a project to him and to have him come back with a lot of suggestions with how to make it better. Every step of the way, Demitry has been there and has added a great deal to the project.  Demitry Andraious at Intechnic.

Our hosting is with Deru Internet Services. I originally worked with my friend Stephen Sherin during the sales process and since then with the support staff that are second to none. Sure we could have gotten hosting at a lower monthly price but the cost of lost opportunity due to lack of service and knowledge would have been huge. Darin and his crew have been outstanding!

The Problem with Qwest Dex....

I was going through some old spam today and happened across an email from a woman who had been referred to me by a friend back on July 17^th.

I immediately called her and apologized for not getting back to her before now. She understood the issues with spam and thanked me for calling, only after she explained she had signed a 1 year contract with DEX to build host and list in the Dex online yellow pages.

Just for giggles I went to her site and took a look at it. The site is clean and simple - 3 pages. Not a lot of text or anything but a good brochure site.

I checked the server to make sure that the spiders could read it and found nothing wrong. I then checked a whois file and found the site is hosted along with 24,000+ other sites. Not a great thing but unless someone is a real big spammer and gets the entire block of addresses banned, this should not hurt them.

The domain was originally set up in July of 2006. Being new and only registered for 1 year makes it harder to get into the mainstream search engines.

The owner of the site is concerned because they are not being found anywhere in Google. I ran a couple of reports and they are not being found anywhere.

I explained that Dex does not really promote the site in the search engines but just lists them in their own directory.  The business caters to senior citizens and comes to them for hair cuts, and hair services.

When I search Dex for what I thought they should be found under “mobile hair cuts” I get one listing. It is for a competitor and it only lists their name and phone number. I moved on and searched for “mobile hair salon” and again got the same competitor.

When I searched Google for company name + phoenix, az they are listed. Unfortunately, the listing has a link to a directory areacodelocal.com where it lists all of their competitors.

In Yahoo local, the client does not exist. Same with AOL Local and MSN live.

So what does a business like this do to attract more customers?

First, they have to get found where their customers are looking for them, in the local search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. They do this by listing their address on every page of their site, exchanging links with other non-competing local merchants and by going in and correcting the listings with each of the major search engines.

It will be important that once the customers get to their site that they collect email addresses so that a relationship can be formed and to measure everything customers do on their site including asking every caller where they found out about them.

Additionally, I would spend $100.00 or so to test out a pay per click campaign that is just based on local search results.

Of course this company could also benefit by hiring Get Found Local to help them with all of their Local Search Marketing challenges.