Citysearch Has New Way for Local Businesses to Advertise

Citysearch recently announced a set of APIs to make all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. It's called CityGrid. Today, the company announced an online advertising solution called CityGrid Complete, as an extension of that.

CityGrid Complete was built around an investment from Citysearch in OrangeSoda. CitySearch tells WebProNews that with the investment, they will offer local advertisers:

- Access to a pay-for-performance advertising platform and campaign management tools

- Scalable search engine optimization solution on the Web, including targeted keyword optimization, and reporting (ranking, conversation tracking and trending)

- Local listings optimization, including business profile optimization and phone call tracking and reporting

- Wider distribution across CityGrid

"Whether it's driving new customers to our advertisers from major search sites or mobile applications, CityGrid Complete is about delivering local businesses the highest quality leads for the best value," said Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti. "By combining the distribution power of CityGrid with OrangeSoda's platform, every small business in America now has access to a one-stop local advertising solution with SEO strategies and tactics that historically required a large dedicated team of experts."

"Every search engine has introduced local directory listings prominently in their organic search results and this has given small businesses another way to get featured in the search engine results real estate," said Jay Bean, CEO of OrangeSoda. "For over 15 years, Citysearch has helped small businesses gain exposure on other websites, and now they want to help small businesses gain better exposure through organic search results. By bundling our expertise and tool set with CityGrid, we are offering small businesses a revolutionary local online advertising package that no other company offers."

OraneSoda has provided SEO services to brands like International Truck, Remax, and Jiffy Lube.

2nd Largest Search Engine Gets Real-Time Search

Add one more thing to your list of online reputation management tools. YouTube has real-time search for the site's comments. Considering that YouTube is by far the largest online video site in the world, and is even considered to be the second largest search engine, YouTube comments are probably not something that brands want to ignore.

Now that you are able to easily search for the latest comments for whatever keyword you choose, monitoring what people are saying about you on YouTube should be quite a bit easier. Although, it could be easier still.

"Unfortunately, there are no feeds being published to syndicate these search results into a reader off-site," notes Marshall Kirkpatrrick of ReadWriteWb, who stumbled across this addition to YouTube. "The regular search on YouTube now has RSS feeds and Google Wonder Wheel data being published, so perhaps comment search will have feeds added soon as well."

"YouTube comments are notoriously not worth reading, but now you can search their full text...in real time," says Kirkpatrick. "There are some very real, potential use-cases crying out for a tool like this."

It is unclear just how long this feature is actually been available, but if it's been out a while, it doesn't seem to have been acknowledged much until now. The feature can be used at youtube.com/comment_search.

If you are looking to be found in real-time searches, commenting on YouTube videos may provide for another good way to go about doing so. That doesn't mean spam. It means that if you engage in more relevant conversation throughout the YouTube community, people will be more likely to see your comments in searches. I suppose the real question is how often will people other than those monitoring their reputations actually be looking for information from YouTube comments.

More People Paying Bills On Bank Websites

More people are paying bills at bank or credit union websites than at individual biller websites, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research.

"For the first time, more consumers paid bills via bank sites in the past month rather than biller-direct sites," James Van Dyke, President and Founder of Javelin Strategy & Research said.

"But many banks and credit unions have been slow to upgrade, which has created a wide gap in online capabilities and usage when comparing the nation's biggest banks to smaller banks."

The report found six in ten of online households bank online weekly, a 12 percent increase from 2008 and seven in ten households pay bills online monthly, up from 64 percent in 2008.

Javelin says the increase in online banking is driven by the recession and people wanting an efficient way to mange their personal finances.

Key findings of the report include:

•  83 million households will bank online by 2014.
•  Smaller banks are struggling to keep up with bigger banks online.
•  Bank fees are the main reason people switch financial providers.
•  Consumer demand is building for online personal finance management tools that consolidate money-monitoring capabilities offered by free web sites with those offered by banks and credit unions.

"The playing field is dominated by Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, which have set the bar high for what consumers can expect from a full-service online-banking operation," Mark Schwanhausser, Research Analyst at Javelin said.

"Nearly six out of 10 customers paid a bill online through these titans in the previous 30 days, which is significantly higher than the number of consumers that paid bills online at regional banks, community banks, and credit unions."

 

Maximum Website Promotion through PPC Bid Management

Tools for Internet Marketing have been rising to popularity these days because of cost-effectiveness and the possibility of measuring increase in profits and sales.

Pay per click (PPC) is a means to advertise business through the use of keywords/phrases in the search engines. The advertiser is required to only pay for each click that sends a visitor to his website. Search engines such as Overture, Google Adwords, Search Yahoo and Miva are just some examples of search engines. They offer top positions among the sponsored listings for particular keywords/phrases you choose. The idea for bidding is you have to buy/bid on keywords/phrases relevant to your business. The highest bidder gets to be on the top of the search result listing and the second highest bidder, of course, gets the next top listing and so on. Every time a visitor clicks on your website, you will have to pay the same amount that you bid on that particular keyword.

PPC can be very costly, time consuming and sometimes not worthy. But if you know how to go about the step by step procedures, PPC is a welcome change to traditional advertising.

If you do your searches for products, articles and auctions in the net, you usually type in a keyword or a set of phrase to guide you in your search. Either you use Google or Yahoo Search depending on where you are most comfortable at and where you usually get the best results. As soon as you key in the search button, immediately a long list of keywords or phrase will be displayed containing the keywords you key in. The first or the top link that you saw is most likely the one who bids the highest for that keyword you type. In this way, businessmen will produce the desired results; they get to be advertised, at the same time, saving and spending only for the clicks they need that might translate to potential sales.

The way to start PPC bid management is to identify first the maximum cost per click (CPC) you are willing to pay for a given keyword or phrase. CPC varies from time and even search engine to search engine too. Maximum CPC can be measured by averaging the current costs of bids (bids range from $0.25 to $5). Average of these bids is to be used as the maximum CPC to begin with. As your ad campaign progresses, the actual conversion rate (visitors turning to potential buyers/sales) will be determined and you may have to adjust your CPC (bidding rate) accordingly.

When you start to bid, see to it that you adopt different bidding strategies for various search engines. Search engines have their own PPC systems that require different approaches. It is also worthy to identify different bids for the same keyword phrases in various search engines.

Another thing, it is wiser not to bid for the top spot for two reasons: 1) It is very expensive and impractical, and 2) Surfers usually try different search queries in various search engines before they settle on the right one that fits to what they are looking for. This hardly results to conversion. Try to bid for the fifth spot instead and work your way up.

If you are now going steady on your PPC biddings, it is time for you to develop your own bidding strategy accordingly. It is important for you to track down which sites bring the bulk of your traffic and identify the ranking of your paid ads. This will help your bidding strategy to be effective and you should also decide where you want your ad to be positioned. Usually your maximum CPC will limit your choices.

Bid gaps (e.g. $ 0.40, 0.39, bid gap, 0.20, 0.19, 0.18) occur when there is a significant price increase to move up one spot in the PPC rankings. It is best if you take advantage of the bid gaps by filling them in so you can save up your cents to other bidding opportunities. Often there are keywords worthy of lesser bids to get the appropriate ranking on the list and produce a good number of clicks and higher conversion rate rather than bidding higher but having a poor conversion rate. You have to put in mind that overbidding too is not good but rather the best position for the most effective bid.

Using pay-per-click bid management in promoting your website will only be successful if you take time building many lists across many engines and studying the performance of every listing. In this way, you can make the most value from what you spend in the bidding process. The key is to use the necessary precautions to stay ahead of the competition.

Bid Management Tools

In ensuring best results, you may use bid management tools. There are accepted and approved management tools that will help you in your bidding. They are categorized in two different types:

• Web based (services by monthly subscription) or,
• PC based (a purchased software)

Monitoring tools too may help in the tracking down of your keywords/phrases and search engines as to which among them often generate sales, overall and in relation to your cost per click. This is what you call return of investment (ROI) monitoring.

These bid management tools may include additional functions that may not get from online marketing tools that are readily available. Other tools can monitor competitor’s bids, produce reports for different parties and offer the ability to interface with multiple PPC engines. This is particularly helpful to those who manage more than a hundred keywords across several PPC engines to boost productivity and save time.

Pay-per-click bid management is ideal for the effective promotion of your business online without the hassles of draining your financial keeping too much. It is now fast catching up as a means used in marketing your goods and services to reach to as many consumers as possible.