Don’t forget to claim your business on Matchpoint.com if you haven’t already.

Coupons & Offers – create demand in a down economy

In this economy, everyone is looking for ways to save money or get a better deal. As a business owner you can capitalize on this trend by publishing coupons to your Matchpoint business page. Your coupons will be featured prominently on your page where they will be seen by potential customers as well as found by search engines. Once you publish your first coupon it will in the new “overview” tab as well as under a new “Coupons / Offers” tab. Also, each of your coupons will receive their own page so they can be easily linked to and passed around.

Photos – showcase your work!

A picture is worth a thousand words and sometimes says it all. Now you can add an unlimited number of photos to your business page. Photos are a very powerful way to showcase your work to potential customers. Adding a few photos of your products or latest work could be just what’s needed to land your next customer.

In addition to uploading a photo, you can add detailed descriptions to your photos. This is a handy way to share your thoughts or describe what the photo is all about. Descriptions are also very helpful as they give your photos more visibility in the major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Unlimited coupons and photos are FREE features for business owners. Just login or signup for a free account to list your business and get started using these great new features.

Well, today I’m pleased to announce that the wait is over. Business Owners can now list their business for FREE or claim their existing business page on Matchpoint.com.

Lots of other yellow page and directory sites offer free listings, but I think we are taking a very different approach in what we are offering business owners. While most other sites want to charge business owners for enhancements like adding their logo, coupons, and photos, we are offering all business owners their own enhanced web page complete with all the trimmings for FREE. That’s right, add your logo, add your business specialties, lists of products, messaging, and discounts you offer, all for FREE.

As a reward, businesses that add content to their page will appear higher up in our search results!

This doesn’t mean that your businesses will appear at the top of results (keep reading for how to get placed there), but it does mean that the more content you add, the better your ranking will be.

But that’s not it, not even close.

Content is important, but we also wanted to provide the maximum number of ways for people to contact and connect with businesses. That’s why every business page on Matchpoint.com now contains three easy ways to contact a business:

• Web site link – allows users to just click over to view the business’s web site.
• Phone number – we don’t hide this like some other sites do. Our users can easily call the business on the phone.
• Contact via E-mail – this built-in contact form allows users to ask the business a question, request a quote/proposal or appointment times all via e-mail.

Also, business pages now also include built-in action buttons that make it easy for people to connect a businesses to their friends and contacts on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. If you play your cards right, your business could get some serious exposure from this.

So, at this point you might be thinking that with all these free features and benefits it’s a “no brainer” for a business owner to sign up and setup their FREE business page. We agree.

But wait a second, there’s more…

Once you’ve added or claimed your business page, you can now opt into Matchpoint Promote – our paid offering that, for as little as $25, gives a business increased exposure on Matchpoint.com and additional features such as:

• Top placement in Matchpoint search results!
• Inclusion in the “You might also like” section of related business pages
• Removal of all ads from their business page
• Click, phone call, and e-mail lead tracking
• Exclusive e-mail leads
• Performance/ROI reporting

We packed a lot of value into Matchpoint Promote and made it really easy to opt-in to the product any time after you sign-up and setup your FREE business page. Setup literally takes a minute (30 seconds if you have your credit card out already!).

We hope you enjoy this latest release. Now go setup a FREE business page so you can start meeting new customers through Matchpoint.

… seven in 10 small-business owners who participated revealed that they would rather try to do their own taxes than start a paid search marketing campaign…

The take away is that search marketing (and all the keyword/bid/auction voodoo that goes along with it) is very confusing and difficult for small business owners who do not have time to wrap their head around it.

Luckily businesses can get the benefits of search marketing but skip all that complexity by signing up and promoting their business at Matchpoint.com.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – 4 November 2008 – Matchpoint, a local search service that connects people and businesses, announced today the next version of its advertising platform that now integrates three local online advertising products into the Matchpoint AdCenter – the company’s award winning ad management portal. Ad products now offered to local advertisers include:

TrafficPoint™
Advertisers looking to direct high quality traffic to their website or form would use TrafficPoint.  Ads receive priority placement in search results and unique destination URLs enable tracking and data passing. Businesses are charged on a per-click basis.

CallPoint™
Businesses that can process incoming calls would choose CallPoint.  Calls are assigned unique, toll-free phone number for detailed call tracking and reporting.  Businesses can define up to three numbers, all-at-once or sequential, so they don’t miss important customer calls. Pricing is on a per-call basis.

OfferPoint™
OfferPoint allows users to submit details on their needs and get back offers and proposals, giving businesses multiple opportunities to connect with consumers. Businesses with outbound marketing capabilities would use OfferPoint. Businesses are only charged after the user verifies their email address and interest, on a per-lead basis.

Matchpoint President Peter Adams said,

Our new platform allows national companies to target the local landscape with features that deliver what they need to justify an effective ad spend.”

For example, CallPoint provides 800#s to track performance on a campaign and category level.”

Businesses can now bridge that last mile from online search to offline customer.”

Matchpoint’s proprietary VoIP-based technology is one of the only PPC products on the market today. New platform features also include integrated ROI reporting, advanced geographic targeting and campaign management capabilities that allow large and small advertisers to easily monitor and mange the performance of their different campaigns.

We’ve learned a lot about how consumers really want to connect with local business.”

By providing multiple ways to connect with local businesses on matchpoint.com, we create a great search experience for consumers and even better ROI for advertisers,“ said Adams.

Matchpoint local search widgets can be found on thousands of websites that participate in the Matchpoint Publisher network as well as on Matchpoint.com.

Recently named “Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine” by the SES Awards, Matchpoint was also given an “Outstanding Website WebAward” from the Web Marketing Association this month.

I send one or two employees to every conference. I send my entire team to PubCon.” – Gillian Muessig, SEOMoz

Peter Adams (our President) will be speaking on the panel, “The Wonderful World of Widgets: How publishers can use widgets for fun and profit”, on 13 November at 2:50pm at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Here are some of the highlights you’ll learn from this session:

• Why a Publisher would want to widgetize their user experience
• Where different uses for widgets can increase revenues
• How to add variety and value to your websites

So come on out to PubCon Las Vegas, see our presentation and the rest of the informative sessions. To help you get there, here is a discount coupon code for 20% OFF the cost of PubCon registration.

Use this code: ad-83720 when you register at http://www.PubCon.com

Plus, we’ll walk you through a quick demo of the our advertiser and publisher products in booth #53 and you’ll get your own ppccpcclp hat.

See you in Vegas Baby!

Online Market World may not be top-of-mind for most of the hard-core SEMers that I encounter day-to-day, but their Hwy 101 billboards at least attracted attention. For those that don’t travel along that corridor, the question espoused was “Need more traffic?” So, if I were a company that is looking to drive more online visitors (traffic) to my website, then I would be intrigued. Conference coordinators expected 2500 people at this conference on 1-3 October at Moscone West in San Francisco.

While I don’t need to review the whole conference here, I did want to talk about the Local Search panel I attended. The moderator, Christopher Scott, author and e-Commerce expert, was quite lively and the crowd wanted to know: How to reach the local consumer? Who are the providers of local search out there? How do you get around the directories? and How can I get away from having to use yellowpages.com ever again! These were the questions the audience brought up at the start of the session.

In addition to Matchpoint, the panel included Zvents’ VP Marketing Paul O’Brien. The representative from Local.com was unable to attend, so Christopher went over Local.com’s slides including the typical list of Don’ts and Do’s.

Peter started his presentation by addressing the audience question about who are the players in the local landscape. He divides them into three basic categories:

1. Search Engines—Google, Yahoo, MSN and a slew of vertical/alternative search engines;
2. Directories, such as Yellowpages, Superpages, citysearch, Yelp and Matchpoint; and
3. Content sites, such as WallStreetJournal.com, lasiksurgeon.com, petside.com, and washingtonpost.com.

Most studies will show that local intent coming out of each is fairly evenly divided: Search engines about 33%, Directories about 30%, Content has around 30%.

The biggest advantage of using Search Engines is that you have control of what you advertise; the “con” is that it’s hard to scale. SMBs and even large businesses would have difficulty managing millions of keywords over thousands of geographies. The biggest “pro” on Directories is the qualified audience. When someone is doing a search on a directory site, they are looking specifically for that service or product, which means there is commercial intent. The disadvantage is that your business will be listed with your competitors, but that is also true of search engines. With Content sites you have a massive audience, but they are hard to localize.

Then the question of qualification and relevancy was addressed. Stating the obvious, and sometimes frustrating point—people will click on anything. It’s hard for a business to create relevancy with 70 characters, so they get stuck with a lot of costly, irrelevant clicks. When looking for a service, it’s all about finding the right fit. Having extensively studied the click behavior of consumers, Peter reinforced the need to optimize.

The benefits of Directories for local search are many. Topping the list is that directory search forms qualify the commercial intent of users. This of course leads to higher conversion rates, bringing your prospect one step down the sales funnel. Most directories will qualify by category and geographic area. Matchpoint goes further to qualify with additional questions that are category specific—like a Yellow Pages 2.0 should be.

Peter’s conclusion: It is paramount for businesses to have multiple ways to connect – cater to consumer behavior. If you don’t have a website, you would miss those people that want to click for more information. There are people who want to call, and people who want to contact you by email. At Matchpoint, he sees an even split between the people that want to click, call or connect via mail. People want to contact you in the way they want to, so you need to be available in all three ways.

Zvents’ Paul O’Brien talked about how to optimize web pages—local SEO mirrors website SEO. To maximize how the search engines find and index your site, Paul advised the audience: don’t use java script, don’t use flash, don’t use PDFs, and don’t put important content information IN an image. Another secret tip is to handle the parameters at the end of your site so that they don’t show. Because the parameters dynamically generate web sites, Google automatically reads them and thinks it is not a permanent site.

Then the moderator opened the panel to questions from the audience. To state the obvious, local search is about being where people are looking for local but it’s been a tough nut to crack so far. You want to be there on a local level – go where all the eyeballs are. The audience received lots of helpful tips.

Peter addressed the question of local search on mobile phones. In the US, the number of people doing any kind of search from their phones is still very low. Other countries, such as Japan, it’s very high. But with web browser on smart phones, like the iPhone, you have access to local search even if you won’t have a special app.

Excellent reference sites on local search are Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk, and LocalOnliner from Peter Krasilovsky.

The audience must have enjoyed the conversations, as the scheduled 1.25 hour session extended into 2 hours. To summarize: Businesses need to be local, where the eyeballs are and available to connect with consumers in the way that is most convenient for them. To get the most from their online efforts, they need to maximize their relevancy and get qualification from searches. And businesses still need to blend their traditional marketing with online marketing. That’s the truth about local search.

Over the past 10 months since we launched the beta product, we’ve kept an eye on the interactions between businesses and consumers and collected feedback from both parties. A major theme that emerged is that people wanted to use Matchpoint to connect with one another over the phone and on the web.

Many businesses, especially local businesses, valued the more direct, immediate contact that web visits and phone calls can offer them. And, many consumers wanted to more quickly get to the end goal of their search; making an appointment, getting a price quote or learning more about the specialties of the businesses that matched their needs.

In response to this feedback, we recently launched two new products—TrafficPoint™ and CallPoint™—to complement our OfferPoint™ product and made improvements to the Matchpoint user experience both for consumers and advertisers.

Here are some of the details:

CallPoint combines the ad targeting features of OfferPoint (user supplied geographic targeting, business defined qualifying questions) and is loaded with helpful features for those that prefer to have prospective customers call their businesses:

•    Unique, toll-free, track-able phone number
•    Businesses can define up to three numbers to be called, either all-at-once, or in sequence
•    Per call pricing
•    Detailed call tracking and reporting

TrafficPoint also leverages the same ad targeting platform as OfferPoint, but is designed for those that want to drive visits to their website. Key features include:

•    Prioritized placement in search results
•    Image upload to add a company logo to be displayed in ads
•    Per click pricing
•    Unique destination URLs to enable tracking, data passing

To support the integration of these two new products, we revamped the Matchpoint Ad Center interface to make room for product specific metrics and reporting, upgraded the design a bit, and streamlined the ad creation experience. We also made it easier for advertisers to select the product category that best fits their business. On the consumer side we’ve simplified the process of getting to the results of a business search, while still enabling those who prefer to contact businesses through Matchpoint privately.

As we continue to refine the products to deliver the best user experience, I hope you will try them and give us your feedback. In the meantime, we’re hard at work on some new features that will even further improve the results for searchers and businesses looking to make the right connection.

]]> http://blog.matchpoint.com/?feed=rss2&p=71 0 http://blog.matchpoint.com/?p=64 http://blog.matchpoint.com/?p=64#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 22:50:27 +0000 sbaggett http://blog.matchpoint.com/?p=64 While the saying goes, “it’s an honor just to be nominated”, I’ll tell you..it’s a THRILL to WIN!

Matchpoint was selected as the Search Engine Strategies Awards’ “Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine” at the SES SJ conference last week.

The ‘Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine’ is a highly competitive category,” said Kevin Ryan, vice president, global content director for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. “Once the finalists were determined by the SES and SEW editorial teams, our panel of industry peers evaluated the submissions and voted on the winners.  Congratulations to Matchpoint for its accomplishment.”

Advertisers can see why Matchpoint is so friendly and how we can help them generate highly qualified leads that work with the way their business works.

SES Awards press release

AT SEARCH ENGINE STRATEGIES CONFERENCE

Matchpoint recognized by peers at search industry’s premier conference

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – 2 September 2008 – Matchpoint, a local search service that connects people and businesses, was named today as the SES Awards’ “Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine” at the Search Engine Strategies 08 conference held in San Jose, California last week.

Judged by a panel of over 30 industry experts, the SES Awards honors outstanding search marketers in 15 categories.  Applicants were measured in four key areas:

•   Innovation in methodology and execution
•   Achieving success goals
•   Excellence in tactical execution
•   Overall approach and category relevance

“The ‘Most Advertiser-friendly Search Engine’ is a highly competitive category,” said Kevin Ryan, vice president, global content director for Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. “Once the finalists were determined by the SES and SEW editorial teams, our panel of industry peers evaluated the submissions and voted on the winners.  Congratulations to Matchpoint for its accomplishment.”

After the field was narrowed, Matchpoint was chosen over two other finalists. Search Engine Strategies & Search Engine Watch hosted the inaugural SES Awards program to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the conference. The mission of the SES Awards is to inspire innovation and encourage new ideas.

“Being advertiser-friendly is a natural outcome of our mission to provide a simple consumer experience and deliver the type of local advertising product—clicks, calls or leads—to businesses that work with the way their business works,” said Matchpoint president Peter Adams. “We are honored to receive this award.”