Two examples of using Local Market Launch to manage business listings

Franchisees and other companies with multiple locations sometimes need extra help adding key words to profiles and claiming all their listings.  Here are two examples of marketing campaigns for Holiday Inn Express  and Sterling Laundry to boost organic search results using tools and services  supplied by Local Market Launch. 

Example 1

Company: Holiday Inn Express
Campaign: Business Listing Management
Tools used: LocalMarket Launch

Challenge: The Holiday Inn Express & Suites in Council Bluffs, Iowa is one of the many hotels located in the city. While Holiday Inns have a well known national brand.

However, in Council Bluffs searches for "hotel", they they were in the 24th position,  on page three, a location that only  .15% of searchers see, or about two online visitors a month out to 5,400 people searching for "Hotel in Council bluff Iowa." 

To boost the organic ranking, the  The Holiday Inn Express selected Local Market Launch to provide its listings management. 

Strategy:  While there are many hotels in the area, the team at Local Market Launch noted that  majority of of hotels were not optimizing as well as they could. 

So LML focused in on "Hotel in Council Bluffs," and other key words,  to create and claim numerous listings across the top directories supplied via Axiom, Localese and Factual,  a total of 150 directories, plus enhancing listings on the 30 top social  media and directory sites with descriptions that included key words. 

Upgrades included photos, long descriptions and hours, on thirty top sites  from Yelp and Google+ to the Yellow pages.

Results:  By December, 2012,  the ranking for the hotel under the search term  "Hotel in Council Bluffs," had increased from postiion 24 to position ten, resulting in an increase from 2 to 270 website visitors every thirty days.

According to a recent ComScore study, 82% of these visitors will become potential customers, so LocalMarketLaunch was able to show a potential ROI of  220 potential customers from that single search term.

Example 2

Company: Sterling Laundry

Market: Santa Barbara California

Campaign: Business Listing Management

Challenge: Open 24 hours a day, Sterling Laundry  offers  self-service washing machines with a  fluff-and-fold service. With 20 to 30 other laundomats in an 89,000 population town, business was competitive, and it's competitive advantage needed marketing. 

After considering more traditional marketing tactics, such as postcards and door hangers, Sterling decided to focus on organic search optimization. They selected Local Market Launch to create a program to claim and optimize listings. 

The objectives were: 

• Improve  online ranking,
• Be found across all online directories, and
• Stand out from competitors

The target audience was anyone in the Santa Barbara area looking for a laundromat with wash and fold, fluff and fold, and/or linen service.

Strategy: 

The team at Local Market Launch identified four key search terms and how Sterling Laundry was ranking for them:  

• Laundromat – 4th

• Wash and Fold – 2nd
• Fluff and Fold – 7th
• Linen Service – 50th

All of these terms were important:  A 7th ranked position, such as the results for the term "fluff and fold" only received 2.4% of overall clicks, while the first position receives 42% of all click-through traffic.

Then Local Market Launch  claimed and optimized profiles on the top 30 online directories to make sure they the contained keywords, business name, address and phone number. In order to stand out from the 20 to 30 laundromats in the area, they also optimized the consumer experience, by including five photos, business hours and payment information. 

Results 

Within three months, a Google search showed that  the ranking for search terms “laundromat,” “wash and fold,” “fluff and fold,” and “linen service” had moved up  to the first listing on the first page for three of the four search terms for that geographic area. 

Search term “linen service,” which was ranked 50th previously and received less than 1 percent of search traffic results, was bumped up to the 5th position on the first page of results.

Conclusion

While webiste optimization is important, most search results will never deliver a local business website.   So optimizing the listings pages and Google+, which do appear most of the time on the first page of search results, is an important strategy, even critical for businesses that rely on category/city searches for a significant portion of their business. See also our review of Local Market Launch and LocalVox.  

Keywords