SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is the name given to techniques which marketing professionals can employ to improve their organic rankings for specific target keywords on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.

One important aspect of the search engine optimization process is Geo-SEO. As can be inferred from the term, Geo-SEO is that component of SEO which is focused on geography, and it is particularly important for multi-site brands.

Businesses following Geo-SEO protocols encourage the use of ‘geocentric’ keywords that are specific to a geographical location. As much as an internet marketing company will appreciate being recognised for the search term “Digital Marketing Services”, if they are located in New York being found for the query “Internet Marketing Services New York” will be much more valuable.

Leading Industries Using Geo-SEO

There are countless businesses that prefer being found locally over search engines rather than globally. The fact that their existing clientele as well as potential customers prefer as much to find local businesses helps them in their prospects. Here is a list of businesses that would prefer Geo-SEO over the conventional SEO practices:

•  Retail stores, discount stores, and other multi-site retail brands

•  Restaurants, cafes and fast food outlets

•  Tradesman such as electricians, plumbers and builders

•  Certified professionals such as doctors, attorneys and accountants

•  Entertainment, movie theaters, theme parks, zoos, recreational centers and arcades

It is crucial for above mentioned businesses to make sure that online search engines redirect queries to the geographical location where their business earns its livelihood. Therefore, they are careful to choose ‘geocentric’ keywords as it discourages the search engine to return non-local results.

Geo-SEO Considerations

Using geocentric keywords allows local businesses to increase the chances of directing their potential customers to the established rendezvous point. Here are some important considerations that local businesses should make when using Geo-SEO:

Keyword research – Careful research should be carried out on keywords to make sure that they are novel and unique. Keywords that are fairly identical to those already used by other businesses will not help the business much. For best results, businesses can add local details such as postcode, region, state, town or city.

Onsite Optimization – This process helps in indexing the content that businesses put on their web pages.

Offsite Optimization – It is equally essential for businesses to optimize offsite content in order to generate indexed content and target geocentric keywords. Offsite optimization also syndicates webpage content to other higher ranked content sites and this helps to establish geocentric backlinks.

Google Maps – Google maps is a useful online resource. It pays to register your business’ online portfolio with it so that it is listed in the premium section. This provides search engine users with a geographical tag on your business’ location.

eHound has developed a tool specifically for this purpose, allowing clients to download a file from their account that has been pre-formatted for uploading to Google Maps.

Geocentric Sub-domains – Choosing the sub domain of your business or ‘geocentralizing’ it also works wonders as it effective isolates your business form Geo-SEO search results. You may have come across sites with sub-domains like pittsburgh.holidayinn.com. This is an effective way of segregating the search results and is popular among businesses with branches.

SEO or Geo-SEO

There is not much difference in traditional search engine optimization practices and geocentric search engine optimization guidelines; all procedures and guidelines used in conventional search engine optimization practices can be applied to Geo-SEO. For instance, onsite and offsite optimization protocols have virtually been borrowed from search engine optimization practice. Also, the content still remains as essential in Geo-SEO as it is in SEO. The only disparity that can be observed in the two, and that gives Geo-SEO its name, is the introduction of geocentric keywords, metadata, titles and descriptions. This is where the main focus of the business shifts from targeting internet users throughout the globe as potential customers to focusing on a more realistic and achievable target market.

While perhaps not described as such, ‘crowdsourcing’ has been around in various forms since the earliest stages of the World Wide Web.

Sites such as eBay and Wikipedia succeeded in large part because they harnessed ‘the power of the crowd’ and in both cases scalability was achieved because they established ‘self-policing communities’.

In one case it was through a feedback system that encouraged buyers and sellers to act responsibly in their dealings with other members. In the other it was through constant peer review, combined with the ability for community members to edit records where they saw a need for improvement.

Outsourcing vs Crowdsourcing

While they may appear similar, outsourcing and crowdsourcing are fundamentally different in both concept and application.

Outsourcing did not represent a paradigm shift in the way work was performed or organisations configured.

The general model for outsourcing was for a company in a high cost country to transfer a function to a comparatively low-cost location. However the organisational model was the same. (A call centre in Bangalore is run along very similar lines to a call centre in Boston).

While today a very large industry, outsourcing never scaled in the way that eBay and Wikipedia have, and the main reason is that outsourcing is not self-policing.

In order to manage risk the clients doing the outsourcing required companies such as Cap Gemini and Infosys to manage the staff or function being outsourced. As a result you had simply replicated the same organisational model in a lower cost country.

A Paradigm Shift

A couple of years ago, in my role as Managing Director of eHound I tried using the crowdsourcing community www.elance.com to have some data entry work undertaken.

While it was clear that there were significant cost savings on offer, I found the process frustrating because of the lack of transparency as to the quality of the available contractors. There just wasn’t a critical mass of demand and supply, and this impacted on the risk profile of the exercise. (If you had tried to sell a high-value item such as a car or a boat on eBay 10 years ago you would have found the same issues with respect to liquidity and transparency).

A few months ago I repeated the exercise and noticed two fundamental changes had occurred:

• The volume of proposals (and the speed of response) had increased dramatically
• More importantly, this critical mass of supply and demand had generated transparency as to quality, since I could now see how much a particular contractor had earned in recent months, who they have been working for, and just as importantly what those clients had to say about them.

Just as eBay members are concerned about their feedback score, contractors on networks such as elance have become very concerned about their reputation.

This means that the risk profile of the transaction has changed:

• On the demand side operational risk has gone down (because of transparency)
• On the supply side reputational risk has gone up (again due to transparency, as well as the volume of available work)

This change in the risk profile of crowdsourcing has the potential to trigger a paradigm shift in the way many tasks are performed, and in so doing change the way many organisations are configured.

Unlike outsourcing, crowdsourcing has become a global, self-policing community to which increasingly complex tasks can be assigned with confidence, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional business models.

The Old Infrastructure of Work

The traditional infrastructure of work included not just an education, but physical infrastructure such as office space, mass transit facilities, sophisticated telecommunications networks and an industrial relations system to support employment relations at scale.

However this model of work has come at a very high cost. In developed markets knowledge workers tend to be housed in large, expensive office buildings in CBD or metropolitan locations, and their employment conditions come with significant ‘on-costs’ which must be included in any business model to which their services are attached.

The New Infrastructure of Work

In terms of capital efficiency crowdsourcing is a world away from the above model.

Work is undertaken in remote locations where ‘on-costs’ have largely evaporated, almost all work is performed on a per hour or fixed-price basis, and the concept of commuting might involve a 5 minute walk to the local café, not a cramped 1 hour train ride into town.

Similar advantages in terms of capital efficiency can be found in telecommunications infrastructure. In developing country markets the traditional fixed-line Internet has been bypassed in preference to wireless access at much lower cost.

As a consequence over the next few years literally hundreds of millions of individuals will find themselves able to connect a low-cost laptop to the Internet via a 4G personal wi-fi hotspot run through their mobile phone, and in doing so expose themselves to a growing pool of ‘work’.

Labour Arbitrage at Scale

Per unit labour costs are significantly lower in the crowd.

While the absence of infrastructure costs contributes a proportion of this differential, it is largely due to the fact that ‘the crowd’ is a seamless, global marketplace for labour, and the very nature of crowdsourcing means that there is transparency to a ‘new global marginal cost’.

Under these circumstances it is difficult to envisage any scenario other than migration of demand for those services that can be replicated in the crowd.

Redefining the Concept of an Organisation

It seems that we have two key trends intersecting:

• Changes in technology leading to a step-change in the global supply of labour
• At the same time networks are being established that provide a frictionless mechanism to link this supply with prospective demand

Just as the network of computers called the Internet unleashed a period of ‘creative destruction’ in the late ‘90s, there is every chance that the ‘human cloud’ will unleash a similar period of change.

If that is the case the very concept of organisations will need to be revisited, from traditional, hierarchical entities with rigid structure, to fluid groups of individuals whose interests are loosely coupled but tightly aligned around the delivery of solutions to which some value has been attributed.

Threats and Opportunities in the Crowd

Just as cloud computing has changed the face of the hosting industry, it is not hard to find threats to incumbency in the crowd.  The potential impact can be measured against two criteria:

• Geography
• Function

The geographic impact is likely to run along developed / developing country lines, with central business districts in locations such as the US and Europe more vulnerable because of their inherently higher cost structures.

In terms of function, the impact will depend on the nature of the work. Just as outsourcing was better suited to certain functions (call centres, payroll administration, helpdesk, etc) some tasks/functions lend themselves more readily to crowdsourcing than others, but generally speaking it will be knowledge workers who are most vulnerable (to the extent that their cost structure exceeds the new marginal cost).

The growth of crowdscourcing networks can be broken down into two types of platforms:

• Generic
• Vertical market focused

elance is a typical example of the generic model, with some 500,000 freelancers and US$150m worth of projects distributed in 2011. Others include odesk and freelancer.

Networks such as liveops represent an existential threat to the business model of incumbents in the IT helpdesk and call centre outsourcing space.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/1e12826e-270c-11e1-b9ec-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1ge3WapJz

Consulting firms (whose capital structure reflects all of the infrastructure costs described above) are also vulnerable, particularly where networks evolve to serve specific vertical markets on which they are focused. Kaggle recently raised US$11 million from a who’s who of US VCs, and has started to transform the data mining space.

Similar examples can be found in the graphic design space : 99designs, Design Crowd

But opportunities also exist for incumbents to leverage the power of the crowd to establish themselves as specialist clearing houses. Using such intermediaries may become a common model for those clients who do not wish to develop the internal capabilities required to manage a distributed workforce.

eHound has taken full advantage of this opportunity, and is now a global clearing house for location-based services technology and projects, leveraging a team of specialists encompassing various skills, located in almost every continent of the world.

Market Leading Operating Systems

The functions of cell phones differ according to which operating system they run on. Therefore, it has become one of the key factors that determine people’s choice. The leading Mobile operating systems in the market are mentioned below in order of popularity and some of their salient features are highlighted:

1. Android – This particular operating system seems to have taken over the world in a landslide. With the launch of the very first android phone, other major leaders in the mobile OS market were taken completely off guard and most did not know what hit them. Equally surprised were the users of Android who quickly regained themselves and changed their loyalties overnight. Android OS is used in smart phones of market-leading mobile manufacturers such as Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson and Samsung. Google has allowed these brands enough liberty to tailor the OS according to their own unique taste and this has encouraged some really impressive and creative innovations in the Android OS. Android OS also does not necessarily need a high performance system to be able to run efficiently. Touch interface makes usage and various functions extremely easy and accessible and there are more eye-candy factors and transition effects than the user can possibly imagine. Touch screen interface has proved to be a major reason behind why users’ are so addicted to Android sets and it is particularly useful for gamers as it takes the whole concept of gaming to an entirely new level. With all these features, it is little wonder that Android is currently leading the market in operating systems. Furthermore, the global Android market gives users the choice of downloading more than 170,000 applications and games. This is the second biggest mobile applications market after the iMarket for the iPhone.
2. iOS for iPhones – Ever since its first appearance on the global stage in the year 2007, the iPhone has been recognized for its unique aesthetics and design. However, the operating system of iPhone has played an equally important role in its popularity. iOS is snappy and colorful adding eye-candy to the interface. It is also extremely fast and smooth in operation and can run a large number of applications at the same time. Touch interface support makes the iOS extremely easy to use and commands are fast and easy to give. The on-screen QWERTY keyboard adds convenience rather than a 3X4 keypad. iPhone manufacturers have also established an online iApplications market where users can download more than 370,000 iOS compatible applications and games. This iMarket also offers users access to multimedia such as high quality videos and music.
3. Windows Phone 7 – Microsoft soon realized that it was losing its share of the mobile market and knew it needed to make some drastic overhauls in its existing Windows OS. Unlike its major contender Apple, which is only compatible with Apple manufactured iPhones, the Windows Phone 7 OS is being provided to leading mobile brands like Samsung, HTC and LG. News has it that even Nokia has planned to use Windows Phone 7 OS in its latest smart phone. Windows 7 OS once again has a touch interface and supports touch input. It offers various new, never-heard-before technologies such as 4-point input multi-touch capacitive screen. The interface is highly responsive to user commands. Perhaps one of the best things with the Windows 7 OS is that most Microsoft Windows features will be available to the user out-of-the-box. This means that they will not have to make expensive purchases simply to edit their documents or set their email clients. The Windows 7 OS also supports accelerometer functions and has a pre-installed a digital compass for navigation.
4. Blackberry OS – Although not in the league of Android and iOS, Blackberry OS has managed to maintain its grip on the market which could partly be because of its popularity among businessmen. Whatever the case, Blackberry has put on its thinking cap in time and switched to a touch interface supportive OS of the likes of Android and iOS. Although it lacks the various functionalities of the two major market leaders, Blackberry boasts a good large display with a quick-response input method using SurePress Technology.

Owing to the many breakthroughs in technology, mobile phones have transformed from simple call-handling phones to sophisticated smart devices with music-playing, photographing, web-surfing and computing capabilities. These days, more and more mobile phones are being used to surf the web and search for web content, a trend that many mobile manufacturers have been quick to notice. Hence, these manufacturers have also laid more emphasis on web-surfing capabilities and web-utilities of their mobile products.

Web Capabilities

IPhone, Android, Windows Mobile or Black Berry Smartphones offer customers added convenience when it comes to web-functions. For instance, do you know that you can add a ‘quick-access’ website link to your mobile home-screen for convenience? Well, if you don’t then this article will be a useful tutorial for you.

Adding a Home Screen Weblink

IPhone

If you are an IPhone user, this is how you add website shortcuts to your iPad home screen:

1. Open Safari web browser
2. Enter the name of the website that you would like to link to your home screen
3. Press the ‘Add’ button next to the address bar
4. From the drop-down menu select Add to home screen

When you are done successfully linking the web-link to your IPhone home-screen, the device will automatically navigate you to the where the shortcut has been added in the home-screen. As with application icons, you can move web-link icons around at your pleasure.

Android

Adding a web-link to the home screen requires a little more time and understanding for Android based smart-devices. This is how it is done:

1. Open the web browser and navigate to the desired page
2. Bookmark the webpage
3. In the home-screen, press-and-hold in empty space and the “Add to Home Screen” menu will appear
4. First select “Shortcuts” and then “Bookmark”
5. Choose your bookmark

BlackBerry

BlackBerry users can also add website shortcuts to their home-screen which provides quick and easy access. Adding weblinks to the home-screen is a simple 4-step process:

1. Navigate to the specific website that you want to bookmark
2. Touch the button and from the dropdown menu select ‘Add to Home Screen’
3. If you desire to change the name of the home-screen bookmark type a new name
4. You can additionally change where the shortcut will appear in the ‘Location’ field
5. For adding the shortcut to the Favorites panel, select ‘Mark as Favorite’ checkbox
6. Finally click on ‘Add’

Windows Phone OS

If you carry a Windows Phone and are a frequent net browser, you may find it useful to include a web address or link a webpage to your Home Screen. You can achieve this in the following steps:

1. First of all open Internet Explorer
2. Visit the webpage you would like to add
3. Tap your finger on the three Dots that appear at the bottom right corner of your phone and drag it up to view the options menu
4. Select “pin to start” menu  and this will add the webpage to your Home Screen

Final Words

Adding web links to the home screen is especially useful for the time-conscious. Furthermore, it is useful for people who like to bookmark interesting websites that they come across. It is also convenient because the home screen is the most frequently visited place and therefore provides easier access.

Cloud computing is driving fundamental change throughout a number of industries, and is likely to touch many more markets as it triggers significant declines in the marginal cost of delivery.

An early example of the scale of this impact has been in the hosting industry, where cloud-based solutions such as Amazon Web Services are delivering significant cost savings against legacy business models, due to the automation of business processes which have traditionally been both labour and capital intensive (such as installing and configuring a new server).
Another illustration would be the retail sector, but regardless of the industry context, the economic impact will be similar:

• A material reduction in the marginal cost of product or service delivery
• Increased transparency driving rapid price deflation towards the ‘new marginal cost’.

For many incumbents this change in ‘temperature’ will be fatal.

From a technical point of view the Cloud is no more than an extension of the availability, redundancy and security of the traditional network infrastructure which has underpinned web-based services throughout the evolution of the Internet, while marginal costs have been driven down by virtue of the scale of providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Start-ups and established players can now access global, world-class infrastructure at very low cost, and scale up or down in a matter of minutes as required.  (Historically such an outcome would have cost six-figure sums).

But the commercial impact of the Cloud has far more to do with culture, risk management and timing than it does technology.

An Ongoing Process of Disintermediation

The disruptive impact of Web-based business models can be viewed in a series of stages by reference to various vertical markets.

However at some point in the last few years this process has reached a cultural tipping point, whether due to the quantum of available cost savings and / or changes in perceived or actual risk, organisations are now moving mission critical business processes to physically and organisationally remote platforms.

Crowd Sourcing

Another indication of a tipping point having been reached is the growth of crowd-sourced networks.

Companies like elance, 99designs and Kaggle are transforming industries such as software development, graphic design and data mining.  These are all global, cloud-based, crowd-sourced business models which are driving fundamental change in terms of the marginal cost of delivery for ever-more complex services.

Conclusion

It is difficult to identify barriers to this process of evolution / disintermediation, and individuals and companies alike need to understand the threats and opportunities this paradigm shift represents.

There are essentially two types of operating environments that are used in mobile phones: native applications or mobile web services.

For the uninitiated a native application is something that you download from an app store specific to your device, such as the Apple App store. On the other hand, web applications are the applications that people access “on demand” through their phones’ web browser.

Many people over time have asked one question when it comes to mobile applications: which is better, a native app or a web app?

Below we examine the pros and cons of both types of applications based on three criteria:

• performance
• user experience
• updates and maintenance

Performance
Native applications tend to run faster than web apps because they don’t rely on network access, are more closely integrated with the phone’s operating system, and can therefore make full use of the device’s resources.

User Experience
Again, a native application, because it gains full access to the device resources tends to provide a better user experience.

On the other hand, a web application is limited by the capabilities of a given browser, and may be affected by network connectivity. (However this balance is changing rapidly as a consequence of advances in browser technology, such as GPS in web session).

Updates and Maintenance
Updates to a native application require a new version to be written and released.  This has cost implications for the brand, and requires the user to download a new release each time. Depending on the type of information / functionality, and how often it must be updated, this can become expensive for the brand and annoying for users.

On the other hand, because it is just like a website, a web application can be upgraded quickly and effectively (write once, publish everywhere), and generally doesn’t require any action on the part of the user.

Conclusion
While native apps tend to deliver a better overall user experience, these advantages need to be balanced against the costs associated with ongoing maintenance.

The migration of existing web content to the mobile channel represents a paradigm shift similar to the original move from offline to the Internet more than 10 years ago.

However while the development of web content required only a small number of browsers to be considered, the mobile channel is more complex due to the following factors:

• Inherently less real estate
• A multitude of handset / operating system / browser combinations (combined with an industry that has been slow to standardise)
• Differing functionality (GPS, javascript)
• Rendering of images in multiple resolutions (eg iPhone 4 retina display) and formats (portrait vs landscape).

In addition thought needs to be given to navigation and content in an environment where speed of access and usability are arguably even more important than on the traditional Web.

2.  Introduction

In order to address the above eHound has developed a Mobile Web Methodology which we use to guide the deployment of our Mobile Web Module, and to assist clients in relation to the migration of non-location content more generally.

The Methodology is broken down into several sections:

• Navigation
• Functionality
• Content

and is applied across a matrix of handset classifications as follows

3.  Navigation

Usability is very important in the mobile channel, as customers will in many instances be ‘out and about’, and therefore more sensitive to the number of clicks required to access relevant content and / or functionality. The efficiency of navigation should also take into consideration the varying network speeds to which users are likely to be subject.

The following is the standard site map for the eHound location-based mobile service.

4.  Functionality

The functionality of modern smart phones can be leveraged to significantly improve conversion, and within its Mobile Web Module eHound uses sophisticated handset detection to access all the available capabilities of a given device.

Key amongst these tools are:

• Device sensing to optimise for type of phone and feature set
• Geo-location (achieved via methods such as GPS, cell tower triangulation, IP address, WiFi networks, etc.) allows searching from the user’s current location
• Map interaction such as panning, zoom in/out using gestures or dedicated buttons on touch screen devices (where javascript is absent, static maps will be used)
• Click to call

With these tools customers can be put in touch with their nearest store, Branch or stockist in a matter of seconds.  Answering more calls faster means more sales.

5.  Content

As a consequence of the penetration of broadband access, web content has become increasingly ‘heavy’. However when considering the content of a mobile website it is important to start with a clean slate, rather than presuming that all the existing material ‘belongs’ on the mobile site.

Actual content will be a case by case proposition, but for multi-site brands a store locator will be a key component.

6.  Categorisation of Devices

Within the eHound Mobile Web Methodology the following handset categorisation is used:

Retina Display

The iPhone 4 has set a new benchmark in terms of usability, and in particular its ‘retina display’.  As such we prepare a separate version of the Mobile Store Locator to ensure users on this device take full advantage of the higher screen resolution available on this device.

High End Smart Phone

These are modern large screen touchscreen/non-touchscreen phones with WebKit browsers. These browsers handle CSS and JavaScript very well, which means that most AJAX sites with native style components typically work great. Includes: iPhone and iPod Touch, Android, BlackBerry OS 6, Windows Phone, Palm WebOS.

Mid-Range Smart Phone

These devices can handle CSS reasonable well, so that iPhone- or Android-style interfaces generally look fine. Unfortunately, JavaScript support is poor. For these reasons, in most cases, the high-end site can be served up but maps need to be static. Includes: Symbian S60, ‘High’ BlackBerry Devices such as Blackberry Bold, Windows Mobile, Nokia E71, other Webkit-based devices.

Low-End Phones

All other Internet-enabled mobile devices. For these devices, we serve only the most basic styling and limited images.

7.  Screen Shots

The following screen shots illustrate the application of the Methodology in a real world environment.

However this growth may only currently translate into single digit penetration rates to a company’s domain, and may not yet be on the Marketing Manager’s radar.

But it needs to be understood that a 10% access rate from mobiles may translate into a 20%-30% share of search activity on a store locator, as illustrated by the following diagram.

As a consequence ‘leakage’ due to the absence of a mobile-friendly website may be 2-3 times higher than expected.

Marketing professionals within multi-site retailers (as well as brands which operate selective distribution networks) need to reconsider the business case for a mobile-friendly version of their website, as the impact on ROI for their budget is likely to be far higher than their web statistics indicate.

For an obligation free consultation on your mobile web strategy, and your Mobile Store Locator in particular, please contact eHound.

In general terms accuracy will be determined on a hierarchy of feeds as follows:

So what factors will determine accuracy in a given situation?

• Is the line of sight to the GPS satellites impeded, either because the user is inside, or in a heavily built up area?
• Regardless of physical location, GPS will take time to lock into satellites (you may have experienced this on your satnav in your car)
• GPS also uses a lot of ‘juice’, so phones generally only switch on GPS when requested
• What phone is being used? Some devices uses third party tools, while more recent handsets utilise proprietary services. For instance if the user has an iPhone 3 they will be using Skyhook Wireless for location, while in iPhone 4 Apple has deployed a proprietary service.

Just to make things a bit more complicated these factors play out differently depending on whether you are:

• Using a native app which has been built for a specific operating system (eg iOS or Android)
• Accessing a website or mobile website via your phone’s browser

An example of such a native application is Google Maps on iPhone. Because it is hardwired into the operating system the app will usually be faster in updating location based on the hierarchy described above.  (This is why you see the accuracy circle rapidly shrink to a flashing dot).

In comparison when you access GPS in a web session, the browser will usually opt for speed over accuracy.  This can impact the user where there is a high concentration of data points (such as ATMs) in a given area.

For this reason the eHound Mobile Web locator uses logic to replicate the Google Maps-type experience by rendering a circle over the map to warn the user about the level of accuracy that has been generated.