In July Your Online Community and WollongongOnline together with SMARTPAGES directories will commence ‘beta’ testing a brand new local search-based tool called SMART DEALS.
We think it’s a great innovation for local businesses and it is our intention to charge only $20.00 per week** to get your business’s chosen local offer on Google’s critical Top 10 search engine results page.
**3 month minimum campaign, excludes GST and $50.00 Establishment Fee.
And the good news is … No, we don’t have steak knives - but if you don’t get Top 10 local you don’t pay!
Our trials with leading online national advertiser Specsavers have shown SMART DEALS has consistently ranked No.1 on search engine results pages for Google, Yahoo!7 and Bing for its chosen offer in the local region, viz: Complete Glasses for $59 Wollongong.
As a bonus we often also achieve Top 10 universal search (as well as local) although we don’t guarantee this - see Specsavers example of universal search below for offer “Complete Glasses for $59” - Items 6 and 7 (indent) of Google SERP.
BTW SMART DEALS rank even better for universal search on Yahoo!7.
Of course we will also email all SMART DEALS offers to our 10,000 WollongongOnline regular subscribers as part of our usual monthly
e-magazine.
There is an increasing number of coupon, daily deals and discount-type websites being launched around the globe and in Australia – see Woot! and Groupon. In fact it’s probably one of the hottest categories on the net at the moment.
However, the SMART DEALS offering is different in one significant way … it’s local!
The writer has been passionate about ‘local search’ for years – it’s the current focus of my research at the School of Computer Science & Software Engineering at the University of Wollongong and has been central to SMARTPAGES and YOC’s goals since its inception in February 2007.
I am convinced web-based products like SMART DEALS will become an integral part of so-called SMART COMMUNITIES in the 21st century utilising the infrastructure of the proposed NBN (National Broadband Network) to re-invigorate the economies of local communities throughout regional Australia.
I often tell attendees at my ITeCeLearning online marketing training courses (part of AusIndustry’s Small Business Online program) that it is currently easier to arrange, and it takes about the same time and cost to get an item from Germany (Amazon’s central warehouse) than to get a similar sized parcel from one side of town to the other – using the internet that is.
I guess it’s another downside to the globalised digital economy we read about all the time … but SMART DEALS promises to address this issue.
We want locals to BUY LOCAL on the internet.
In the coming weeks YOC will be launching a special webpage (probably hosted on our original community portal website www.wollongongonline.com) with SMART DEALS information and an electronic gateway for people wishing to place orders online plus upload their chosen keywords and company logos.
I promise to keep readers posted on progress through this column in the coming months. In the meantime you can contact me direct for further information by email: andrewc@youronlinecommunity.com.au
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