There is a press release on Marketwire from TMP Directional Marketing about a recent Local Search Usage Study conducted by comScore. The study found that most people still use a variety of online and offline media resources to find their local businesses. What I found most interesting in the findings were the preferred sources used by those in the study group.

First sources used:

• Search Engines (31%)
• Offline Print Yellow Pages / White Pages (30%)
• Online Yellow Pages Sites (Superpages.com / YellowPages.com) (19%)
• Online Local Search Sites (11%)

If you add up the online source percentages you get 61% are now using online sources for finding local businesses. Obviously, the vast majority are using online sources for local business information, but doing their buying offline.

The study also states that following online local searches, 39% of the consumers contacted a business over the telephone, 32% visited the business in-person and 12% contacted the business online. This is the part of the study I am not clear on: What were these people in the study group actually searching for? Just a phone number and address? For example: if I was looking to make an appointmnet, make a service call, check stock before I go there, I would either use Google or my Yellow Pages print book depending on which was faster at the time. But if I was looking to buy flooring and I knew nothing about the flooring dealers in my area, nor the products/services offered, I would probably would want to first visit their websites to learn more about the companies and what they actually offer and get their store hours. In this situation I would guess the search engines would be the first choice for most consumers today (it would for me) and the search engine precentage would be much greater than 31%.

Click here to read the TMP press release on Marketwire.com

In a recent Press Release from Bona (click here to read it), they announced a new hardwood floor care system, called the "Ultimate Hardwood Floor Care System" and this new Ultimate Hardwood Floor Care Kit is available to purchases at $59.99.  They went on to say:

"Bona's Ultimate Hardwood Floor Care System will be available this October at select Ace Hardware, Do It Best and Kohl's department stores and on bona.com."

What strikes me odd with this last statement is: Why would Bona introduce the "ultimate" hardwood floor care system and not offer it to specialty floor stores and the large home centers first? Personally, I would never think of buying hardwood floor care products at Ace, Do It Best or Kohls department stores. Bona also has it for sale on their own web site for $59.99, which makes me wonder why others online would want to sell it and have to compete directly with their supplier's own web site.

So what do others think?

We are already seeing this Fall the 2 major flooring manufacturers launching very aggressive Sale Events both through traditional advertising as well as online. Flooring dealers can boost through web site traffic and ultimately in-store traffic by blowing the dust off their web sites and heavily promoting these sales on their web sites. Add these sales events to your home page and possibly some other pages where consumers can easily find them. Include some "Call To Actions" to give additional incentives to the shop your store(s). Make sure your locations and phone numbers arre also clearly visible.

Last, you would be wise to include some Pay-Per-Click" advertising on Google Adwords using the specific keyword phrases used by shoppers looking for these specific flooring brands and their products. This can be setup geographically so onlypeople searching within your trading area will see your advertisement. Make sure your Google Sponored Ads appear on page #1 of the search results for the speciific keyword terms you are bidding on. That is where all the action is. Creating a special landing page for these promotions may also be a very effective way of capturing more targeted buyers and driving them to your store locations.

Got any questions or ideas, feel free to email me:  john@webstreamdynamics.com

Attention Flooring Dealers... Today marks the first day of Shaw's "It's The Fall Flooring Event" (August 29, 2008).

How can I use this to boost my web site traffic and drive more potential customers to your store(s).? I am glad you asked me. :)

Shaw stated in their press release: "This fall, television spots will air on networks such as HGTV and DIY. Print advertisements will appear in 11 national publications including Southern Living, Sunset, County Living, Country Home and House Beautiful. Shaw’s Fall national advertising campaign will achieve over 350 million impressions." With all this magazine and TV exposure there will be a lot of consumers going to the web to search for Shaw flooring products. Smart, web-savvy flooring dealers (hopefully that is you) will add some geographically targeted pay-per-click advertising on Google and maybe Yahoo & MSN to capture those potential flooring buyers. You can turn on the pay-per-click advertisng for September and November and then stop it when the promo ends in late November. You can also set a daily bid amount to keep your costs under control.

You can see the online sale give away here:  Shaw's Falling For Floors.

When companies run offline advertisements (radio, newspaper, TV,etc.) this often spurs people to go online and do a search for your company. What this should tell you is you better be there at the top of the search results for your company name, as well as variations of your company's name. If you don't have a web site or your site is not properly optimized so you don't show up in the search results you could be driving potential customers to your competitors. In times like this it can really pay to have your web site search engine optimized.

 If you have questions feel free to fire off an email to me at john@webstreamdynamics.com.

There is no doubt the spam mail is on the increase. A lot of the spam mail is generated by a sophisticated bot network that actually controls computers and uses them to send out auto generated spam. They are even getting smarter on the emails sent to all of us. Now we are seeing headline news and other top stories in the email subject lines trying to make us open up these spam emails.

My advise to everyone is use you head. Don't open these up ever! And never click on the links inside them. Turn off all images when opening up any emails so the spammers can't track you as easily. Avoid leaving your email address on web sites where spam bots can grab them.

Also. banks, credit card companies, ISPs, and online pay-per-click companies don't send you emails asking you to update you account details.  If you are unsure just examine the URL (web site address) they want you to go too. The web site address will probably be to a totally different web site in a far off country.

Last, keep your anti-virus software up-to-date and run everything through it, including anything you are downloading from the Internet.

If you have any questions feel free to email me at: john@webstreamdynamics.com

Most companies don't understand the importance of a web site's Title Tags and Meta Descriptions Tags. The Title Tag and Meta Description Tag are located in the top of a web page and contain words describing the content for the page. They often contain targeted keyword phrases to help improve search engine ranking position and are very important for Search Engine Optimization. Unfortunately, most companies are unaware of this fact and don't have a clue how to find and review what words the web site developer inserted in these important two HTML tags.

So I wrote a simple web application to help companies review the Title Tags and Meta Description Tags for any web page in their web site. Just click the link below...

SEO - Examine Web Site Title Tags and Meta Description Tags for Better Search Engine Optimization

In an online article on eMarketing.com titled "Gas Prices Boost E-Commerce"they state there has been a boost in online sales because of the higher gas prices. That would not surprise me. What does bother is in the chart it Shows the decline in purchase of luxury goods and fewer major purchases. That strikes the heart of the flooring industry, not just new home construction but also the remodeling projects are probably being put off by many homeowners too. Click here to read this full article.

One of the reasons Webstream Dynamics creates custom web sites is so we can optimize the images for the search engines. Images are used on web pages to support the page's message and if done correctly can also help with search engine optimization (also called SEO).

Text and graphics within images are not easily intrepreted by the search engines spiders, so we need a way to describe the image to the search engines. Luckily, the HTML Image tag has a property called the ALT TAG. This is where we add a few words that accurately describe the image in text words.

For example: See below the image from  Glueless Floating Hardwood Floors.