Austin Pizza: Where are the major chains in Google SERPs?

“Austin Pizza“. It seems fairly logical that at some time in the last few years, someone, anyone, working for Pizza Hut, Dominos or Mr. Gatti’s would have said, “hey, what happens when someone searches for pizza in their city?” Because, frankly, nothing happens, and that amazes me.

I could understand, I guess, that pizza executives might not see the value of the interwebs. For that matter, they might not even use the internet to look for things like pizza. After all, isn’t the internet just something the “kids” play around on. You know, college kids killing time between classes or late at night instead of studying … and what is the target demographic of these pizza companies? Oh, wait …

Where are Pizza Company Ad Agencies?

What I don’t understand - what I can’t grasp - is where are their ad agencies? The main goal of an ad agency, if I’m not mistaken, is to sell more product. I realize they are working on brand awareness, etc. (I happily await your flames :), but if I own a pizza company, I want my agency to sell more pizza. Speaking as someone who searches for everything from his BlackBerry, the first pizza company to show up in my SERPs is the one that gets my call.

It just boils down to, once again, advertising agencies not understanding search. (Just one more example of how little understanding they have of search: I can’t even Google up the current agency representing Pizza Hut. If one were representing Pizza Hut, seems one would want the whole world to know about it.)

Google Loves Pizza

Google loves pizza. In fact, Google loves anything that is relevant to keyphrases its users are looking for. Google wants these companies to show up in the SERPs. Dominos, Pizza Hut and Mr. Gatti’s are all really, really relevant results for someone looking for pizza in Austin. So, since Google loves pizza and relevant results, why is it so hard to Google up some pizza at 3 am?

Pizza Chains and Google Organic Ranking

Well, Dominos achieves the amazing feat of hiding all its pizza stores from Google by having a store locator that requires you to type your address, city and state into a form and click “find”. They provide no crawlable means of discovering any of their zillion stores. Pizza Hut uses the same strategy to keep Google at bay. Papa John’s, ditto. (Did someone have a fire sale on this interface?)

Mr. Gatti’s, smallest entity in our sample, has, believe it or not, a crawlable store locator, yet they still manage to thwart ol’ Googlebot. How? Well, they have bad URL’s, code, text, H tag selections, meta tags (for a unique location, meta name=”description” content=”Gatti’s Pizza” / and meta name=”keywords” content=”pizza, restaurant”), page content… etc.

In fact, the only thing these pizza chains aren’t doing to keep Google out is forbidding access in their robots.txt file. They aren’t, are they?

Submit Business Locations to Google Local

I’ll play my own devil’s advocate here for a minute. Maybe the user experience, design or GUI is more important that organic search. Maybe they don’t want to build a crawlable directory of store locations for fear that a user might actually find it on Google.

Maybe these things are important. Maybe arguments such as “that person would never have become a customer if they hadn’t been able to Google your less than ideal locator page” should just be put aside. What then?

Well, there’s an extremely simple solution to these arguments. Google Local.

It’s incredibly easy to submit your business to Google Local. I submitted ours in 10 minutes. I submitted an excel spreadsheet with a listing of a client’s 500 locations in less than an hour. In fact, I’m guessing an agency could have an intern submit every Pizza Hut location in the world in less than a day. So, in less than a day (and the month it takes for the submitted locations to show up in Google Local), Pizza Hut could begin showing up for every variation of “city”+pizza. This would tap into a HUGE long tail keyphrase list and translate directly into increased sales of pizza … for the cost of an intern’s day. There is no excuse.

What’s that? You’re not interested in long tail, only high-volume keyphrases? Don’t get me started on the lack of SEO for pizza coupons.

Austin Advertising Agency GSD&M “won” the renewal of the Air Force advertising contract. The agency was chosen over Chicago ad agency DraftFCB for a ten year, $372 million dollar contract.

I say won in quotes because the contract is actually $12.8 million per year less than the previous contract. To be fair though, $37 million a year is nothing to sneeze at. I buy lotto tickets anytime it goes over $20M!

Since others seem to be harping on all the contracts the Austin agency has lost recently (The Statesman, Austin Biz Journal and mediabistro have all piled on), I think to be fair I would point out that the agency has also recently landed some pretty decent work.

New Clients for the Austin Agency

Two new clients include World Market (ack! the url’s, make them stop!) and John Deere (If you call me, we could fix these URLs for like, 100 bucks;). The Austin Business Journal also points out the agency is bidding on several other accounts, including LL Bean. That’s good news for Austin advertising folk, many who have been laid off because of the lost accounts.

I think with each of these clients the opportunity is there, just waiting to be realized. I know from 3 seconds looking at LL Bean (those url’s are gonna’ give me nightmares for a week) that absolutely nothing could hurt their SERPs. I’m pretty sure my yellow lab could create a more search engine friendly architecture.

Let’s hope the agency uses these new and renewed accounts as an opportunity to stretch into less traditional areas such as search engine optimization and social media marketing (no, not some avatar thing) but a true grass roots social media campaign.

We think it’s possible to be cool and have a positive ROI!

Advertising Agencies Don’t Get SEO, Part 1 of a 2,000,000 Part Series

Let’s start this off by pointing out that it’s now April 2008.

In a recent 7 month study involving over three hundred brands, including the likes of Procter & Gamble’s Folgers and Pampers, it was learned that:

Google, Yahoo and MSN react differently to changes in content and inbound links.

Wow. Really?

It’s a good thing all that money was spent on a 7 month study of 300 brands in multiple languages to figure out something the SEO community has known since, oh, I don’t know, 1998.

SEO is something most little guys, even this little store in Austin selling cowboy boots (sorry, couldn’t pass up the link opportunity) understands well. SEO is not brain surgery. For that matter, SEO is not really even all that hard. It just requires effort beyond sending the work down the line to your AdWords buyer and making a few power points for the client.

Ad Agencies, please call your local SEO (just pick one, really) I don’t care if you hire them (or me) or not. Seriously. Just call them, ask a few questions. You might be amazed at what you learn.

It won’t even take 7 months.