Local Search is Brutal for Recruiters

CHICAGO, IL - I'm not quite sure what the technical SEO lesson is here, but it has been a fairly expensive foray for yours truly.  Two years ago I snapped up the domains "ExecutiveSearch____.com" -- where the "____" was the name of a top 50 metro US city.  For example, I bought ...

• ExecutiveSearchAtlanta.com,
• ExecutiveSearchBoston.com,
• ExecutiveSearchChicago.com,
• and so forth.

Times fifty.  Then I started blogging on as many of those sites as I could.  Man.  Talk about time consuming.  It was exhausting.  Setting up all of those blogs ... changing the c-names ... editing my content so that it would match the local market ...

It's not like I'm insane.  It was a theoretically valid keyword-density play, where the URL would contain the keywords I needed to get recruiting business in those cities.  Seemed like a good idea at the time -- and it made sense from a naming standpoint.

So imagine my surprise tonight when I checked on the Google results for "Executive Search Chicago."  Not only am I not even on the first page of the results -- but even if I were, who would care?

Look at all that clutter!  How is any prospective client who uses Google (and they all do!) supposed to pick one recruiter out of the geo-mapped pack at the top of the results page?  Proximity?  Forget it.

Memo to executive search firms:  You need an instantly recognizable INDUSTRIAL or FUNCTIONAL differentiation.  You cannot just say "we have the best relationships" and expect the phone to ring.  It won't.  Which leaves you with three choices:

1. networking,
2. cold calling, and
3. SEO.

I've done all three.  SEO is by far the most effective -- and it's certainly the most scalable.  In that sense, maybe the SEO lesson here is that it's not how well you optimize your site, but that you have a business concept worth marketing in the first place.
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Comments

[Pete Prestipino]

Brutal is an understatement - this is the Google Onebox in action and it's caused a lot of local focused search terms to suffer the same fate. Take
"Chicago advertising agencies" as an example (I SEO'd the site of the first natural ranking - advertisechicagoland.com a while back). The problem is that the Onebox well for some queries e.g. (chinese restaurants chicago) but not so much on other terms. Users realize that these are often not truly helpful results (and won't click) - over time the result will be that Google will understand which search terms it (the OneBox) is appropriate for and which it is not.