Company founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan have said they were influenced by the book Blue Ocean Strategy. Whether they have actually created a “blue ocean,” or uncontested market space, with their product remains unclear to me, but obviously some smart folks have decided to invest in the business.

Red Oceans are crowded with bloody cutthroat competitors. Operating in a Blue Ocean means your “value innovation” has broken through traditional market barriers. You’re not fighting for market share. You’ve created a new market and attracting customers that didn’t previously exist.

Value Innovation is the cornerstone of Blue Ocean Strategy and according to the authors it occurs only when companies “align innovation with utility, price, and cost positions. If they fail to anchor innovation with value in this way technology innovators and market pioneers often lay the eggs that other companies hatch.” As the business cliche goes “pioneers are the ones with arrows in their backs.”

Most companies choose one of two paths:

• The high end: Differentiation by creating greater value at higher cost.
• The low end: Broader appeal through reasonable value and lower cost.

Blue Ocean Strategy means Value Innovation, or simultaneous differentiation and low cost. So there’s the rub. How do you deliver more for less?

If you want to make your competition irrelevant you’ll have to create a new way to meet a market need, and create a new market in the process.

The authors have studied scores of companies and their competitors across over 30 industries as far back as 1880. The bottom line is that businesses with a Blue Ocean Strategy are much more likely to be profitable and successful long term.

There are various analytical tools and frameworks to help create a Blue Ocean Strategy or possibly to identify companies with such a strategy that may be worthy of investment. In some upcoming posts well discuss those. Sound good?

For the basics on listing your local small business on Google Places see our earlier video. Below are some of the key points points for tuning up your Google Places page to get great local SEO results.

Get Some Great Reviews

One important point I forgot to mention is this video about Google Places is that you should encourage your favorite to write a positive reviews for your business. Just navigate to your page, click the “Link” link near the top right, copy it and paste in an email to some good folks.

Company / Organization

Use keywords in this field that you think your target audience will use when they are searching. For example: “Acme Corp – Widgets in Asheville.”

Telephone Number

Use a local telephone number, not an “800″ number. This is a local listing.

Categories

Choose the suggested categories that best describe AND also in local listings (Places) on the search results pages.

Additional Details

Here’s where you can really get creative. You can put almost anything about your business that you want to highlight. On our page we used our social media links for the business. If you paste a URL into the second field it will turn the word in the first into a link. For example: Facebook‎: Facebook

Complete Everything

Fill out every part of this form the best of your ability. The more complete your listing the better.

Extra credit…

Coupons

Add a coupon whether it makes sense or not. The coupon link in your listing will help it stand out from the crowd. For example our says: “Free Consultation. Contact us to discuss your marketing needs and we’ll work with you to create a custom marketing plan for your business, for free.”

For examples see our Google Places page for AVL Marketing. Now that we have it tuned up, it’s time to practice what we preach and go get some reviews…

Web design is hard. Years ago web designers had to make some tough choices when it came to typography on websites. You couldn’t just use any font you wanted for headlines or body text because unless the viewers of your site had the same fonts loaded on their machines they would get substitutes. And who knows what that would look like. So you chose from a short list of “web safe” fonts, standard fonts that everyone should have. If you insisted on controlling the fonts you could use graphics instead, but search engines can’t “read” images. Later, new ways of coding web pages (stylesheets) made it possible to use text for search engines and graphics for viewers, but it takes time to load images and fast loading pages are now an important SEO factor. More recently the use of Flash to replace text via some fancy coding solved most of those issues, and kept the text flexible. But now there’s something even better…

Google has created a Font Directory where anyone can access a growing list of fancy fonts. So a designer can code a website and specify any font in Google’s Font Directory and the viewer’s browser will go get that font to display it on the page. The only downside I see right now is that the number of fonts is rather limited, but it seems like a move in the right direction. According to Google “all fonts in the directory are available for use on your website under an open source license and are served by Google servers.” Maybe they can change that policy or also add premium fonts eventually. Or maybe they are just doing this to make indexing the World’s information easier. Surely, no one cares more about “search engine optimization” (SEO) than the big G.

Anyone using the Font Directory yet?

Google Font Directory

Google Font Previewer

Yeah, that’s a long headline. But it’s the truth, Ruth. Don’t let the Google Goliath kick sand in your face! Watch the video to hear the whole story. The entire email exchange between Google Adwords staff and me is below.

This is happening to a lot of people. Read Google’s own forums to see how many people are having their pay-per-click Adwords accounts shut down even though they have done nothing wrong. I’m glad they turned this account back on, but I’m disappointed they didn’t address their original, and incorrect, claim that my account was “related to another account, which has repeatedly violated our Landing page policy and site guidelines.”

Instead of admitting that they had made a mistake they said the site had “low landing page score” because it was “down” when they reviewed it. There is no evidence of that. Adwords always indicated a Landing Page Quality Score of 7 or higher.

I waited almost two weeks before asking Google’s customer service to check into it. They replied within a day. Their responsiveness was appreciated, but their response was not. I was going to bold highlights and insert some jokes, but I think I’ll let the emails speak for themselves.

See the entire email thread after the jump.

Jan 9

From: tracysigler@gmail.com
Subject: Ad Approvals and Policies (NewUI)
Date: Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:24:45 +0000

Hello, I’m trying to run two ads for a non-profit. QS is high for everything. I posted them over 10 days ago and they are still “Pending Review.” There are no technical issues. I’ve had an Adwords account for years and have never experienced a delay like this. This is urgent for us because it’s seasonal campaign. Thanks for your help. I appreciate whatever you can do.

Jan 10

Hello Tracy,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you are concerned about your ads being queued for review. I apologize for the delay in response.

It has come to our attention that your Google AdWords account Customer ID XXX-XXX-XXXX is related to another account, which has repeatedly violated our Landing page policy and site guidelines.

You can visit this link for more information
https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164786

As a result, your account has been suspended and your ads will no
 longer run on Google. Additionally, please do not open any new AdWords accounts. If you do, your newly opened accounts will be suspended upon registration, and your account fee will not be refunded.

Our review is extensive, and we take many factors into consideration
 to ensure that we’re reaching an accurate conclusion. As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason.  To view our Terms and
 Conditions, please visit
 https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/tsandcsfinder

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

XXXX X
The Google AdWords Team

Jan 11

Hello XXXX,

This is incorrect. My account has _never_ been “related” to another account and I have not had a problem with repeated policy violations.

Can you please tell me what information you have about this so I can work to clear it up?

Thanks again for your help.

Tracy Sigler

Jan 13

Hello Tracy,

Thank you for your reply. I understand your concern.

Based on your reply, I’ve decided to escalate your issue to our technical
team, which will perform a thorough investigation to determine the cause
of the issue.

These investigations can take some time, but I’ll contact you to let you
know when our specialists have found a resolution.

I sincerely appreciate your patience while we investigate for you. Please
don’t hesitate to reply directly to this email if you have more
information to add.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

XXXX X
The Google AdWords Team

Jan 20

Hello Tracy,

Thank you for your continued patience. Your sites have been re enabled
after being reviewed by one of our AdWords Specialists.

I’ve confirmed that your site had a low landing page quality score because
it was down at the time we reviewed it. Because your site is back up, you
should see improvements to your Quality Scores soon, reflected by higher
Quality Score details for your keywords in their Keyword Analysis fields.
Find directions for viewing this field at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=150568.
You might want to ask your web hosting provider how to prevent future
interruptions to your site’s service.

Keep in mind that we’re constantly improving the way the AdWords system
evaluates landing page quality, and there’s no guarantee that your Quality
Score won’t be affected by a poor landing page quality in the future. To
prevent this from happening, we recommend ensuring that your site complies
with our landing page quality guidelines, found at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=46675.

If you have additional questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/, where you’ll find answers to many
frequently asked questions. We look forward to providing you with the most
effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Niky K
The Google AdWords Team