ELEMENTS is excited to announce its newest client, Curves Middle East, the Middle East master franchisor of Curves International, the world’s leader in women’s fitness with nearly 10,000 locations in over 70 countries. Curves Middle East currently has franchises in Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestine, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

ELEMENTS is working with the Curve Middle East to update their look and feel to the new Curves International brand and brand messaging, as well as create websites for all their Middle East franchisees. Through the ElementsLocal software each local franchisee owner will be able to update their own websites, send mass emails as well as have access to a private Intranet.

“ELEMENTS is thrilled at the opportunity to leverage its multilingual capabilities for Curves in the Middle East,” says Jeremy LaDuque, President & CEO of ELEMENTS. “We understand the two fold nature of launching websites in multiple languages as well as ensuring those websites adhere to the local search engine guidelines. This will allow us to broaden our capabilities and expand our market reach. We couldn’t be more excited.”

“The ElementsLocal platform was a natural fit for what we’re looking for in Online Marketing. We wanted local websites, email marketing and social media all from one provider. We’re looking forward to a fruitful relationship with ELEMENTS and leveraging their expertise in India next,” says David Ramadan, President of Curves Middle East and Curves India.

ElementsLocal™ Chosen to Provide Online Marketing and Social Media Course by the Institute of Certified Franchise Executives™

ElementsLocal™ announces its’ Certified Franchise Executive (CFE) accredited course on the subject of Online Marketing, a guide to best practices in local search, search engine optimization, email campaigns, and social media marketing. A 20 minute live webinar will be held Thursday August 5^th at 10am PST to introduce the course. The webinar series starts August 11^th with Local Search, then on August 18^th is on Email and Social Media, followed by developing an Integrated Approach on August 25^th.

The webinar series identifies the key steps Franchise Internet Marketers should take to achieve top local searches in Google, Yahoo and Bing as well as how to leverage email campaigns and social media marketing  for best results.

This course is open to anyone interested in how to market multi-unit and franchise businesses online (150 credits available to those seeking their CFE certificates). The first webinar is free, but seats are limited, so sign up for your seat at www.elementslocal.com/cfe.

“Our Online Marketing course comes right at a time when many franchise systems are losing local visibility in the search engines due to ’local search‘ being more prominent than national brand search,” says Jeremy LaDuque, President & CEO of ElementsLocal™. “Our course is designed to help Franchise Marketers quickly gain competence with the digital marketing techniques that are critical to business success today. “ The series offers tips and tricks to practical cost-effective techniques that fit the unique needs of a franchise system.

“National franchise businesses have a natural advantage when vying for visibility and business in the communities they service, but increasingly franchisees don’t optimize their websites to be local enough and are not claiming their Google Maps listings. As a result, their websites are becoming less visible as local mom and pop businesses entrench their own local web presence,” continues LaDuque.

Local search results – which is a business listing result presented according to the proximity and relevance of the consumers web search – are displayed differently in Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. ElementsLocals’ research has shown that, no matter what the search engine, local franchisees are often poorly represented in top local search results. “The silver lining is that getting local listings is easier for franchise systems because they have power in numbers,” says ElementsLocals’ Laduque. “But the window of opportunity will eventually close. Those franchise systems who entrench themselves in local search now will solidify their competitive advantage for years to come.

To sign up for Online Marketing Best Practices course go to www.elementslocal.com/cfe.

Jeremy LaDuque of ElementsLocal and Paul Segreto of franchisEssentials to host IFA’s Wednesdaywise Webinar on Aug 4. The subject will be on How franchises use social media to market and build a strong online presence

Join us: Wednesday August 4, 2010, 2-3 p.m. ET

Wednesdaywise Webinars is approved for 50 CFE Participation Credits per webinar. 

http://cot.ag/d5JM3V

Over this last weekend Google engineers rolled out a new “OneBox” search result format.  A OneBox appears any time a Google search includes enough information about a local business for Google to determine that one business in particular is the result that searcher is looking for.  Prior to this last weekend, the OneBox result was listed at the very top of the Google result screen with a map on the left and a link to the businesses’ website on the right.  See the image to the right:

A OneBox result is a prize listing that most SEO experts shoot for as it highlights one specific listing above all others.  This latest change to the OneBox makes that listing stand out even more as the business website listing for the OneBox now appears above the local map.

Now you might be wondering why merely changing the location of the resulting map and link to the businesses’ website would make any impact at all.  Well, there are a couple of reasons.  The first is that prior to the change only Google Places information appeared below the business link including the standard fare of the address, the phone number, hours of operation and links to the Google Places reviews should there be any.  Now inside of the OneBox just below the URL to the company’s website Google is displaying the description meta-tag for the company which is normally stuffed with calls to action to entice users to click through.

The other benefit for listings in the new OneBox format is that Google has now redefined the fold of the page.  When a surfer looks at any website, the top half of the screen is what will catch their eye and entice them into action.  Links above the fold will draw far more attention and clicks than anything below the fold where the surfer is required to scroll down to get to the content below.  It is reported that links above the fold receive 80% of the surfer’s clicks.  So by pushing the company’s website link & meta-description above the map, Google has helped push more links below the visible page and arguably created a new visual fold line at the bottom of the graphical map.  In doing so, Google is inferring that there is only one link on the result page that should matter.

Ok, but that’s only affecting the OneBox results which are very specific searches, correct?  Indeed, but over the July 4^th weekend Google rolled out a test of a re-designed 7-Pack (7 local listings to the left of a map in a general search result) in which the map was moved to the right margin and Google listed the website’s meta description below the URL.  What does this mean?  It means the 7-Pack visually becomes a 3-pack as lower results are forced off of the bottom of the page (image courtesy of: Linda Buquet http://www.catalystemarketing.com/ ).  No one outside of Google knows if this new 7-Pack will become a permanent feature in Google or when it will be put in place.  What we do know is that obtaining high placements in Google’s local search results is becoming more and more critical to a website’s success.

ElementsLocal™ announces its’ newest client Glass Doctor, which is a member of The Dwyer Group family of home service franchises. Glass Doctor is one of the largest and fastest growing glass repair and replacement companies in the world.

“ELEMENTS is working with the Glass Doctor team for a complete design overhaul of their corporate website as well as launching over 250 brand new “hyper-local” franchisee websites,” says Jeremy LaDuque, President & CEO of ElementsLocal™. Additionally, the industry acclaimed ElementsLocal™ Content Management Software (CMS) will be leveraged for local content contribution, lead management and social media marketing. The result will be a new modern design, updated functionality and an extension of the company’s online brand presence which will result in increased leads at both the local and national level.

One of the benefits derived from the implementation of the ElementsLocal™ software platform is that each franchisee websites will be uniquely ‘hyper-local’ and search engine optimized for their respective locations.

“Aside from attracting new customers, we wanted to use the latest Content Management Software (CMS) available for our Franchisees and Corporate staff to easily and cost effectively maintain and update websites. Out of all the companies we considered, ElementsLocal’s software platform was the complete package that fulfilled all of our online marketing needs,” comments Mark Dawson, President of Glass Doctor.