I recently noticed Yelp crushing local search results organically on Google and owning multiple listings and real estate on the first page of many local searches.
Here’s a visual…
Searched on Google “hair salons los angeles”
The first four organic listings are yelp right under Google’s Adwords cost per clicks ads.
Here’s another search… “auto repair shops san francisco”
Not only is Yelp getting the best organic results with a listing on Google’s first page they are getting multiple listings and as seen here sometimes 3 or 4 times!
This reminded me of another company that had another boost in brand awareness from great search engine results. Amazon ring a bell?
I started to search Google to see if others had recognized the great SEO results Yelp were getting and I found some others seeing the same thing. I then thought to myself Yelp’s stock has been performing great lately and although the street likes it for it’s mobile play as an internet marketing consultant I wondered if the street actually knew they had great SEO results since about Jan 2011…
Check out this Yelp chart from SEMRush to see their search engine performance.
After seeing a big improvement from Jan 2011 I pulled a stock chart for almost two years back on Yahoo Finance.
It’s interesting to see especially since in July of this year is when I noticed Yelp ranking a lot better with Google and the stock seems to parallel in performance. So is this a good indicator to follow when picking stocks? Is noticing organic listings on Google a good indicator of stock performance? Inversely if organic rankings start to suck as Amazon’s organic SEO with Google has recently dropped is this an indicator to short a company’s stock? I guess that will depend on the mobile play and if they build their brand well enough during these good times as Amazon has. But it’s still another interesting indicator to watch.
I have seen correlation before with companies that are ahead of the curve with Social Media, Internet Marketing, PPC, SEO and Mobile do well against their peers. Ford Motor company is another example of this. They never went bankrupt like GM did and they were always great with digital marketing strategies. Their stock was low 2’s when the economy crashed and now Ford stock is at eight times higher at $16 a share.
Lastly, this started as a gut thing about Yelp because of the same gut feeling with Ford stock and their great social media presence. Gut instincts have been one of the best tools for me in business and I think are one of the most underrated tools of life.
