Dominate Your Local Market!

Some reflections on the New Year

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
- Bill Vaughan

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
- Benjamin Franklin

New Year’s Day is every man’s birthday.
- Charles Lamb

Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
- Hal Borland

New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.
- Hamilton Wright Mabie

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.
- Oprah Winfrey

Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.
- Henry Ward Beecher

New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving [the road to] hell with them as usual.
- Mark Twain

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.
- Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
- Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.
- Author Unknown

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
- Oscar Wilde

New Year’s Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot. Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.
- Jay Leno

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
- G.K. Chesterton

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.
- Jean Paul Richter

And my personal favorite…

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions.
- Joey Adams

If you’ve searched on Google for a local business, you probably noticed that when a locality, such as city and state are part of the search terms, the #1 position in the organic (unpaid) search results is a Google map showing local businesses related to the search term.

An example:

This would certainly benefit you to be a part of that listing because of it’s position. It is a much shorter route to the top of the search results than any other.

The Google Map listing is not directly related to Google Search, but works in parallel to it. So listing in Google Maps is NOT a replacement for good search engine optimization, but a compliment to it.

Listing your business in Google Maps is easy and free. It should take you less than a half-hour to complete the process. If you are unsure about getting it done right the first time, call your web design or marketing professional.

Listing also opens the door to tying in your Google Maps listing with your Google AdWords campaign, and is an essential part of any online marketing strategy for local businesses.

Click here to add your business to Google Maps
or call or email OrangeCat at 859.544.9005 for a free consultation

If your answer was “Internet Explorer” only, you may be antagonizing huge and growing parts of your market. I never understood the “one browser” web development philosophy, even back in IE’s hey-day.

Back then I used to hear some non-forward-thinking developers say they only tested in IE because it had some 75% or the market, the rest of the contenders divided up the other quarter of the pie, there was only so much time in the day, blah, blah, blah.

But thumbing one’s nose at 25% of web browser never made any sense – at least to me.

But the nose-thumber’s lot has grown worse with time. Over the past year, IE’s segment of the market (combined IE6 and IE7) has shrunk from 53.2% to 46.6%. IE 5 has all but disappeared.

In the same 12 months, Firefox’s share of the market has gone from 36.4% to 44.2%, Safari’s from 1.9% to 2.7% and Opera’s from 1.4% to 2.3%. So anyone now developing for IE and ignoring the others is building for less than half of the market.

But I still see websites and applications that misfire or completely fail in Firefox, Safari or Opera. For a personal website, it’s just dumb. For a commercial website, it’s suicidal.

If the current trends continue, it won’t be long before Firefox assumes the #1 position, a mean feat considering you need to go get it, download it and install it. But Firefox is gaining popularity for a lot of reasons – not least of which is that it’s extensible.

There are Firefox extensions that add all sorts of useful features to the basic browser. One of my favorites is the Foxmarks bookmark extension that allows me to keep all of my bookmarks automatically synchronized across four different Firefox installations on two OS X Macs, a PC running XP and a Linux laptop on Ubuntu.

I also installed extensions such as the Google toolbar, the Web Developer Toolbar, ColorZilla (tells me the value of any color on my screen) and a Del.icio.us bookmarking button.

Add to that the fact that Firefox is Open Source (free) and very crash-resistant. If you’d like to try out Firefox, here is the link to download it:

10. Using free web hosting

If you were starting up your business right now, would you locate it in an out-of-the-way location where customers had a difficult time finding you? What if the landlord limited the number of customers you could have? Would you open there just because the rent was free?

That wouldn’t be a very good choice, would it? Unfortunately, free webhosting has the same issues. The biggest problem is bandwidth limits. Web hosts pay for the bandwidth they use and understandably limit the amount they give away for free. That can often result in your customers getting an error message instead of your website.

That error message is the equivalant of having a big “For Lease” sign on the front of your business. It may refer to one of the apartments upstairs, but by-passers can easily make the assumption that you are out of business. Not good.

Free hosting services also limit your ability to add essential services to your website. They generally don’t allow some important scripts to be installed and when they do, the limited resources they make available to your site can hinder their performance.

There are a number of low-cost web hosting solutions available. Sometimes, as with the marketing plans offered by OrangeCat, professional-grade web hosting is included in the package price. In OrangeCat’s case, domain name registration is also included.

IMPORTANT – When domain name registration is included in any plan you are considering, make sure that the registration will be in YOUR name, not the webhosting company’s or web developer’s. That can save you from some really BIG problems in the future.

If you are creating your own website, or if your web developer wants you to set up your own hosting account, there are several low-cost, high-quality hosting services available. One that we have used and found to be first-rate is HostGator. Another is Hostorix.

Either HostGator or Hostorix will provide you with professional-grade entry- to medium-level web and email hosting. So will most of the other low-cost hosting services. I recommend HostGator and Hostorix because I’ve had highly positive experiences with them. I can’t say the same for some others.

If you need a more high-level solution to handle large bursts or traffic, numerous email accounts or to maintain greater control of your hosting, you’ll need to give OrangeCat a call at 859.544.9005 and inquire about a custom solution that can be matched to your needs and budget.

Remember that your web hosting is the foundation on which your online business is built. Make sure that the foundation is a solid one.

9. No or poor contact information

I‘m often amazed when I visit a website that sells products or services and nowhere on the site is the contact information for the company that stands behind it.

Put yourself in the buyers shoes for a moment. Would you give your credit card number to someone whose name, address, phone number and email information are concealed. Are they someone up the street or an identity thief in some untouchable location? How would you know?

If you expect someone to pony up the bucks for your product or service and to give you their credit card info, you’d better let them know who you are. And the more information you can give them, the more comfortable they will be with the process.

When customers visit your website, anything you can do to eliminate confusion is to your benefit. It’s very easy for customers to “just say no” to whatever you are offering, and introducing any confusion into the process will encourage them to do just that.

At the very minimum, you need a contact phone number on every page and a separate “Contact Us” page with your company’s name, mailing address and email. Repeat the phone number again on this page and offer a link to your online support system if you have one.

This was a short post, but don’t underestimate the value of getting your contact information right. If you have any contact information issues, make a plan today to set them straight and reap the benefits from here on.

8. No call to action

What do you want your website visitor to do? Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But very few web pages out there have a clear “call to action.” Without a clear call to action, the visitor is left wondering what to do next. Most often, they’ll just leave.

When they leave, they might not find their way back and you’ve lost a potential customer. You’ll find a “call to action” down lower on this page. If you take the action called for, you’ll know whether your website has a clear call to action. That action is there to illustrate exactly what I mean when I say a clear call.

Tempting though it may be, don’t ever have more than one “call to action” on a page. Visitors will find that confusing (which do I do first?) and probably leave without taking any action at all.

If you are going to have a call to action on every page – and you should – it could take many forms.

You may want your visitors to:

• Sign up for your email list
• Request product or service information
• Visit your place of business
• Buy a product or service right now

Each of those requires a unique approach:

• Sign up for an email list – You may want to use a special squeeze page (a highly effective tactic), or you may use a drop-down box, or lightbox-type overlay. Some of these can be somewhat annoying, but they are also very effective.
• Request product or service information – Here you might want to provide them with a form they can fill in and have the info mailed to them. Exercise a little caution here as most folks don’t like giving too much information on a first visit. Better to get as little info as possible to start and ask for more as you build a relationship.
• Visit your place of business – Make sure they have the address, a phone number, your business hours and a map. Don’t leave anything to chance. Offer an incentive for visiting.
• Buy a product or service right now – If you want to sell off a web page right away, you need a compelling sales letter that lays out the benefits of your product. Don’t confuse features with benefits. A feature is a characteristic of the product that produces a benefit. Example: an air conditioner is a feature of a car. That feature provides the benefit that you can drive cool and comfortable in the hottest weather.

Mention your product’s features, but sell on your products benefits.

The “Call to Action”

Here’s what I’d like you to do. Try this with your home page first. Ask someone to go to your home page and look it over. Then ask them what the page wants them to do next.

If they don’t give you the correct answer immediately, call us and we’ll help you straighten the problem out. If there is no correct answer, call right this minute, even if it’s 3 in the morning and leave a message.

If your visitors don’t have a clear idea of their next step, you are wasting money. If you’re wasting money, let’s turn that around today. Call Bob at 859.544.9005 right now.

7. Poorly chosen domain name

Not long ago, I wrote an article for OrangeCat.net called “Own You Own Name.” Click here to read it. What I said in that article was for everyone to grab some version of your own name and hold it forever.

I own several versions of my name – BobStovall.com, BobStovall.us, BobStovall.info and BobStovall.org. I use a couple of them as primary domains and the others as secondary ones.

Domain names are getting harder to come by – grab your own name now if you can. If you can’t get the .com or .org TLD (top-level domain), grab the .net, .info, .biz, .us or any other you can.

And while your at it, reserve your own name as screen name or url on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Why?

Branding. Would you rather control the branding of your name – or let someone else do it? If you’re in business, you are a brand. Have you ever tried typing your own name into Google and see what comes up? I hope it’s good – that’s what branding is about.

You use your own name domain for things like a personal or business blog or resumé website. Don’t underestimate the power of having that type of site under your own name.

Plus you get the added benefit of having an email address in your own name at your own domain. Looks a whole lot more professional than a free email address (which if you remember is Online Marketing Mistake #3).

There are other mistakes that can be avoided when choosing a domain name, but let’s look at that from the other perspective – what domain name SHOULD you get?

If you were a plumber in Anytown, GA, you might want to get something like:
AnytownGeorgiaPlumber.com, or
WeClearDrainsAnytownGA.com, or
AnytownPlumbing.com.

If you were a lighting store in Overthere, WY, you might want:
OverthereLighting.com, or
LightAndLampsOverthere.com, or
OverthereWyomingLighting.com.

If your domain name describes what you do in just a few words, it will help you in the search engine rankings and it will be easier for potential customers to remember.

Always try to get the .com version of the domain name your are seeking. It is better to take a slightly lesser .com domain than the perfect .net or other domain. Why? People often assume you are using the .com version whether you are or not. Why send them to someone else?

And avoid dashes in the name if possible – especially if you were thinking about using the same domain as a local competitor, but with dashes. I used to own several of the orange-cat variations of my orangecat domains. Then I realized I’d rather have other people drive incidental traffic to my sites by using the hyphenated versions than pay for them myself.

If you need help finding and registering the perfect domain for your local market, have your web developer help you out. And remember that domain registration is always free to OrangeCat Marketing Plan clients. You own it – we pay for it.

6. Poor usage of keywords

Q. What could be worse than a poor choice of keywords for your website?

A. NO choice of keywords!

But every day, I run across websites where keywords were not even considered when putting it together. A big mistake. In fact, big enough to be #6 on our top 10 list.

Every once in a while a website with no keyword strategy lucks out and gets a decent ranking for a keyword relevant to their business – but more often not.

Exactly what IS a keyword?

There’s a little bit of confusion, especially among newbies, about what a keyword is. A keyword is a group of one or more words that is likely to be queried by someone using a search engine to find a specific thing.

For instance, if you were looking for a red widget and you lived in Monkey’s Eyebrow, KY, you might go to Google and type in “red widget Monkey’s Eyebrow, KY.” The phrase “red widget Monkey’s Eyebrow, KY.” is the keyword.

Google would then return results for the search in order of relevance determined by it’s algorithm. The idea is to get you what your want – a red widget and as close to Monkey’s Eyebrow as possible.

So when creating or updating your website content, you need to pay special attention to including keywords likely to be used by people searching for what you have to offer.

A good starting point is to include your chosen keywords in the web page title, the META description tag and the H1 tag in the body of your content. Then repeat it in the content text making sure the usage is correct – in other words, don’t force it at the expense of good copywriting or grammar.

In fact, it is a good idea to have the content of your page title, meta description and h1 tag match very closely.

One keyword error I see often repeated is to try and do too much keyword optimization on one page. You’ve probably seen it yourself. The web page author puts many different keywords into the page title, the META description and the META keyword tag in hopes that the search engines will index to page under all of the keywords.

Remember that the search engine is going to try to give the searcher the most relevant information to his or her specific search. Trying to make a page a “jack of all keywords” is likely to backfire as the search engine views the page as unfocused and returns more focused pages ahead of it.

You would be far better off creating separate web pages (or blog posts) that are more keyword focused than trying to jam a lot of keywords into a single page.

There are a LOT of 1990’s search engine optimization (SEO) tricks still floating around out there and being sold by SEO “experts” who haven’t made the effort to keep up, and that can cause you more damage than good.

If the use of jargon (terms like seo, meta, h1, etc.) in this post has caused your head to spin a bit, you are probably better off letting an expert handle your search engine issues, such as optimization and keyword placement.

5. Outdated or stale content

How many times have you looked for information you really needed on the Internet, but the only information was 3-5 years old? That’s not a problem if you’re looking up how to unclog a sink drain or install leaf shields on your rain gutters.

But if you’re looking up software, online marketing strategies or anything that experiences rapid changes, old information could be worse than useless.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and the rest know that, too. They pride themselves in presenting you with the most up-to-date information available at the time you search.

Did you know that every page on your website carries a “last modified” date on it? That date is like the “Don’t use after” date on a milk carton. If you have old information on your website, the search engines will recognize that and rank other, more recent information ahead of you.

So all of the work of days gone by could be brushed aside. You need to keep your website updated. Can you just change the date on the file by uploading a new version? Yes, but the original page was indexed by the search engines and they will recognize that for what it is – an attempt to fool them. Do that a few times and it could result in a loss of ranking.

The need for fresh information and content explains the popularity of blogs in the search engines. By their nature, blogs are easily updated. And most bloggers (commercial as well as personal) use their blog to distribute new information on a regular basis.

A blog can be used as a free-standing website or as an addition to one you already have. In either case, if the quality of information is good, it can generate higher search engine rankings by presenting fresh content.

You can also update or add pages to your current website on a regular basis. The Search Engines also like what they call “organic growth” which simple means a website that grows dynamically with new content. They are not crazy about 1,000 page websites that suddenly appear out of nowhere – unless they contain great, original content.

At a marketing conference not long ago, I met a marketer who bragged that his 9-year old website, untouched and not updated since 1997, retained a top 10 Google ranking.

Needless to say, that caught my attention. Had he stumbled onto some kind or “perma-content” that allowed him to benefit from something he created nine years ago?

The keywords? His company’s name… So his top 10 ranking wasn’t a testament to some brilliant keyword strategy. In fact, it’s the opposite. How could he rank that LOW on his own name? OUCH!

Keep your content up-to-date, by some combination of blogging, updating your current web pages on a regular basis or adding new web pages with new information.