Dominate Your Local Market!

Search Engine Optimization, also known as SEO, is one of the most cost-effective ways to market your local business online.

SEO is what will determine your placement in search engine results pages (SERPs) for certain keywords or keyphrases. And the higher your placement on those pages, the better your chances of sending traffic to your website.

Your SEO strategy will be different depending on your particular product(s) or services. A retailer’s SEO needs will be greatly different from a service’s, which in turn will greatly differ from a restaurant’s.

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In 2009, 46% of Internet users conducting a local search then visited the place of business, up from 34% in 2008. A flat 38% contacted the business via the telephone. Those are some whopping numbers.

If you haven’t as yet seen the value of having a solid local search strategy, remember that one or more of your competitors will. Having a local search strategy may mean life or death for your business over the next several years, regardless of what type of business you are in. Have one and prosper or don’t have one and wish you did later.

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26% of those using local search to find a business are seeking the name and address of the business and 21% are seeking driving directions. An additional 21% were seeking a business that has the product or service that they needed – at that moment.

This highlights the importance of having a local search strategy. Being able to put your name, address and driving directions in front of persons searching for the exact product or service you offer at the very time they need it is a golden opportunity.

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One of the best ways to increase your business’s visibility on Google is to list your business at the Google Local Business Center.

Make sure to include all important keywords/phrases to your listing and use your and surrounding town names, too.

This video will show you why listing at Google LBC is important to your businesses growth.

Owning a small business in most towns means you rely on customers from surrounding towns and areas for a significant portion of your business. Back in the “Yellow Pages” days that meant spending a small fortune promoting your business in those areas.

Now, a business can use online marketing to reach potential customers in an expanded market in a very cost-effective manner… IF you follow a simple strategy.

You could build a web page that simply included the names of your target cities and a few keywords or phrases that you would like to rank highly for. And it just might work. I’ve used this technique and it got me into the top five for my keywords in a fairly competitive market. But the competition was weak.

That was then and this is now. The chances of success using that technique have shrunk. It may still get you into the top 20 in your chosen markets, but that is no longer good enough. You now need to give your business the best chance to rank highly for an array of keywords that potential customers are likely to use when searching for your product or service.

Keywords are not a guessing game. Starting with some logical basic keywords, we need to use effective tools to expand the selection of keywords that we start out with. Once we have a a list of actual keywords gleaned from logs of real users of our website, we add those to the mix.

“Mix” is undoubtedly the wrong word to use as the get the best effect on ranking each keyword or key word set needs it’s own web page. For example, if you were trying to rank highly for the the keyword “blue widget,” you would need a web page dedicated to that keyword set and not try to include “red widget” or “blue thingamajig.” You’ll get much better results if you create separate pages for each keyword set.

A web page designed for a single keyword set should also have a keyword-rich, filename, title and content. The content should offer information of value to visitors landing on it and should be created for real visitors, not search engine robots.

Here’s an example of a web page created for a single keyword set:

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And the resulting Google ranking:

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In these two images you can clearly see the advantage of having web pages that are optimized to BOTH a locality and a keyword set. Do not attempt to create pages like this that have similar content but simply redirect to another page. The content in meant for the search engine robots and will never be seen by visitors to the page. Those are called “doorway” pages. Google doesn’t like “doorway” pages as they contain no content of value to visitors and they will quickly eliminate them from their database – and possibly penalize your entire site.

So, if you want to market to different locations in your area, use a separate web page for each keyword set (product or service) and location (city, town, county, etc.). Just be sure that each page has content of value to a visitor and is optimized for the keyword set it is meant to promote.

Ever sent a long URL in an email only to have it break in many of your recipients email program? Email clients sometimes break the lines in a long URL causing them to become unclickable.

BudURL offers shortened URLs that will not break under most circumstances. An added advantage of using BudURLs is link click tracking. Here is how the service is described on the BudURL website:

“BudURL was designed from the start to give small businesses and marketers insight into previously invisible click traffic. Not everyone has access to Google Analytics and most of those that have it don’t know how to use it. BudURL makes link tracking amazingly simple. Shorten the link, put it somewhere, and watch the clicks roll in. It’s that easy!

“BudURL is easy to use! Just paste in a large, unruly web address in the box above and click the “Shrink It!” button. You’ll get a unique BudURL™ that you can use anywhere you’d like such as social networks, instant messages, emails, ad campaigns, electronic newsletters, etc.”

Try it on these two URLs – they take you to the same place.

http://bobstovall.com/how-fast-does-google-index-your-wordpress-posts/

http://budurl.com/googlefast

You can shorten any URL for free on the BudURL website. If you want to track clicks, you’ll need to open a free starter account. More options are available for a small monthly fee, but up to 250 URLs can be added to a free account.

Get a BudURL or open a BudURL account by clicking here.

We’ve all heard that posting to a WordPress blog can get your new content indexed quickly. But just HOW quickly?

Last Friday, I posted to my WordPress blog at YourKentuckyHome.com with an Easter holiday related video. YourKentuckyHome.com happens to hold the #1 position for this set of keywords, but that is irrelevant to indexing.

As you can see, within 6 hours, the new post was indexed in Google under my #1 position result. If you’ve waited days or weeks for new content to be indexed on your static website, that’s great news. But even better news is I’ve had posts appear much quicker than that – a few in under an hour.

That’s why I have been so enthused with WordPress blogging since I first tried it several years ago.

Whether you are posting information, or news and opinions, or if you are marketing your service or product, there is no quicker way to get the word out than blogging.

If you are new to blogging, or haven’t taken the plunge yet, there are videos that can take you from newbie to expert in just a few enjoyable hours. Don’t let fear hold you back.

Videos are proving to be the premier traffic generating media for the websites wise enough to use them. They can also help hold visitors on your web pages once they get there.

Search engines recognize the importance and user draw of videos and crawl the major video sites on a regular basis. You can literally grab a high ranking in just a few minutes of hours by submitting a video to YouTube.

I’ve been using videos placed on numerous video sites for the purpose of generating qualified traffic and I thought it would be interesting to see which ones draw the most views.

Here are some recent stats on views for the videos that appear on the HowDoIDoThatVideos YouTube channel:

These videos are all in the “Instructional/How To” category and used the same text in the info box on each of the services making the comparison a valid one.

The stats don’t include Google video which I also regularly upload to because I am using my TubeMogul stats to ensure that all services are reporting for the same videos for the same time period and Google stats are not available.

As you can see, YouTube is still far and way the venue where most of my video views take place. Metacafe is second and Revver is a distant third. From individual stats, I can interpolate that Google Video falls somewhere in between YouTube and Metacafe.

If you are producing videos to place on video sites to generate traffic ( and traffic means business), be sure that your videos appear on the top sites. For my uses, that means YouTube, Google Videos, Metacafe and Revver. I also upload to Howcast, as it is a site that specializes in “how to” videos.

When planning your videos, be sure to observe file size and video length restrictions. For instance, YouTube requires that videos be a maximum of 10 minutes in length. My upload service of choice, TubeMogul, limits file size to 100mb for it’s quick upload service and a 500mb file size limit for it’s resumable “big file” uploader.

On YouTube, you can upload up to 10 videos at a time. They can be a maximum file size of 1gb and a maximum length or 10 minutes.

If you want to use TubeMogul to upload your videos, it offer several advantages:

You can upload you video once and have TubeMogul distribute the video, along with description and tags to many online video services, such as YouTube, Google, Metacafe, Yahoo, Revver, MySpace, Daily Motion, Howcast, 5 Minute Videos, Blip, Veoh and more. It’s a real time saver.

Placing videos on YouTube et al offers so much opportunity for exposure to potential traffic for your website that you really need to include this strategy as part of your overall online marketing plan no matter what your business.

For national or international businesses, it is essential – for local businesses uploading videos is one part of your strategy to “Dominate Your Local Market.”

For many people the terms “Google” and “Search Engine” are synonymous. And with good reason. According to a report dated January 5, 2009 at hitslink.com, Google now accounts for 81.26% of all searches. Wow!

Yahoo distantly follows with 10.43%, MSN with 2.96% and AOL with 1.96%. Microsoft Live, Ask, Altavista, Excite, Lycos and All the Web round out the Top 10 (see the chart below).

Interestingly, on several of my websites MSN provides disproportionately more traffic than the hitslink stats would indicate, while Yahoo provides significantly less. Let’s analyze…

It’s important to remember that for the most part, what’s works for Google SEO also works for Yahoo, MSN and others. But there may also be differences in the way the various search engines rank websites.

For instance, for the keywords “web design danville ky” I hold the #4 and #5 positions on page 1 in a Google search and #4 on MSN, but I don’t appear until #91 in Yahoo despite getting several mentions in rankings for websites in which “web design by OrangeCat.net” appears in the footer.

It seems that Yahoo currently gives links more weight than content when determining relevancy.

The major point here is that there are inconsistencies in how the SEs use available information to rank web pages. I could probably spend a lot of time and money to optimize for Yahoo, but would that mess up my Google and MSN rankings?

The best bet might be to leave my SEO alone and buy some Yahoo Marketing ads. For my keywords, it would probably be very inexpensive, would surely be more effective and could be placed overnight instead of optimizing, then waiting weeks or months for my Yahoo rankings to improve.

By appearing on the first page of Google, Yahoo and MSN, I’ll have page one exposure on SEs representing 88.73% of searches. A quick check of rankings on other SEs shows satisfactory results.

So by all means prioritize Google when doing SEO, but don’t forget that a significant amount of traffic cans still come from Yahoo, MSN and others.

I recently received an email from Google AdWords guru Perry Marshall. His message was a bit unsettling, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the point was very valid.

The subject line of the email was “The appearance of a business vs. a REAL business” and I quickly realized there were some gems of wisdom in the message that we could all learn from.

I’ve done a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects for clients and myself over the years and set up quite a few Pay-per-Click (PPC) campaigns as well, but I’d never seen the difference quite this way.

In the email, Perry tells a story of a “serial entrepreneur” who has built several huge online businesses.

He was looking to branch out into a new product line and looked at a few established websites that were for sale and that specialized in the product he wanted to sell.

He looked at one that was doing $3 million per year in sales with a small staff and strong profitability. It looked great on paper, but he turned down the deal for one very specific reason.

Almost all of this websites traffic was generated from the left side of Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Wait a minute! All of that traffic from free SEO traffic? Sounds like a dream come true, doesn’t it?

The problem was what would he do when the free traffic disappears.
To quote Perry:

“Notice that I said when it goes away not if it goes away. It’s an eventuality that there’ll be some Google Dance and one sad morning, the guy’s showing up on page 6 of Google instead of page 1.”

Uh, oh. That could be a disaster with a capital “D”

The website had no record of being able to build and sustain business predictably by using a method that remains constant, e.g. PPC. Once again, quoting Perry:

“That business, even though on paper it was worth several million
dollars, was not even a real business. It relied on the availability
of free customers – which is a foundation of sand. Temporary
success at best.

(As a matter of fact the owner was afraid to even TOUCH the
website, which was clearly out of date – because he was afraid
changing something might ruin his great SEO rankings.)

If your business is dependent on free customers, you do not
have a business. You do not have any kind of ‘real’ business
until you have the ability to buy advertising from a variety of
available sources and transform that traffic into sales and profits.”

I’ve always been a proponent of optimizing for free traffic. Experience has taught me that “free” traffic is like a “free” cat. The traffic might be free, but the expense of optimization to get that free traffic can cost as much or more than trackable, quantifiable PPC traffic. And you have to wait 3 to 6 months to learn what PPC can teach you in a week.