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Local Search Marketing – How and Where to Start

By: Scott Gallagher3.5.2010 Comments: 1

Local search marketing is very often misunderstood and confused with online marketing for a small or local business. This isn’t the case.

For starters, search marketing is the process of deploying marketing strategies that help create online transparency and exposure, in turn helping increase a business’ website to show up in the search engines. This is not deploying strategies to manipulate the search engines in showing a particular website. Successfully listing your business in Google Local Business Results requires several key factors.

In the case of Google, there are three typical places a local business can be found for a lucrative return. Assuming a business’ website does show on the first page for a relevant keyword, such as [Chicago painter], those three places are

Organic Results (SEO)
Local Business Results (LBR)
Paid Results – Pay Per Click (PPC)

Therefore, local search marketing is deploying those strategies to get a business effectively placed in those three areas when a relevant keyword is used to trigger such results.

Local Keyword Research

Everything on a search engine starts with a keyword, or sometimes called a keyphrase. Knowing the keywords that people use to search for a local business is critical. There are several ways and methodologies to determine this. Regardless of the method to derive a list, some fundamentals are the same.

You want keywords that are relevant, being used and convert.

Relevancy

For example, if you are painter in Chicago, then the keyword [painter] is not relevant at all; however [Chicago painter] is 100% highly relevant. If you are a painter and have some supplies for resale, then the keyword [painting supplies in Chicago] is relevant for you, however not a core business offering. Therefore, this keyword is likely only 75% relevant. The keyword [Illinois painter] is another example of lower relevancy, however still have some relevancy.

Search Frequency

Obviously, keywords that are searched more frequently are a more lucrative terms to listed in the search engines. However, very often higher searched terms become less relevant because of items like the geographical modifier, or the geomod.

Using tools like Google’s keyword tool will help you determine search frequency.

Conversion

There is a big difference between perceptions of the keyword [Chicago painter] and [Chicago painting services]. Evidence has shown across the board that service terms with a geomod and the term [service] or [services] converts prospects much higher than those service terms without the term [service], as in the case of the keyword [Chicago painter]. You need to focus your marketing efforts on keywords that convert.

Keyword Conclusion

The fact is keyword research is by no means a science. Experts can study keyword research for years and still learn new online behaviors. This is definitely importance to local search marketing, as all three properties use keywords to trigger results. Obtaining proper education on effective keyword research is critical. Taking time to choose the proper mix of an investment into all three strategies is the best mix for almost any local business. Here is a good Local Keyword Tool that you can use.

Pay Per Click, Organic and Local Business Results

Practically any local business with or without a website can promote themselves through the search engines, but without a website one would be restricted to the local business results. All three listings use an algorithm to rank the listings in the search engine results. Each algorithm is independent of the others and require a variety of factors to improve results. Here is a post about PPC versus SEO.

Every local business owner should invest time into understanding the options available to deploy some form of an online search marketing campaign. By gaining an understanding of the options, one can choose to deploy an in house search marketing campaign or hire a professional SEO firm. Considering an effective campaign requires 10-25 weekly total hours, with an effective outsourcing and workforce, many companies are looking for effective SEO agencies who operate qualified agencies.

To learn more about promoting a local business in the search results, read our post about Local Internet Marketing – 10 Tips to Market a Local Business Online

Citations are the New Link

By: admin1.5.2010 Comments: 0

When small businesses are looking for new ideas to create more traffic for their website, their marketing team is more likely to consider new methods of search engine optimization to make their website appear more often when certain phrases are punched into the search engines. This is not an uncommon small business marketing idea, and often is also considered by even larger corporations.

When sites use SEO, links from those sites and other places where their business is mentioned is weighted against that of other sites; thus determining where it ranks compared to the competition. Each search engine has their own formula for determining the ranking of sites, but recently Google and Yahoo have been changing the way that SEO affects different sites in their ranking.

Recently, citation has also been affecting the way that different business sites are ranked in a search. For businesses that are unfamiliar with citation, this is not using certain keywords or phrases, but rather the use of a business’s name, address, and phone number. Commonly, this information is found in sources such as the yellow pages, white pages, and other directories that are not linked to the original website.

For those considering new small business marketing ideas, this has been intriguing since these citations tend to rank equally with other sites, even though they are not connected to the business. This has lead many SEO writers to consider changing their own views on small business marketing ideas. It is also encouraging employers to also post information on different resources that may not be directly connected to their business.

Many businesses that have had high search results seem to have more citations than inbound links. This is proving that Google and Yahoo are webbing their search to smaller sites in keyword and geographic niches; giving sites with more geographic citations more weight.

Proof of this has brought some change to small business marketing ideas, making it beneficial for businesses to look at posting information in more local forums and blogs to help increase their chance of being noticed by the search engines.

Before, many who study small business marketing ideas thought that this technique was a waste of most business’ time since this information had little weight in search results. Through experimentation, however, it is proving that this is no longer the case.

With the new development of these citations, it is becoming beneficial for sites to interact more with organizations in their community. A popular small business marketing idea that is occurring with citations is businesses joining different organizations in their community for free or creating organizations that place their geographic information on websites. Much of this is still experimental, but it is proving to so far be beneficial to those SEO writers who are willing to experiment with this new small business marketing idea.

It is unsure where this will lead in the feature, but it is believed that Google is starting a trend that will soon branch into other search engines, since Google and Yahoo have already been confirmed to cross reference citations and links across one another for accuracy. This is good news for many small businesses and ultimately means more traffic for them in the very near future.

Local Internet Marketing – 10 Tips to Market a Local Business Online

By: Scott Gallagher28.4.2010 Comments: 3

Marketing a local business, or small or medium sized business online isn’t as complicated or challenging as one might imagine. You might have been thinking about investing some money to promote your business online, have tried it and been stung or simply want to learn some techniques to apply yourself or build an agency offering these services to local businesses. Regardless of the size of the business, in today’s day and age almost every single business can benefit with some form of online marketing.

The following list of tips cover the main high level strategies that can drive relationships and business to practically any local business. Understanding that a local business is one that has borders, even United Airlines would be considered local. This list isn’t an all or nothing list either, simply applying a few of these strategies will help your search listings one way or another.

1. Claim Your Listing

Typically found within the organic listings, Google and other search engines display a map with listings typically to the right. These listings are driven from databases throughout the Internet, but Google will look at their database first. You must ‘claim’ your listing from the major search engines. A great tool to use to determine if you have claimed your listings from the major portals is called www.getlisted.org.

2. Reviews

Establishing reviews online for your business is relatively easy to accomplish and provides a tremendous amount of trust to your business. Think of reviews as merely a digital form of word of mouth, which we know is our best form of marketing available, and it’s free.

Obtaining reviews helps do a few things. First, when potential buyers are reading, buyers like to eat at busy restaurants. Next, it establishes authority with the search engines, the more reviews means the more active your business is within the community. Finally, it establishes your service area, the geographical area that you do business with. Whether it be the distance clients come to visit you or how far you’ll travel to visit customers. This pattern is important in order to be shown in Google Places.

3. Consistent Name, Address & Phone Number (NAP)

Your business should be listed in several different areas on the Internet, such as having a YellowPages listing, listings claimed in other directories and search engines, other local websites and other niche based sites. In order to gain higher listings in the results, the organic listings, you require links to your website. Having your business name and address listed is called a citation, and is important in getting higher listings in Google Places, or the local business results. When a citation is listed, your business name, address, phone number and possibly email address should be included, all in the same format. For example

Naparex, LLC
27 N. Wacker Dr. Suite 878
Chicago, IL 60606
Phone: 1-773-649-9212
http://www.naparex.com/chicago-courier-service.html

In this case here this business provides local services to several communities and this is their Chicago listing. We have included a link, not for the purpose of search engine optimization, but in theory to make it easier for the user to reach the page if they want. We are not using any anchor text, but this is for another post. An anchor text link looks like this. [Courier Services]. The address info is the citation and for the purpose of being listed in Google Places, this is all that is required.

4. Proper On-The-Page Factors

There are several On-The-Page factors that are discussed in order to improve your rankings in the search engines for both Google Places and the organic results. Those factors won’t be covered here, but can be found in another post titled Important On-The-Page Triggers for Results with Local Businesses on Google.

On-The-Page factors are items in our control to improve visitor experience on our website, and the search engines take some of these factors into account. While these factors are argued that they only have a weight of about 10%-30% of your rankings, they are critical to have. With very poor on-the-page factors, a website is likely to drop in the rankings.

5. Effective Transparency and Exposure

Many call this off-the-page factors. When considering the organic listings, the greater amount of links you have pointing to your website, the higher you’ll rank, in theory. Every link is not ranked the same and some links will outweigh 1000 of another type. Google Places considers citations and reviews much more than links.

We call this transparency and exposure. You see, this is merely marketing your business, exposing your website in areas that has potential buyers. You do this offline all the time, whether it be your phone number in the phone book, a billboard, radio or cold calling. Exposing your business on the Internet, in the form of links or citations, in the right areas such as geographically related or industry related sites is extremely important. For example, having a local newspaper do a story about your company and service is killer, they’ll post the article online and link to you. Obtaining a relationship with the local college will give you high value links if you can arrange something with them, a donation goes a long way sometimes.

6. Paid Advertising

When users search on a search engine, almost always based on the keyword, the search engine will display some paid results. These results are typically found at the very top and along the right side. These are the only results that one can pay for, and in most cases it’s a pay per click (PPC) model. This is the largest paid distribution channel for small businesses to advertise, however Facebook is creating an extremely powerful marketing tool for local businesses.

Google’s PPC system is called adwords and it’s not too difficult to operate a campaign on your own. However, I will caution you, it is estimated over half of PPC campaigns are failures. This is not because the system doesn’t work, it does, this is because of ignorant marketers. This is not a system anyone can just jump into and run a profitable campaign. Not that this doesn’t happen, it’s that this is a mathematical and numbers game. The knowledge isn’t hard to obtain or execute, but some knowledge is very important. I suggest if you want a good book to read, my friend’s book is titled Adwords for Dummies.

7. Email Marketing

Email marketing is said to provided the greatest return on your investment of any online initiative. In fact, many reports indicate that the average small business receives more that a $45 return on every dollar invested into email marketing.

Again, similar to all other initiatives, it’s not entirely in the execution, it’s the quality of the execution. Far too often do email marketing campaigns solicit direct business. This does work, in many different business models, however for a lot of business models it’s a killer. Imagine a dentist. It’s possible, more so in the US, that a blatant promotion might garner some short term activity, such as a discount on a cleaning. However, providing consistent education to your target audience will provide much better long term results. This dentist might want to include simple, to the point education on the cleaning agents they use and how they are better. Then after the education piece, offer a discount to try it out. The email can lead one to a blog for greater detail. This builds trust, authority and provides value to the audience, who are your future and existing customers.

8. Social Media Marketing

There has been so much buzz over the last couple of years about Facebook, Twitter and somewhat with LinkedIn for business. The jury is still out for many strategies using these platforms, however one thing is clear. These sites foster relationships, and business is all about relationships.

Twitter, like Google and links, is not about your follower count. It’s about the quality of your followers. Your business followers don’t care much about your personal life, but offer value they would expect from a business such as yours.

Facebook is a great place to meet new prospects in local groups. Just remember these groups are really only productive when you give first, offer value to the community and you’ll be rewarded.

These are time consuming tasks and can lead to little success. At the very least, get yourself and your business accounts at these sites. Facebook you can create a page attached to your account and attract followers where you can offer promotions, tips and interaction. If you have more time, get yourself some education on this concept.

9. Video Marketing

We have now recently entered a time where anyone can broadcast to a large audience anywhere on the planet. Cellular phones now offer real time streaming, hosting sites offer HD on super high speed connections, video software is easy and inexpensive to use and we have a hungry audience looking for choice over the mainstream content. Search engines are frantically building technology to index and properly rank this content so only the best content, unbiased of publisher monetary status, will be ranked high. There is no reason why every local business shouldn’t create some video content. There are simply so many different ways and options that a business can use online video. From easy, high rankings in the search engines, to interactive content for future and existing customers to a perceived first mover advantage, employing some video strategy is critical in today’s online marketing initiative.

10. Long Term Vision

Like most marketing campaigns offline, deploying almost any strategy online takes time to yield a positive return on your investment. One thing is for sure, online marketing is critical for most business success in the future. Therefore, almost every business in one form or another must possess the education prior to execution. Every business is likely going to either have these services in house, outsource them to a local agency or have a hybrid of services.

Even with PPC, education and an execution plan with testing is critical. A commitment of time and money is required, but when done properly, every local business can benefit from online marketing.

Opt-in to the box on the right to instantly download a 21-page PDF outlining in greater detail aspects, strategies, statistics and facts about this industry.

Local Business Center now Google Places

By: Scott Gallagher22.4.2010 Comments: 1

Announced on April 20th, 2010, Google has changed the name of their Local Business Center to Google places.

This is merely a branding move in our opinion. We have seen evidence of Google expanding their search capabilities for local businesses since 2005 and the greatest changes happening in the last year.

About year ago I wrote about the local service area challenge. We called for a solution and basically had predicted that the search engines must introduce this to solve the challenge. The post resulted in a phone call from Kevin Hagwell, Local Product Manager from BING. We knew we were on to something.

I find it interesting that the change of the face of the Local Business Center to Google Places addresses this major concern. With this change, this is was the first promoted feature of this service, defining a service area. A local business can define a service area now right inside of Google places. It’s not like businesses are going to skew their service area, therefore what else does Google have to verify and validate this service area?

Well, at LMS we don’t teach you to chase the algorithm. We teach fundamental marketing principals. By creating targeted transparency and exposure, a business will thrive on Google. It’s just marketing, period. But how does one assign trust and authority to this service area they are telling Google.

Reviews

Customers leaving reviews leave a footprint. This footprint over time establishes a service area. Reviews are tagged with a location, either IP or mobile locations. Reviewer accounts have authority and have locations attached to them, and their friends, and their friends, and so on. Active social accounts are darn near impossible to create and maintain without being sniffed out as spam if you are creating them solely for links.

With the introduction of the LIKE button and the fact that the web is a very transparent network with real people, two companies have changed the game.

Google is making businesses better businesses.

Facebook is making people better people.

This is all being done through honesty, transparency and exposure. And I was taught in school that ethics are rarely found in the business dictionary.

Targeted Email Marketing for Local Business

By: admin22.4.2010 Comments: 0

One of the most powerful marketing practices for a small business is email marketing. For many local businesses, this is a very cost efficient form of marketing that reaches a variety of clients not only in their local community, but across the Internet in the areas of their niche. There are a variety of small business marketing services available to help small businesses create effective email campaigns.

Most local businesses are familiar with Internet email marketing, but have not considered using this method within their own businesses. A multitude of small business marketing services provide tools for creating effective advertising through welcoming emails such as email advertisements. These emails can be in the form of product advertisements that look similar to printed ads, but are available at a more cost efficient price for most businesses who wish to get customers to their site.

Products are available to businesses to help create such advertisements, but many local businesses use small business marketing services for the creation of these advertisements since they can be time consuming. Most marketing services fees are worth the overhead cost since these advertisements are more likely to get clients to revisit online businesses.

Another popular email marketing technique used by local businesses is in the form of email newsletters. These newsletters are designed to be more personal, aimed toward reoccurring business. Through these newsletters, a local business can advertise new products or services that are available, along with strengthening their company’s own image.

Online, there are a variety of small business marketing services that are willing to help companies create personable newsletters that are designed to keep clients. Along this same line, many marketing services use email marketing in the form of getting new clients to sign up for free newsletters with the promise of new products or helpful advice to help them in an area of interest. Again, both of these newsletters are designed to be more personable to strengthen the bond between the client and business.

Many services also provide email marketing campaigns that are available to local businesses. Through these campaigns, the local business can expect for the marketing service to create emails that will go to a variety of email lists to advertise their specific product. With these services, businesses can expect that the campaign will be tracked using sophisticated statistics to determine the direction in which the business should take to best capture the attention of their customer base. It is important that a local business research their chosen small business marketing services since the success of their email campaign can be determined by the type of lists being chosen by the service.

A carefully thought out plan for email marketing can bring success to any size of company, but it can be especially beneficial for small, local companies. Once a local company has found a business that meets their individual requirements for email marketing, it does not take long for new clients and better client relations to be achieved.

Important On-The-Page Triggers for Results with Local Businesses on Google

By: Scott Gallagher21.4.2010 Comments: 0

I have seen time and time again that a website’s rankings take a significant jump by changing some of more important on-the-page factors. This applies to both the organic results and the local business results.

Organic

Organic results

Local businesses definitely need to be working towards ranking on both the organic listings and the local business results. These are the results that we have become so familiar with.

There are several on-the-page factors that influence how the search engines rank pages. There were times that this wasn’t as important for some search engines, including Google, however while these factors do not have significant weight on the ranking, their presence is critical.

Look at it this way. You can look at your website like a race car. You can have the car decked out with a supercharger, high performance brakes and suspension but if you don’t have the tires, the car won’t perform. Even using low performance tires the car will still move, but won’t win the race. Some say getting second means you’ve the first person to lose the race. This is a scaled down list however represents about 80% of the on-the-page efforts. While there are several factors that influence the search engines on-the-page, these following factors are most critical:

Quality Unique Content – You’ve heard it over and over and over.
Use some keyword rich text based links – all pages need to be accessible
Unique keyword rich titles
Keyword rich H1 tags
Optimized images – avoid words and use text when possible – small kb – alt info
Quick loading speed – Google recently introduced page loading speed as a ranking factor

Local Business Results

local-business-results1

These results are fairly new and come into play when certain keywords are used. Google decides what keyword triggers the local business results. They are getting pretty good at figuring out most local searches, typically either triggered by your IP address or adding a goemod, a geographical modifier. A geomod can be a city, town, village, postal / zip code or sometimes local jargon [chitown pizza delivery].

When a local business comes into play, there are several factors that the search engines look at to validate the businesses’ credibility. One must first understand that a listing in the local business results does not mean that one has a website. A business does not need a website be listed here. A business needs quality transparency and exposure.

When a business does have a website, the website is essentially attached to the listing’s profile and most times Google will include a direct link to your website from the SERP. Sometimes they won’t and for that reason is why we are considering on-the-page factors for the local business results.

You see, Google’s philosophy is essentially they believe that a listing needs to have a physical address and that listing needs to be trusted. Since there is never a person checking these results, the algorithm ranks many factors. If the listing is trusted is will rank high. How to rank these listing is another post, but remember that if the listing shows, the on-the-page factors determine how much exposure Google will give that business’ website. Do you want the generic Google page or the business’ page influencing conversion? Do what you can to get traffic to the website by improving the click through rate in the local business results listing by optimizing these following on-the-page factors:

Full business name and address on at least one page of the website
- Preferably at the bottom of each page in small font. Ensure your N.A.P. (Name – Address – Phone number) are congruent. Ie. 200 N Harrison St is much different than 200 North Harrison St.
Full phone number to the main phone line that is published in the phone book.
- Do not use tracking phone numbers. Use text based on pages when possible.
Include the surrounding areas that the business covers whenever describing the services, or benefits.
Include local jargon and discuss the value of the business to the local area.
Directions to your location, such as an embedded map, especially if you’re a business that has walk in traffic.
Location pages for each physical location the business has or in some cases location pages for the major suburbs a business facilitates serves
Proper internal linking structure and page naming conventions