Sep

22

Online Marketing for Local Businesses

Filed Under Website Marketing | 3 Comments

Most local businesses now have a website, an online presence. Since the majority of the local business owner’s day to day tasks are running the business, there is not much time for marketing the website. It does not take long to discover that simply having a website will not bring massive amounts of visitors.

There are local businesses that have spent a great deal of money to have a service design a fancy website for the company. This might include flash and great graphics. It usually does not include marketing the website, and often does not include certain code behind the website that makes it search engine friendly.

Flash on a website may look good but the website visitor can experience problems loading the website. If the site is hard to navigate, or it takes too long to locate the desirable information on the website, it will not keep a visitor’s attention. People want to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. Another point worth noting is that some websites focus too much on what the company is about rather than what they will provide for the customer.

Why does a website need to be search engine friendly? One of the main purposes a local business needs an online presence is because today people search online to find information about local businesses. If the website is not optimized for local search, it is not going to show up at the top of the search results where people are searching.

Let’s look at a couple basic things that a website should have. First, is the title of the website. This is also what shows up in the blue bar at the top of your computer screen when you are viewing the website. The search engines look for keywords in this title. Many local businesses list their company name and possibly something like ‘Serving the Community for 30 years.’

There are a couple of things wrong with a title like that. First, there may be people that search for the company name, but often they are already established customers or possibly a referral from a customer. For new business, the website needs to attract people that are searching for their product or service. Those names need to be in the title of the website if possible. Also, the name of the location can be included in the title tag for better search results in the local area.

These are just a couple of very basic beginning points for a local business website. It is these foundation points that we must have in place in order to build a successful internet marketing plan for the website. Next post we will discuss the process of keyword research.

To learn more about establishing a partnership for marketing a local business website, visit Online Marketing for Local Businesses.

Sep

6

Investors Business Daily Talks Search Engine Web Marketing

Filed Under Internet Marketing, Website Marketing | 2 Comments

In Friday’s issue of Investors Business Daily there were two articles about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and its benefits compared with buying search ads (Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN, and a host of other sites that sell ads). Search engine web marketing has a paid side and a free side. A large budget may be needed to do run ads in the paid area.

IBD stated that with search engines becoming a bigger source of web traffic – how many times do people ‘Google’ something every day – companies are more interested in getting that traffic.
Many of the larger (Fortune 500 size) companies are doing both. Recently, these bigger companies have increased their SEO efforts after seeing the benefits their website gets back. Small and medium size companies can compete in the same markets as large companies if they do their SEO work correctly, and target the right search terms (keywords).

The free side of search is the organic, or natural, search results that are returned when people type their search words into Google and other search engines, and it really is valuable traffic. Many people will only look at those results – not at the paid ads that appear down the right side of the page and a couple at the top on the left. Under the ads at the top on the left side are the organic search results. In order to rank well in the natural results, your search engine web marketing needs to be optimized for the search engines so that they reward it with a high ranking.

The art of SEO involves finding the right keywords to target for search engine web marketing efforts, and then designing the site so that search engines will not only find it but reward it with a top ranking. In addition, there are SEO strategies and good old fashioned ‘work’ to do on the website that will help its perceived value to the search engine rises. IBD stated that the competition is very intense and not many companies will share their SEO strategies because of that. One way that I have learned to be able to rise above the competition is in the keyword research area.

If website owners are not able to get to the top few spots on the first page of a search engine for their keywords, they are most probably targeting the same keywords as too many other websites in their search engine web marketing endeavors. In some markets, the majority of websites are using the same keywords. They can’t all end up in the top spots. Every market has what we call money keywords, or profitable keywords. These are words or phrases that get significant searches every month, but don’t have as many websites already targeting them. With some SEO work, website owners can rank quickly for these money keywords and start to see lots more traffic come to their website.

The IBD article talked about the long term benefits of SEO. If a company stops their ads today, the ad goes down and no additional traffic can go to the website from that point on. This type of search engine web marketing is gone until the company decides to start paying for the ad again.

In contrast, SEO work that includes good content on the website, and on other websites that link back to the original website, is information that will be up on the search engines for a long time to come. The benefits from this type of search engine web marketing work you do for your website today will continue to pay off for years down the road. With SEO, there is more up-front work and cost in getting the work done, but with long term benefits. And it all centers around keyword, terms, or phrases.

Investors Business Daily states that, “If a company depends on Web traffic for sales, you can bet it’s using search-engine optimization, or SEO, to boost its search ranking.” Some brands do not sell from their websites, but for those of us that do want to do more business from our websites, the time is now to put an SEO plan together and work that plan consistently. It is worth the time and effort for your search engine web marketing, even if you must outsource the basic keyword research if you don’t know how to do it thoroughly or are not getting any traffic to your website with your existing keywords, to secure the right keywords that can take your SEO efforts to a whole new level by helping to put your website far ahead of your competition.