Sep
22
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.
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3 Responses to “Online Marketing for Local Businesses”
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Vicki, I agree with you completely. In fact, I’ll go one further; local businesses would be better served with a blog format for their internet identity. It is easier to change, easy to update, and much more flexible. This allows a business owner to advertise specials and such easily, on a short notice. You also make a good point about the use of website exotica such as embedded flash animations. It is easy to get carries away and make the site difficult to load and read. People will go on to the next site. Thanks!
Several years ago, my brother and I took over a family business from our father and one of the first things we did is invest in a website. Although the website was not fancy, it was more than functional with information about the store, location, local activities and even a section of tips and techniques.
The problem we ran into was the only people who visited the site were customers we referred to it! Neither we nor our “consultant” understood the steps required to market the site and hence our business online.
Helpful insight like this would have been a great asset …. Where were you then?
… Thanks Vicki
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