Internet Advertising on the Rise

Here is a very interesting article about how small businesses are spending their budgets for lead generation. Obviously leads are the lifeblood for any business and spending money to get them is one of the most profitable ventures for a business. It is quite easy to track and figure out your return on investment with most lead gen programs and these leads usually provide for immediate income instead of branding which requires long term investments.

If you look at the top four categories of website design, e mail marketing, new social media, and website optimization, you realize they work with each other. You design your website, its content, and search optimization around driving more qualified customers to your website. Once there your goal is to get them to opt in to your e mail list so that you may market to them for a long time. Once you build up a large list you are no longer at the mercy of traditional advertising to drive people into your storefront.

I also find it interesting that businesses stopped doing most things advertising related in 2009 and now are jumping head first in 2010. This tells me that businesses feel that the economy is turning around and an opportunity exists. Those businesses who start the earliest will have the most “bang for their buck” as some companies are behind the eight ball.

As more lead generation shifts to the internet the ability to track and change campaigns make it very attractive. For instance if you depend on yellow pages you get one attempt and if it fails you are stuck for the year. Most traditional forms of advertising are also hard to track and judge effectiveness. The internet gives you the ability to see what campaign is working in real time, adjust that campaign overnight, and test against other campaigns to see which is most effective.

Have a look at the e marketer article below and start thinking about how to use this information to your advantage. If you would like to talk with someone about it feel free to call or e mail me through the contact page.

Marketers Put More Lead Gen Budgets Online – eMarketer

The Future is Mobile Web

Just this weekend I traveled from Boston to Denver via car. It was during this trip that I really realized how important a company’s website was. When we were going to be in a city or just arrived we looked up destinations via the internet or mobile phone. Unless we wanted to waste time this was the best and fastest way to find what we were looking for. We also looked at the online ratings to see if they were good or bad. If you have a business that depends on people finding you, having your website mobile friendly is crucial.

Everyplace we stopped we didn’t know what was there or where to find restaurants, hotels, or any places of interest. The simplest way to find places was to look up via mobile phone the different places. Research has proven that most local shoppers research their information online before buying locally. Although the mobile phone is still a minority of online researching it is gaining a lot of steam.

“There has also been a doubling in usage of mobile shopping, according to PriceGrabber.com’s “Smartphone Shopping Behavior” survey. In April 2010, 35% of US Web-enabled mobile phone owners said they had participated in some form of mobile shopping in the past year, such as browsing or researching but not necessarily purchasing products.” emarketer.com June 3rd, 2010.

Now is the time to get your business prepared for the future of mobile shopping. This will be more and more important for you to get a leg up on the competition. After all everyone now has a mobile phone and many are now switching to web enabled phones. Don’t be saying in 3 years…. wish I had set up for the mobile phone search.

Basic Keyword Research

The first step of SEO for a local website is the most important step and is the base for all you do. That step is keyword research and selection of keywords for your small business website. If done correctly you should only have to do this once maybe twice if you do a pay per click campaign. Do this wrong and you will have to redo your website and change the content later on. You will have wasted time and money chasing after the wrong crowd.

Keyword research can cover a lot of different areas so we are going to narrow down this keyword research to just organic seo campaigns. By organic we mean what searchers would look for when trying to find a business in Google. We then are going to break that into three more areas that we will cover in this article. The first step is looking at the raw data. Then we will look at the sites that are in Google already. Finally we will put it all together by making some hard decisions on what to use.

How do we find the data involved in keyword research. There are many tools you can use but the fastest and easiest is the Google adwords keyword tool. Most people will tell you to go for the largest phrase and optimize your site for that keyword. This is actually not what you want to do if you want to rank for your local business. You are actually looking for “buyer phrases” not high search volume phrases. As a small business you want to find what local buyers are typing in because that is where your customers will come from. The other reason you want local buyer phrases is because you will be able to rank for it much faster than the more competitive general phrase.

Once you know what your keyword phrases are going to be it is time to do some research. Look up the sites that are ranking for those terms and write them down. Next go into the keyword tool like before and check the box website content and see what keywords come up. If you missed some keywords your competitors might help you find them. Next you want to look up their back links through backlinkfinder.com or another site like it. Find out where they got their links from and go get them also. Finally you are going to go into your browser and look up each site and do a view in the tab then page source. Here you will see their title, description, H1 tags and keywords. You can pattern your site after the top ones which will help you to get up there faster.

Now that you have done a lot of research you can make some choices for your keywords. You should have a list of hundreds of keywords and phrases to use. It is imperative to narrow the list down to a manageable amount. The fastest way to get clients coming in is to break keywords down by competition then searches. For competition go to Google search box and do an “allintitle: keyword” search without quotes into Google. Anything under 10,000 is very easy to rank for. Start with those phrases first which should immediately start the cash flow through internet visitors. While they are ranking well then target keywords with up to 25,000 “allintitle” and so forth up the line.

Obviously there is a lot more to be done but I had to limit the scope of this article. If you can use these free keyword tools then you can be successful in your keyword research. At some point you will want to dig further and analyze with some other tools. At that time have an expert do this for you.

How to Handle a Bad Economy

The more news I read the more I hear that small business is really hurting during this economic downturn. While I understand the anxiety that many business owners face, one must ask, what are you doing about it? Are you just complaining or are you taking new steps to drum up business. With less money floating around now is the time to be aggressive versus sitting around hoping and complaining that they just walk through your door.

Let’s look at the average consumer these days. Getting a good deal is very important to them. That is why nearly 80% of local buyers will shop via the internet first. This is fast and requires no outlay to find a good offer. Once they find that offer they buy it over the internet and have it delivered. NO THEY DON’T! While a good price is important it is still more important to know they have someone standing behind the product. The last thing anyone can afford is money that is wasted through an unscrupulous internet seller, so they will purchase it locally almost 70% of the time.

This then begs the question what are you doing to get in front of this person? Are you just there hoping they will find you? This is what I mean by being aggressive in your small business. First make sure you are ranking high in Google for all local search terms. I won’t go into numbers but you need to be on the first page or people won’t find you. When they do find you it is imperative you drive them into your store.

Next, you must be making a splash in social networking. Not only do these sites rank high, there are thousands of potential buyers there. They congregate to discuss things and some of the discussions will be about have you ever bought X? If you sell X wouldn’t you want to be in that discussion?

The internet is a lot like being in a mall with buyers all around. Do you close the storefront? No you put deals and specials at the door that almost begs consumers to come in and check out your store. You give away little knick knacks that almost guilt the shopper to come in. You hand out coupons all over the mall to try and drive people into the store. The owner stands in a place to welcome and introduce themselves inspiring trust.

So know look at your website like it is a storefront in a mall. Give away coupons to get them to come in. Make sure you list your loss leaders on the front page to keep people at your store. Use social sites to get them to know and like you. They will be loyal if they know, like, and trust you.

These are all things you can accomplish on your own to drive up sales. They do take time and effort but will be worth it now and in the future. The difference with marketing on the internet it stays versus other advertising that needs to be constantly run. If you don’t think you have the time or expertise, look up a local seo person to help. They are small business owners like yourself and understand how to implement this strategy at the best cost for you. I, of course, would be willing to help!

Location is important with Google

Local SEO is becoming more important to local small businesses than ever before. The search engines are becoming more advanced and try to send local searchers and buyers to localized websites. As this trend continues, those small businesses that optimize for local search will have a step ahead of the rest. Hiring someone now who can optimize your site for mobile marketing and local search will prepare you for the flood of searches that is coming. It will be harder to remove you from the top position as you have been there along time and were optimized first. I would highly recommend that you plan for local internet marketing now to take advantage of the wave to come. Start by reading this informative article and make a comment on my blog.

In recent months, Google has already begun placing a great deal more emphasis on location than it has in the past. For example, last month, the search engine added a new search option to its list, called “nearby.” This lets users filter their results based on either their default location or a custom one.

Google: Location a “Hugely Important” Signal | WebProNews

Tags: LocalSeo Help

Google and Relevant Search Results

Here is a great article about how Google treats incoming links. There has been so much said about building links to quickly at your blog and how you will be “sandboxed”. In the world of social media and SEO this just doesn’t make sense. You can have a great article and have it go viral with thousands of links appearing. Google is not going to deindex you or drop your rankings with such a popular article. they would be doing a disservice to it’s readers if that were the case. What if that article or blog then didn’t receive any more links? Then Google will look at the velocity of links and if you get no more inbound links it may then drop you. I think the key is consistantly building links and not overduing it at first and stopping. It seems many think this is the way search results should work. What are your thoughts?

Google’s Need For Freshness Sours Search Results | WebProNews

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we main gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

Compete with Large Companies with SEO

Competing with Big Companies using SEO

Local Seo Help | Learn from your rivals

Dominating Local search through your online websites is a key going forward to drive interested buyers to your store. Over 80% of all local buyers search on the web for research and to find local stores to shop at. Over 90% of them make a decision based on the first page of the search engine results. If you are not on page one you will miss out on a majority of traffic and possible clients. In the future this will expand even further, so now is the time to dominate your local market so no competitors can beat you out.

Understanding what your competitors are doing online is a must and absolute priority when launching a new website that is entering a competitive space and also when established websites want to keep an eye on their competition.

SEO Competitive Intelligence : Learn From Your SEO Rivals | Search Engine Journal

Tags: localseo help

LOcal Seo Tips | 55 Quick SEO Tips

Here are 55 search engine optimization tips that even your mother would love and even be able to implement. When dealing with SEO it is good to have a checklist of items and just go down it and check them off. If you don’t use a list you will forget items that will help drive your rankings higher. I highly recommend reading this article and then make your own list to follow.

Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.

55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love | Search Engine Journal

Tags: localseo help