Getting Your Neighbors To Stop By

We (online marketers) no longer have to persuade 99% of the people we meet that the Yellow Pages phone book is essentially dead as an effective investment of your marketing dollars, and that search engines (read: Google) are the way new prospects will find your local business. Today, nearly everyone realizes we’re all going online to find local services. Local search engine optimization is simply one of the most effective strategies to position yourself to generate more leads from the internet:

• Increase local visibility by optimizing your local directory listings
• Produce more authoritative results within the local online listings
• Redirection to your website is free unlike paid display advertisements

The idea behind local SEO is simple
When you search for a product or service, Google search results can be broken up into two different categories:

• National (or world) results, and
• Local results, i.e. just those businesses close to the searcher’s location

The organic results are the regular search results that appear below the paid advertisements (in some cases is hard to tell). These results are calculated by the search engine’s algorithm (computer program) using a variety of technical factors, but essentially the results are telling us these are the most ‘popular’ results in America.

Not bad, eh? Who wouldn’t want that kind of credibility and prestige, not to mention the legitimate traffic benefit, of being on page one in search engine results pages (SERP)? Well it’s a good thing for sure, but (a) competing withe the whole world is tough, and (b) chances are consumers in Los Angeles aren’t going to care much about your business in Atlanta, GA. Clearly it makes sense to allocate more of your time, energy and resources into being on page one of the SERP for those local searches. Generating leads and new business locally is the name of your game!

Get Started
Ready to Take Action? Call me today for a free discussion about your business, your digital marketing strategy, and ideas for how you can rethink your marketing out of industrial age strategies and into the internet age. Done right, internet marketing and specifically Local SEO can help you get more customers, more sales and grow your business.

Every business needs a digital presence (read: website, social media pages) , but that’s not news to you. What may be news to you though are the three key objectives that your website needs to meet when your visitors arrive.

1. Professional Image: 15 years ago qualifies as “back in the day” in internet years. You may recall that any website 15 years ago was acceptable, and there were some pretty awful ones. Today that’s definitely no longer the case. Your visitors will infer many things about your business from the look and feel of your website. Their capacity to “know, like and trust you” starts with how professional, credible and authoritative your site looks. Today’s web visitor assumes that shoddy website = shoddy business, and you don’t want to provide that perception.

2. Unique Selling Proposition: Whatever you sell or service, you’ve got competition. Which leaves your customer with the question “which business should I pick?” Assuming they don’t have some other influencer affecting their decision such as a personal referral, they will tend to look for the best fit for their exact needs.

You can’t be all things to all people, but you can be very unique and specific in something that you do. That is your unique selling proposition. Whether it’s home delivery, 24 hour customer service, targeting a specific demographic (seniors, military, newly married, etc), the more specific your selling proposition is, the more likely you’ll stand out to a given segment of your audience. As Seth Godin observed in “Purple Cow”, you need to be remarkable and one way to be remarkable is to make your offer very unique and specific.

3. Clear Call To Action: The success rate of your web presence as a lead generator improves greatly for websites which include a call to action. Whether it’s a request to call for a free quote, download a free report or click a specific link or button to move from the landing page to a desired information page, you should want your visitor to take some “next” action. We tend to do what we’re asked or told, so when someone lands on your webpage be sure to tell them what action you want them to take, and make it easy for them to follow that course.