Where is My Business

Three Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Will — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:33:13 +0000

The Internet is a giant research tool. Your customers are becoming more and more savvy as each day goes by, researching products, features, benefits and of course prices. If you aren’t taking advantage of that trend, you’re missing out.

SEO

One of the best ways to build more traffic to your website is to take advantage of search engine optimization. Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website for keywords that your customers are using every day when they do their research.

Optimizing your website design is a good place to start. Make sure your website is clear and concise, and every visitor understands just where they are (with your branding and logo) and isn’t cluttered with useless boxes or animations.

Each page on your site should target a single keyword or keyphrase. Make sure you have a nice headline (with your keyword in it, of course) and your copy for that page includes the keyword a few times.

Don’t overdo it, though. The copy should still be in ‘normal English’ and not marketer-speak.

Content

One of the best things you can do for your website is to add a blog. And I don’t mean your daily diary of what you eat and how your Mom is doing. I mean real meaty content – things that are affecting your industry and answer questions that your customers always ask. The kind of stuff that makes you sound like an expert.

Why?

Because you’ll sound like an expert. And people love dealing with experts.

There are probably a hundred or a thousand people right now that know what you know about your industry. But I’d be willing to bet that less than a handful of them are leveraging that expertise online.

There’s a huge harvest of customers out there just looking for a solution to a problem, and you can be the one that solves it for them. Writing a weekly blog post that answers a question you hear all the time will not only portray you as the expert, but it will also create links from other websites back to yours. And every link is like a vote.

Video

The last thing that you can do to get more traffic is to start dabbling in the world of video. Did you know that the number two search engine isn’t Yahoo!, Bing, or AOL? It’s YouTube.

If I were to ask my kids today to go look something up online, there’s a good chance they’d go to YouTube to start looking.

Nearly 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of the day. While that seems like a lot, there is still only a small amount of videos that are actually optimized for certain keywords and keyphrases. And Google is working hard to optimize those videos with use of voice recognition software.

Between Google’s voice recognition and your brief description of the video when you upload it, you’ll rank in the search engines quick. And with Google’s new universal search, your video will not only show up as a search result, but it could also potentially push a competitors’ website off the first page – giving you even more traffic.

Summary

The smart use of search engine optimization techniques, creating quality content and video will thrust your website traffic past your competitors in no time.

7 Tips for Being Found in Local Search

Will — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 14:44:47 +0000

There has been a huge increase in the ‘hyper-local’ scene for a few years now. Ever since Google changed the way they show their local results, the local small business owner has gained a signifigant advantage over big box corporations when it comes to online reach. The hyper-local movement, if you will, has created some great local review sites, the Check In feature (first on FourSquare, then on Facebook and Google+), some great local bloggers and a vast variety of local news websites (such as the patch system).

Along with these changes, business owners – particularly those in the service industry – have been given a great opportunity to really dominate their local landscape.

To take advantage of that potential, small business owners are doing what they think is obvious when it comes to getting that hyper-local traffic. Following are some tips on getting your business noticed in local searches.

Location in Title Tag

In most cases, this is a no-brainer. I’ve posted many times before on the importance of a title tag, and this one is no different. Adding your main targeted city in the title tag will improve your rankings for related searches.

Method: Keyword | Keyphrase | City
Example: Dentist | Dental Care | St Louis

Claim Your Google Places Listing

Just the other day I was visiting a local client of mine who sells items for the home. While visiting, he received a phone call about one of his items, and at the end of the call he asked where they found his number. Their reply – Google Maps (ie Google Places).

The last time I read stats on this, only 12% of all businesses had claimed their business listing. Of those 12%, only about 4% of them have done a full optimization of their Google Places listing. With over 50% of the US population now carrying smart phones, this is another no-brainer. Claim your listing. Optimize it to its full potential. Now.

Map on Your Home Page

Because a map takes up a significant amount of room, I’d say it’s a bad idea to put one on your home page. Home page real estate is very valuable, and that real estate should be used for more important SEO-related things, such as text, calls to action, and featured items/products/services/sales.

There are exceptions, or course. If the majority of your visitors are simply searching for a location to visit, and not expecting to shop online, a map may be a good idea. For instance, if you ran a business that did STD testing in Chicago, you may want to have a map that listed the locations where people can visit. There is no physical product being sold, and a testing location is all the visitor really needs.

Mention Landmarks

One of the many algorithms that the search engines use is related to something called Latent Symantic Indexing (LSI). Without going into detail, LSI looks for related words in a website or web page that helps it determine if it is worthy of moving up in the rankings.

For example, if you own an Italian restaurant, the LSI system would look for words like ‘pasta’ and ‘fork’ and ‘sauce’ – words you’d probably use in a normal conversation when talking about that restaurant.

Same goes for local-related websites. If you simply pepper the pages with St Louis, that may not be enough. But mentioning landmarks such as the Gateway Arch, Ted Drewes and Art Hill, you’re more likely to see better results and rankings.

Get Reviews

My wife loves to read reviews. When she’s researching a company, a hotel, or a restaurant, she’ll always read through the reviews – and will base her conceptions of the business upon them.

Your follow up strategy with every customer needs to include getting reviews. It’s becoming more and more a must-have – and it doesn’t really matter if you ignore this advice – people are probably already writing reviews about your company anyway.

In your follow up email, point your customer to a page where they can review your business. This page could be your Google Places page, your Yelp page or any variety of others. Or – you can build a page that gives them several options. In my opinion, this is a better idea, because the reviews will be somewhat randomly placed throughout the Internet, and not all in one place. For an example, check out the “Review Us” page at Sunshine Drapery.

Citations

In the world of SEO, we say that Content is King and Links are Queen. In the world of hyper-local SEO, another phrase needs to be added – something like Citations are the Prince. While good content and a good linking strategy is very important for your business, getting citations is not to be ignored.

A citation is simply a business listing – a mention of your business name, address and phone number – somewhere on the web. These mentions are noticed by the search engines, and influence where your business is listed in things like the 7 pack. The more citations you have, the better you’ll rank.

Your Address in the Footer

Putting your address in the footer of every page on your website is a smart idea. Not everyone goes to your Contact Us page to find your information. On top of that, putting your address on your website will help sites like Google Places believe you have a real location.

Of course, if you work out of your home, this may not be a great idea. In that case, I’d recommend a UPS box or other physical location where you can collect mail (no PO Boxes though).

Three Tools for Spying on Your Competitors

Will — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:16:31 +0000

When you’re in business, there’s no better thing to urge you on like a competitor’s success. Losing a big contract or opportunity to an industry neighbor is fuel enough to get most business owners moving. Wouldn’t it be nice if, say, every time your competitor put up something new on their website, that you knew about it right away?

The great thing about the Internet is that everything (well, almost everything) is public. Once you publish something online, it’s out there for your customers, vendors and competitors to consume – like it or not.

But most of your competitors aren’t going to visit your website on a regular basis to see what you’re up to. And let’s face it – you’re not about to do that either. What you need are a few automated shortcuts that can help alert you when there’s activity so you can be less of a reactive company. And that’s what I intend on showing you today – ways that you can spy on your competitors.

Google Alerts

By now most business owners that receive some sort of online newsletter or read Internet marketing-related blogs have heard about Google Alerts. This is, in my opinion, one of Google’s best tools, and one of their most under-utilized tools for marketing purposes.

The Google Alert system simply takes phrases that you input, and every time that phrase shows up on the Internet, a custom email is sent to you with a link to the new web page. And much like Google’s search capabilities, you can add delimiters and other special characters to your alerts to really hone in on specific queries and phrases.

For purposes of this example, we’ll be a dentist in Saint Louis, Missouri. Our competition is, well, other dentists. So here are some likely queries that I’d like to target:

dentist st. louis
st louis dentist -medicare
saint louis dentist -medicare
st louis dental
saint louis dental
“dental hygeine” st louis
“tooth decay” st louis
braces st louis
braces saint louis
“braces st louis”
“braces saint louis”

There are a few things to think about when putting your list together. First, start with your keyword research list. Your keyword research list is all the words that you think potential customers may type in to find your business, and it’s very likely that a competitor would have a similar list if they also did keyword research. So watching new pages that they create around these phrases can help you improve your own pages as well.

On top of these phrases, I’d also like to target a few individual dentists who I happen to know are either actively marketing online or appear to be considering online alternatives as part of their future marketing strategy. Maybe you’ve heard that a competitor is in the building stages of a new website – this is a great way to keep an eye on them. In your Google Alerts profile, simply put their domain name:

site:domain.com

Now, every time there is a change to your competitor’s website, no matter what the change, the Google Alert system will tell you about it. If you start to see a lot of changes being done, you can assume they are taking steps to get better rankings, and are worth watching more carefully.

SEM Rush

I’m a big fan of this website. SEMRush lets you put in particular keywords and see what sort of online competition there is, and it also lets you filter results by domain name.

Putting in your domain name yields some valuable information – such as who (they think) your online competitors are. If you see a list of your competitors, then you’re on the right track. If you see a list of various unrelated websites, then you know your SEO efforts are not working well.

Putting in a competitors website tields some even better information, such as what keywords they are bidding on in PPC (if any), what keywords they are currently ranking for, and what sort of traffic their website is getting on a monthly basis. How do you stack up?

There is a ton on information available at SEM Rush, and the basic service is free – even better!

Get An Outside Opinion

What better way to spy on a competitor than to see just what their customer base thinks as they trudge through a purchase or blog? We use UserTesting.com quite often to test our own sites, as well as competitors that we think are doing a pretty good job with their Internet marketing.

Did a competitor recently launch a new portion of their website, perhaps a blog or new product section? Why not have anonymous users give you feedback from their perspective about the website’s layout, functionality and overall look & feel? Then take that information and make your website even better.

Dominate Your Industry

Don’t just use these tools to spy and see what your competitors are up to – use them to get ahead of your competitors! These three tools will give you a huge advantage and will show you just what your adversarys are up to – and will give you the knowledge and ability to get ahead of them in the SERPS!

Are You Keeping it Fresh?

Will — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 16:54:31 +0000

For several years now, our good friend Russ Henneberry has been preaching to small business owners about the importance of content marketing. Good content, updated regularly, is a terrific way to get more traffic and become a subject matter expert in your industry.

This past week, Google introduced a new ‘Freshness Update’ to the SERPs – and it has changed some things for business owners. Suddenly, fresh content is more of a contributing factor in how your site is ranked and displayed on Google. Just as Russ has been saying for several years, it’s more important now then ever to blog for your business.

How the Freshness Update Works

Affecting about 35% of searches, the freshness update takes into account the ‘latest news’ about different searches. For example, a search today for ‘Bob Forsch’ shows not just information about him, but also links to various blogs and articles written today.

At this time, it appears that the data for ‘fresh’ posts is being pulled from RSS feeds, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it also takes into account the amount of mentions in various social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook.

Check out this video from SEOMoz about the freshness update: