Need Help Marketing?

When was the last time you searched for a local business in your area on a search engine?

You as a business owner probably haven’t searched for your own profession though, because you have never been in need of that kind of help. If you really think about it, your customers go online to find local merchants, retailers, and trades people all the time. Probably even without thinking about it.

What we are talking about is local search engine marketing and what it can do for your business exposure and lead generation.

How about an example to help illustrate what we are talking about here. Go to Google Local Search or Yahoo Local, which are probably the two highest used search engines for searching locally. Now try to find your business listing. Do you have a sponsored link for your area for example? Do you see your competition across the street even.

By searching for “Boston Dental” in Google Local Search and I got the following listings (click on the images to enlarge):

Next time I repeated the same search using Yahoo Local  for “Dental in Boston” and I got the following listings (click on the images to enlarge):

In both examples New England Dental was displayed in the top spot. Now if I was living in Boston and looking for a new dentist this dental practice would definitely be top of my mind.

The lesson in this example is actually two-fold:

1) Make sure you commit to doing online advertising using local keywords such as town, city or county for your area.
Before your competitors pick up on this strategy to corner the local market.

2) Make sure you have a consistent business listings in both Google and Yahoo which was the case in the example above.
These business listings are free to setup but will help to promote your business locally and maybe even outside of your current advertising budget could reach.

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Sometimes on most websites the home page and the creative design get the most attention. And the focus is not always focused on lead generation. However that is your website’s primary purpose.  Usually where to put everything and make it easy to find, or maybe just making sure everything is covered takes precedence.  In a lot of cases even more so where a content management system (CMS) is used to update your website. Because you may even forget to remember about your sub pages (second and third level pages in your navigation).

The convenience of using CMS systems and the speed of publishing updates means you can post new content and have it look like the rest of your website. But at the same time it could also mean that you never take the time to look at the new content pages you are creating and how they fit into the rest of your website. Much less your lead generation program.

Here are a few points to keep in mind when reviewing these sub-pages:

• Is your contact information easily available on all home pages? Home Page, Blog Post, About Us, special promotion pages, etc.

• When trying to generate leads you need to have different click through paths for your different website visitors (Ex. existing customers vs. someone who just read about your company in the newspaper). Everyone digests information differently and in different cycles such as ready to buy or people who are looking for credibility and trust before they consider purchasing. Remember we talked about effective web persuasion in an early post.

• Use keywords on deeper sub-pages, since you never know which pages search engines will favor. This point is important enough to repeat the first tip. Consider if the sub-page is the first page the visitor sees. Do they have an easy way to contact sales or customer service. Using a keyword in the first paragraph will also help search engines weight that page higher.

• Do you have links from other sites? If yes then that will help with your “link authority” and help your search engine rankings which could lead to higher qualified leads that come from relevant industry websites. Or that match keywords that your buyers ask about.

• Keep content fresh and updated. Put another way new content generally shows up higher in the search engine search results. Since recency is a factor in determining a content’s relevancy.

Capturing new leads is an ongoing process to ensure your sales pipeline is filling with new prospects. Sometimes improving existing pages can help too by perhaps looking at keywords that helped find those deeper and in some cases hidden gems. Using your web analytics tools you might realize that the majority of your search engine website visitors are being directed to one landing page or blog post topic. If that is the case, and these keywords are key to your business. You may want to highlight this page content on the home page. Or at the very least mention these same keywords on your home page.

Photo credit: pneumatic_transport

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