Archive for Local Search
The 3 Series Punch to Marketing your website and Blog
3 Steps - Credit to #freelance
Many people want to just start their online marketing campaign – be it SEO, Paid search or Social Media Marketing, without doing any previous marketing analysis. However it’s much more important to have your business plan down pat when you are marketing online, over when you are doing offline marketing.
To give you an understanding why, I’ll give you 3 different “case studies” with a lawyer who is trying to grow their business. They are an experienced attorney.
The Online Marketing 101 to Web Analytics – 3 Basic Ways to Use Web Analytics Tools
Web Analytics is a critical tool to understanding your online business. Whether you are simply running a blog, trying to generate leads from your website, or doing ecommerce, web analytics tools are critical to your success. So what can web analytics do for you?
- It can tell you what keywords the search engines find relevant to your website. This is a pretty basic way of using web analytics, and that is to see what keywords are driving traffic to your website. You can then decide whether to continue focusing on those topics that are driving traffic to your site, or you can decide to focus on other more relevant topics.
USA Today’s Steve Strauss Encourages Small Business Owners to have Blogs
John Janstch alerted me to an article in the USA Today online that adresses whether business owners should have blogs.
Steve Strauss gives 5 reasons a small business owner should have a blog:
- You help build a sense of community – in other words, you build a relationship with the customer, so they see you as a real person… not just a webpage
- They allow you to plug products
- They help with SEO - I use the blog here solely for SEO (as well as to get new clients – I’ll get to the plug at the end
)
17 Useful Wordpress SEO and other plugins
- All in One SEO Pack – This is an absolutely vital plugin for every blog that you have. This allows you to change your Title, description and keyword metatags on each blog post to make them unique, as well as to make a default home page title and description. I credit this plugin with about 30% of the credit for my rankings on some of my keywords.
- AutoMeta - This tag kind of conflicts with the All-in-one SEO packplugin, as it automatically creates the titles and descriptions. I still have to see how this works with All-in-One SEO pack
The Los Angeles Times Free Local Business Listing
While searching on Google for Los Angeles Business Directories, I found that the LA Times has a free one. I had never heard of it before, and it’s free, so I figured, hey, may as well give it a shot.
If you have a business in Los Angeles, go ahead and post it there.
Top 3 Questions from SmallBusiness Owners About Online Marketing
Local Business Owner Three Biggest Questions about search – and the answers:
1) Do people really search for local services online?
2) Can I afford to get traffic from the internet?
3) Is there anyway to do it if I am not a “computer guy” or on a budget?
The main way to see whether people are searching for your service is to go see how many people search for your business locally, by going to wordtracker and seeing how many people are searching for your service in your area.Here is a screenshot of the amount of people that search for los angeles accountants (a client of mine is a los angeles accountant).
Blogging for Yourself, the User and the Search Engine – a 2008 resolution
As you may or may not know, I am a big believer in blogging. It is a valuable way of
1)expressing your personality,
2)creating a connection with your users, and
3)getting valuable SE ranking.
The question is which one comes first? You might think this is a trivial question. It’s not.When I started blogging on About Results Marketing, I had merely bought a cool expiring domain for something I had wanted to do in the future – consulting in SEO, SEM and online marketing.
Is the LA Times Getting Closer to “Getting It”?
This is a follow up to my first post on the LA Times’s efforts to go “Web 2.0″, after meeting with Eric Ulken at a blogger’s event.
First off, a little disclaimer… My site is ugly, doesn’t convert, and definitely is not “cool”. So I really should have no right to criticize other companies’ efforts to “get it”. Especially since the LA Time site isn’t to badly designed. It has a pretty minimalist design, and very easy to find links.
The Importance of Local Optimization for Small Businesses
I’m currently doing some consulting work for some clients – as well as for my day job… creating and implementing a plan of action for local search. I’m realizing how much I’ve underutilized it. In the next couple of days I will be creating a guide outlining the steps you need to take to market your business locally.
In the meantime, here is an important resource from Frank Fuchs, a “Yahoo” who seems to have no qualms about stating his impressions of the company publicly. He lists all of the Local Places to submit your business to.
Market Your Business Through Referrals, John Jantsch
“I
get at least a hundred times the referrals now as I did before I had a
referral
plan.”
~ Scott Hensley – Affordable Concrete Cutting
Today
I want to share with you, in it’s entirety, a copy of a letter I
received from a small business owner who implemented a number of
suggestions I gave him in the Duct Tape Marketing book.
I chose to share this not to point out how brilliant I am – writing this stuff is the easy part sometimes
- but to showcase how acting on what you read – the really hard part – can payhuge dividends.
Response to WebProNews Rich Ord Column “Pay Per Click Party Over?”
Rich Ord (CEO of Ientry) recently posted an article in WebProNews Titled “Pay Per Click Party Over?”
Rich puts in 5 reasons that PPC will be losing effectiveness, and getting less useful.
Like banner ads, they are becoming too ubiquitous (- adsense on every page etc), declining relevance, rising costs, increasing options for marketers online, and bad press about the trustworthiness of the ads.
I disagree with him on many of the points. Although the party may be over for small business, it definitely isn’t close to over for the search engines or the advertisers.
PPC Powerpoint Presentation
About three months ago, when I was still working for my old company, I created a powerpoint presentation on Pay Per Click for the CEO and Chairman of the board, as well as the partners.
I was frustrated because I felt that there was no communication of the search marketing team’s goals to the company, as they didn’t understand the factors of PPC. Therefore, I created a powerpoint presentation about the basics. Click on the image to see the presentation on authorstream.
The undug gold mine of SEM…MSN???
Tonight’s post is kinda short, as I watched Live Free Die Hard and I came home at like 10:15.
Anyways, I’ve found a fascinating thing. I work mostly with paid search, and dabble in SEO, blogging etc. The most underutilized search marketing tool is MSN! (Can’t give you specifics but…) Our cost per conversion from MSN is about 1/3 to 1/5 of the cost of Google or Yahoo. (Yahoo is about 3/4 of the cost of Google – surprisingly).