3 Free Strategies you MUST Do to Grow Local Traffic

1. Create a Google Profile. You’ll get a “personal page” that shows up in searches, and if you include your address (and you should), you’ll be more likely to show up there. Create profiles for key sales people and leaders at your local business.

2. Build a free site using Google Sites. Yes, you’re not going to use this free site as your own business site. But why not create one that talks to your customers about their needs (and subtly promotes your organization through backlinks or a “brought-to-you-by” notice.

3. Sign up at Google’s Local Business Center. You can create and manage information about your site, locate your business on a map, and add information and coupons there for users to find. You’ll also be able to track online searches and other analytics about your business. (Click here and watch the video).

These three strategies are free and can profoundly impact the traffic that arrives at your website… and at your front door.

If you don’t want to do this work yourself, please see our Local Domination Service Packages.

Using Google Video For Your Local Business

Are you a local business looking to advance in the rankings? One way to do it is with video. If you create a video and post it on YouTube, you have a good chance of getting a nice high ranking… even on broad keywords!

Here is a great example of someone who did just that with the phrase “video SEO in Google”.

Why is video such a great opportunity? Search engines are designed to search written content — words — for clues to index things. In a page of 500 words, the search engine might make its indexing decision by looking for keywords that amount to only 2% to 4% of the total words on the page.

But a video can’t be searched in the same way. So search engines rely on far less information (through descriptions, tags, and perhaps outgoing links) to indicate what the video is about. The density of information is far greater. It’s like fishing with dynamite instead of a hook and worm.

What does for local businesses? You may not want to search for a broad term like “restaurant” or “plumber”. But you can still search pretty high with far more local terms — like “Miami plumber” or “Cincinnati restaurant” — using video.

Video gives good SEO benefits, but it also is a nice way to give a personal touch (which is one major reason why people buy from local vendors).

If you don’t want to do this work yourself, please see our Local Domination Packages.

Why Internet Marketing is Right for Local Offline Businesses — Part 2 of 4

This is part 2 of a series. To read the first article, click here.

Recently, my wife and I made plans to go to dinner with friends. We had eaten at all of the “regular” places and were feeling adventurous so we decided to try something new. We went online, typed in our city, the kind of food we want to eat, and the word “restaurant”. “Boston Chinese restaurant” or “Boston Italian restaurant” or something like that.

Very convenient! Google is “feeding” the local search frenzy by providing services like adding your place of business to a map that appears at the top of local searches.

Alllll the way back in 2005, The Kelsey Group (an advisory service specializing in internet marketing and other marketing channels) found that 70% of internet searches use the web to find local businesses. (Read their findings here).

That was 4 years ago and that number had increased by 16% between October 2003 and March 2005 (an increase of basically 1% per month).

I believe that this number is going to be much higher now for the following reasons:

1. There has been a growing emphasis on local search since then
2. Wifi has become more ubiquitous, allowing for search-on-the-go
3. Social networking sites have seen growth in the local side of networking (an example being Twitter, which is used to connected globally but also locally through hashtags like #nyc or #la or #miami or #boston, etc.)
4. Smartphones (especially the the iPhone) offers numerous apps geared to local businesses.

The Evolution of Google’s Online Search

When Google swooped in a few years ago with their groundbreaking ideas and secret algorithm, website owners tweaked and adjusted their websites and slowly learned what was effective and what wasn’t.

The bottom line for Google was a very website-searcher-centric idea: Put the most authoritative sites first. The more authoritative it was, the higher it should rank. (Which makes sense for internet users who are using search to find something).

They measured authoritativeness by a variety of factors, including keywords, backlinks, and more.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz‘s CEO, wrote a very compelling blog in which he talked about how Google’s rankings algorithm has changed over time. He even provided a handy chart which shows an estimation based on Fishkin’s experience and observations.

Essentially, he says that authoritativeness is still key at Google and they measure 4 basic things:

• The authority of the domain
• Anchor text
• Keyword usage
• Backlinks

View his chart below and read the blog post here.

Increase PageRank With This Simple Step

When people are searching for your business, they rarely go past the bottom of the second page of their Google search results. If they can’t find what they’re looking for by page 2, they’ll revise their search parameters.

What a motivator to get into the top 20 (or, better yet, the top 10) of Google search! And the way to do that is with better PageRank. The higher your PageRank, the higher you’ll appear.

One of the ways to get higher PageRank is to be linked to from higher PageRanked pages. So, if your site’s PageRank is 3, strive to be linked to from pages that have a PageRank of 4 or more.

I like to use this tool, Google PageRank Checker, before I post anything on another site.

Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t avoid lower PageRanked pages. But if you have to spend your time somewhere, focus on the higher PageRanked pages.

According to Google PageRank Checker, here are a few pages to link back to your site from:

Wikipedia.org (PageRank: 9/10)

Twitter.com (PageRank: 9/10)

About.com (PageRank: 8/10)

LinkedIn.com (PageRank: 8/10)

Squidoo.com (PageRank: 7/10)

Suite101.com (PageRank: 7/10)

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