The Ready-to-Buy Psychology of Local Online Marketing

The internet is not just a global medium. It’s a powerful local medium. No matter where you live, people are searching for the service you provide with a local modifier: “[your city] [your service]” (like “Chicago dog walker” or “Kansas plumber”).

Marketing with this “[your city] [your service]” technique has some advantages: It’s faster to achiever higher search engine ranking placement and it costs less because you’re not competing against larger multinational conglomerations with huge search engine optimization budgets.

But there’s something else that is important to consider about the psychology of searchers who are searching locally. Let’s say you are thinking of buying a car. You type in “car” into a search engine and see what comes up. Maybe you narrow it down by manufacturer.

So, let’s say that as you do your research you go from searching for “car” to searching for “midsize car” to searching amongst “general motors”, “ford”, “dodge”.

This is all at the conceptual level; the research level. What happens when you’re ready to buy? You don’t just type in “Ford dealership”.

No. If you live in Atlanta, you type in “Atlanta Ford dealership”… Notice that’s the [your city] [service] search.

So, the psychology of people search locally is this: They are ready to buy.

The web is a powerful research tool, but the terms used to research are general and broad. Searchers hit credible, authoritative sites to get more information. And when they’re ready to buy? They add a local modifier and look to a solution provider in their neighborhood.

3 Common SEO Mistakes

I just read a great blog (via @DemetriosDallis on Twitter) by John McCarthy of WebMetro. In his blog, entitled “D’oh! Not-so-best SEO Practices”, he writes about 3 mistakes he’s seen businesses make on their websites. You can read the article here but I’ll summarize it below.

1. Domain names… lots of domain names. McCarthy doesn’t say that having lots of domain names is a bad thing. In fact, it’s a good thing. But what you do with those domain names is the real key.

2. Spider blocking. I had no idea that this was as common as McCarthy suggests. Apparently, lots of businesses accidentally keep their website from being indexed because of some incorrect code. Easy to fix (and devastating if you don’t).

3. Expiring domains. This one makes sense. Google tends to rank sites higher if their domain name or SSL registration is set to expire soon. The thinking is: The longer a website is registered for, the better.

Local businesses can benefit by carefully navigating these SEO pitfalls. Read McCarthy’s article to find out how to make sure that local buyers can find you.

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)

The Number One Search Engine Marketing Success Secret

A web presence is essential for today’s businesses, but simply putting up a website or blog isn’t enough. You need traffic. (It’s not that different in the offline world: You can set up a store but it’s no good unless people find you!)

So, how do you help that traffic find you? There are a number of ways you can generate traffic – from paid search to viral videos to social media to articles. No matter what combination of search engine marketing you do, there is one single search engine marketing secret that will make all the difference. Follow this one secret by making sure that all of your search engine marketing complies, and you’ll generate traffic.

The search engine marketing secret
The best way to generate traffic is by building credibility. Credibility is the magnet that will attract prospects to you so you can sell to them. All of your search engine marketing – when done correctly – will contribute to a growing sense of credibility that will help you to convince your prospects to buy.

In fact, the most popular search engine is set up to encourage you and enable you to become more credible. Google uses the concept of PageRank, which was named for Google co-founder Larry Page. Google’s game changing impact on the internet was its idea that each link to your website was a “vote” for your website’s credibility. That sounds like a good idea, but they took it one step further with PageRank: The value of a vote was higher from sites that were more credible themselves.

For example, there could be two equal sites on the web but one has a higher PageRank because highly valued, thoughtful, informative, and useful sites link to it compared to the other site.

Then, Google would use each site’s PageRank as a factor in deciding where to place it in a search result. Generally, pages with a higher PageRank appear closer to the top of search results because it has been “voted” more credible.

How credibility impacts your search engine marketing
When you’re planning what your search engine marketing efforts, you need to make sure that one of your activities is to build links back to your website using highly credible sources.

Press releases are a good example of this because news sites often have higher PageRank. Some articles, distributed to the right article distribution sites, can offer a similar result. If you create a blog or a YouTube channel or a Flickr account, these can all help link back from high PageRank sites, giving you votes of credibility.

To start, think about your industry and where the most credible websites are likely to be. Use a tool like PRChecker.info (http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php) to check for the PageRank of the target sites you’d like to do your search engine marketing through. When you find higher ranking pages, find ways to link back to your site from there. It could include submitting articles or participating on a forum or having your blog posted there.

No matter what type of search engine marketing you choose to do, just remember to make sure it builds your credibility. And when you do enough of that, you will successfully build web traffic to your small business.

Targeted Search Engine Traffic

Targeted Search Engine Traffic for your local business.