Why Internet Marketing is Right for Local Offline Businesses — Part 1 of 4

The thinking goes like this: Internet marketing might be fine for global businesses but local offline businesses (whose customers are drawn through word of mouth or local advertising from the surrounding neighborhoods) aren’t looking online for a service provider.

However, they are looking online! Local internet marketing provides another powerful marketing channel for local businesses to pursue… and it’s even better than offline marketing.

The Kelsey Group is an advisory and consulting service specializing in marketing (particularly search and Yellow Pages marketing). In their annual search forecast, they write that local search is going to become a huge part of marketing for local businesses, outpacing broader global search.

“Local search growth will outpace [broader global] search growth through 2013. Local businesses and those that target geographic areas will make a sustained effort to build … their online presence.“

For the next three years (at least), more and more local businesses are going to get on board with local-focused internet marketing. Your competitors probably are… will you?

Twitter… In Plain English

Local businesses learning to create a web presence and market themselves effectively online wonder at the value of Twitter. Will their followers really care to read “I’m eating a ham sandwich” or “I’m drinking coffee”?

Twitter is so much more than that. I love what the folks at CommonCraft have done to explain how Twitter works:

Twitter does give local businesses an online presence and adds search engine marketing and search engine optimization benefits through backlinks and to help increase web traffic.

See us for starting your Maryland Social Media, Maryland Search Engine Marketing, and Maryland Search Engine Optimization Services today.

Local Search Engine Marketing Basics: Long Tail Keywords

Local Search Engine Marketing Basics is an occasional series of blogs providing definitions and basic guidance on search engine marketing concepts.

Defining “Long Tail Keywords“

In order to understand “long tail keywords”, you need to first understand the “long tail” concept.

The “long tail” is a concept introduced by Chris Anderson in 2004 in which he talked about a phenomenon in business where there is an initial large amount of purchases of a product or clicks on a website (called “the short head”) but those began to trail off (the “long tail”)… however, the amount of the combined trail was equal to or greater than the short head.

In other words, a movie might make $50 million at the box office during its initial theatrical run. But it might make another $50 million or more in “cheap seat” cinemas, DVD sales, and international sales.

Read more about the long tail at Wikipedia.

This “long tail” concept has been broadened to the search engine marketing world.

Common keywords, like “marketing” or “restaurants” are the short head. Millions of people type these into searches every day. Not surprisingly, large companies invest millions of dollars each year to appear at the top of Google searches for these terms.

The local business may have a very challenging time appearing at the top of those “short head” searches. But, for local businesses, the long tail provides some serious possibilities!

Short head keywords might be “marketing” or “restaurants”. Long tail keywords are very specific. On their own they might be searched as much as the short head keywords, but the cumulative amount of search for long tail keywords is dramatic.

So, a local Maryland-based marketing company might forgo the short head keyword “marketing” in favor of several “long tail” keywords like “Maryland marketing”, “Maryland advertising”, “Maryland marketing company”. A Boston-based restaurant might not have  a prayer of achieving a top Google ranking for “restaurant” but they have a much better chance of getting to the top of Google for a long tail keyword like “Boston restaurant”.

3 Ways that Local Businesses can Use Social Media

Small businesses are eager to get on board with the social networking phenomenon. And it’s no wonder, either: social networking is a massive trend with profound social implications.

People spend a lot of time in social media for work and leisure. And smart businesses are meeting them there. Here are 3 ways that your local business can use social media to improve your online marketing:

1. Create a fan page on Facebook. Think of it like a Facebook page for a business. Your customers become fans and you can interact with them through Facebook in a similar way that you might interact with family and friends. Host discussions, hold contests, share photos, poll your audience, and more. Engage them!
2. Create a Twitter hashtag for your business (for example, if you own Maryland Eatery, your hashtags might be #marylandeatery or #mdeatery. Run a program like Tweetdeck to keep an eye on what people are saying about you and tweet frequently with that hashtag. (Hashtags can be registered at wthashtag.com.
3. Start a blog. Yes, a blog is social media! You can create one on Blogger or through Wordpress. Post regular content and, most importantly, engage your audience in a conversation!

Local businesses might shy away from web marketing and social media because it seems like an “international” marketing medium. But there are exciting local internet marketing opportunities.

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.