The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

So you’ve built your website and now you’re ready to start promoting. Should you promote it to local prospects only or go broader, wider, more worldwide?

That’s the question every new website owner should answer. Hopefully, you’ve thought about it before you built your website. If you want to focus on local prospects, then it helps to optimize your website for local traffic. That includes adding your physical address and phone number to your web pages – especially your About and Contact pages, but possibly all of your pages. Globally targeted websites don’t need a physical address appearing on the site unless you do mail order.

Other considerations for local businesses include who your prospects are and how you intend to attract people to your business and website.

If your business products and services can only be distributed to local persons, then you obviously have to promote your website locally. For instance, a plumber can’t travel from New York to California to perform services; those services must be delivered to local home owners and businesses.

Promoting a website locally also includes some level of offline promotion. That might include earned media through local newspapers, TV, and radio as well as ad placements in those markets. It could also mean some phone prospecting or door-to-door, perhaps even some outdoor marketing. You’ll certainly want to include your web address on your business cards and stationery.

Local SEO involves listing your website in Google Places and Bing Local as well as other local directories like Yelp and MerchantCircle.

Global SEO has its strategies as well. The first step to website marketing is to decide what market your business will serve. Start there and the rest can almost take care of itself.

Here’s a great article on local online marketing. I have three comments to make about the content in the article.

1. Paid search still packs a powerful punch – I don’t care where you live, paid search has the greatest potential to drive targeted traffic to your website fast. And then you can reap an ROI that is difficult to match anywhere else. I’d say paid search is better than TV and radio – especially for effective local marketing.
2. You can’t separate local from mobile – Mobile marketing has arrived in full force and if you think about it you’ve likely seen people use their cell phones to find businesses to shop in as well as to find products to purchase locally. While people may use the Internet to research purchases, they still would rather purchase locally. Mobile marketing makes that so much easier.
3. Localization and local awareness - The big trend is for big businesses to customize their marketing for local geographic markets. Modern online technology makes that possible. A huge part of that effort is with local smartphone apps. Location-based apps make local marketing easier and local shopping better.

Online marketing is getting a lot better for small businesses and making the world a better place for consumers.

When you build your website and put it online, you’ll have to decide whether you are going to target a local audience or a global market. It’s one of the most important decisions you’ll have to make.

It’s not as simple as it may seem. Local online marketing and global marketing actually have a lot in common – online, at least.

For instance, both employ search engine optimization. You can also market both a local business and a global business through social media. You can also drive traffic to a local website as well as a global reach website through pay per click advertising. Virtually any type of online marketing tactic that can be used for one can be used for the other.

All of that said, however, local businesses do have other options that global businesses don’t. Online Yellow Pages is one example of an opportunity that local business have that global businesses can’t leverage. Craigslist classifieds is another marketing tactic that seems to work better for local businesses.

And there are global marketing tactics that can be used for local online marketing but that may need a little bit of creative tweaking for effectiveness.

When you’re ready to build your website and take the online marketing plunge, find a consultant who can help you decide whether local or global is more appropriate for your situation.

Facebook is one of the most powerful social media tools online. Of course, it’s also the most trafficked website online so it makes sense that any business would want to have a presence there. But what about local business? Can Facebook benefit businesses with a local presence that may not want to market themselves internationally? Absolutely. Here’s how.

• Facebook Places allows you to edit community pages that are local to you. For instance, if you live in Boston, Massachusetts, use the Facebook search feature to find the Boston, Massachusetts community page. Anyone can edit that page. Once you make an edit, future editors who are also friends of yours will see that you’ve made changes to that community page.
• Friends Lists allow you to create lists of your friends who may have something in common, such as friends who live in the same geographic area. You can post updates that only those friends see.
• Local Business Listings, like Facebook Places, are community pages that anyone can edit, except that they are for businesses. Yours could very well be there, created by Facebook. All you have to do is click to edit the page and monitor what others write when they edit. You want to be sure no false information about your business is published.
• Create your own Facebook page for your local business.
• Post events and promote them through Facebook Events.

Facebook is a powerful way to promote your business online to people you may already know or that you meet in the process of doing business in your local area.

Meetup is a website that allows anyone to start a group around a particular interest, take in members, and manage the group on an ongoing basis. It’s simple, really. Meetup is the platform that allows you to organize the group, but it’s important to point out that all the legwork involved in managing the group is still in your hands.

Meetup does charge a fee to organizers. You, in turn, could charge a fee to your members or meeting attenders, but if you are using Meetup for business purposes, then you might not want to do that. So what is the benefit of using Meetup?

Your primary benefit for using Meetup is that you have a popular platform. People looking for a group that meets around a common interest have been trained to search for such groups at Meetup. That doesn’t mean you can’t use other online sources for promoting your meetings. You can still advertise your meetings on Craigslist, local websites such as your daily newspaper classifieds, and industry websites. But Meetup is very popular and gets a lot of traffic from people who are looking for groups to attend.

Meetup.com is social media at its best. People have not given up on meeting in the real world, but often you will find that they being searching for real world events online. Meetup allows you to advertise your off-line events to an online audience that is continually growing.

Local search has been a big help to smaller local businesses over the last year or so. They have been able to out-compete their larger rivals simply because the scale of size actually works for them rather than against them when compared to traditional marketing. However, those factors that are working for small businesses may also be working against other small businesses.

Mobile businesses that service an area that exceeds Google’s 50-mile radius can be at a real disadvantage. In today’s economic climate, small one person businesses that operate out of the back of a vehicle will often think nothing of traveling 100 miles to complete a job. Consider photographers, particularly wedding photographers – they travel to wherever their services are required.

The problem with local search is that Google, for example, has that strict 50-mile radius as a limitation to appearing in local search results. That 50 miles is measured from your business’ official address, not from the center of your town. If you want to appear in local search for neighboring towns, you will need to establish a physical presence in that town – an option that is not always viable.

While some businesses are trying to get around this by using fake addresses, Google is slowly weeding these businesses out of its local search results, even if they are legitimately servicing those areas. Google is aware of this problem, since it’s been raised on numerous occasions. However, even they have no recommendations to fix the problem, except for creating a physical presence in each location.

We do have to be fair to Google in this case, however. They are trying to provide users with the most relevant search results possible. Local search is just that – local. So for an out of town business to appear in those results, they would also need to convince locals that they do service that area.

Local search is great for local businesses. It certainly levels the playing field and may even give smaller businesses a real edge of national competitors. You do need to be aware of the limitations and how they may affect your business.

Have you considered geo-targeting your PPC advertising keywords? You can save considerably on your costs per click just by adding  local area place names. For example, if you were selling and delivering pizza to the Wynnewood (PA) area, you have a number of options. You could target ‘pizza delivery’, ‘Pennsylvania pizza delivery’, ‘Philadelphia pizza delivery’, or ‘Wynnewood pizza delivery’. Targeting ‘pizza delivery’ is out of the question – there are over 90 million pages to contend with.

You may, however,  be surprised to see what sort of results you received if you explored each of the geographical options. Pennsylvania pizza delivery returned almost 5 million pages in Google search results. The average cost per click was $2.86. Let’s narrow it down a bit and search Philadelphia pizza delivery – that’s a bit closer to home. That reduced the search results to 367,000. Even better, the cost per click came down to $1.44.

That’s still almost 10% of the cost of a delivered pizza. Let’s get even closer to our geographical area and see what Wynnewood pizza delivery returns – 32,000. That is certainly easier to compete with than the 367,000 for Philadelphia. Cost per click – just $0.05. That represents a huge drop in cost-per-click numbers and you are now targeting people in your direct marketing area.

Now here’s something that may surprise you. If someone accesses a search engine from Wynnewood and searches for a pizza delivery service (without mentioning their location), the search results will most likely include a local map with the top seven local businesses listed. If you’re not targeting that geographical term, you could miss out.

So there is a moral there. Number one – be sure to claim your business through Google Places (Google local search), and secondly, be sure to include terms that relate to your geographical service area.  Cap it off by using those same geographic terms in your PPC marketing and you will see significant increases in your organic search placement for searches that count; that is, local search, and a significant cut in your costs per click. In fact, the costs can be so low that you can afford to geo target several areas. At $0.05 per click, you can geo target 10 areas and still save compared to using broader geographical terms.

If your business is a local business, then include geo-targeted keywords in all your online activities – particularly your local internet marketing.

According to WebProNews, more Americans are connecting with their neighbors and other locals over the Internet. This is a pretty significant development and could mean that local Internet marketing is about to get a huge boost. That could be both good and bad.

Among the things that could happen locally are:

• An increase in spam
• A greater potential for more viral marketing campaigns
• A boom in local search engine marketing
• More social media involvement at the local level

And who knows the potential for any of these?

On the viral marketing front, anything that catches on locally and seems to move on its own without much effort could become viral in seconds. Through Facebook, Twitter, SMS or local forums and community websites, content could go viral just with a simple nudge. But local viral marketing campaigns still must follow the same rules and principles as all other viral campaigns. On that we can rely.

It used to be that Internet marketing in general, but more specifically Search Engine Optimization, was more difficult for small businesses, mainly due to the competition. Based on the particular niche, one might have to spend more money on quality linking for their SEO campaign, simply because it was more competitive, and smaller business were less able to afford the volume and quality of links needed to build a competing SEO campaign.

However, in recent years, search engines have been weighing locality more into the equation. Basically, what this means, is for small businesses, which would more than likely only be serving a small area around their physical location, searches in their area would be more likely to return a result leading potential leads to their site. While it may not be as difficult to acheive an effective SEO campaign there is, however, a need for careful optimization. Here are a few tips for small and medium sized businesses for utilizing this search engine feature.

• Localize On-Site Content – For a search engine to display your site in returns, it must first index/crawl it, and therefore, information on your site will play a large factor in helping search engines determine if and when to display your site in results for your strong(er) keywords. It would only make sense then that advertising your location on-site would be one of the best ways to tell a search engine which areas to be more likely to display results for your site. Most businesses have a contact page with an address and phone number, but it is important to also include this information on the home page, and any other page possible. Don’t overdo it, as abusing tags and mindless repetition of  information has never proven to encourage search engines to give any extra weight; not since the days of meta-tag SEO.
• Claim What Is Your’s In Social Media – Beyond just your own website, it is important to claim your name wherever else you can. This includes listings, review sites, and sites like Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. Depending on your business, you may be able to sign up for more social media sites, but the idea behind this arduous task is to: a) Give potential visitors more ways to reach your site, and b) Prevent your competition from claiming these for you, which has been known to happen. While the time spent optimizing social media profiles may not be the most effective SEO strategy, your reputation will thank you.
• Focus On The Local Mentions – Now that you have your bases covered in the Social Media world, check out the listing sites close to you. Your specific town may very well have a site which lists businesses, and if it’s on a listing site like CitySearch.com, make sure you’re on there as well. The basic idea is to plant flags wherever you can, but more importantly, where potential local visitors are more likely to see it. Networking is key to accomplishing this, so utilize those social media sites you signed up for and find local blogs that deal in your niche. Make some friends, get some links – not everything can be bought!

There is always more you can do to help your own business – don’t forget that those big businesses don’t have the time to marlet their site as well as you in your own town. Let them focus on the nationwide efforts while you dominate your own local search, and let an Internet marketing firm like Reciprocal Consulting help!