Tag Search Results

Recently, the head of Google’s team that fights against web spam announced that they will be changing their search engine algorithm to “reduce low-quality ‘exact match’ domains” so that they don’t show up as highly in the results.

What does this mean? That search engine optimization is changing. Even if you sell books and own www.books.com (i.e. an exact match domain), your site will find itself tumbling down the Google search results if the content on the site is poor.

And this isn’t the first time that search engines have made crackdowns on sites that have low quality content. Just in the past two years, Google’s Panda started punishing sites that manufacture back links, Bing and Google acknowledged that they incorporate social media recommendations into their algorithms, and Google began preferencing content that is fresh and regularly updated.

It’s more important than ever before in local internet marketing to create unique, high-quality SEO content in order to ensure that your site stays near the top of the search rankings. If people don’t like it and recommend it, search engines will quickly let you drop from page one to page two – or worse.

Say Goodbye to Stuffing and Spinners
What this translates to is a long overdue goodbye to those websites who employ less-than-savory internet marketing tactics to keep their pages near the top of the rankings. Sites that simply stuff their pages with high-ranking SEO words and provide little in the way of valuable content are falling by the wayside. So, too, is the use of “spun” articles – writing content in such a way so that it passes things like Copyscape to make it “unique,” but really just uses slightly different words to say the exact same thing.

Instead, site owners need truly unique content created by people who know how to write, and that content needs to find social approval in the form of Likes, +1s, and so on in order to be seen as relevant. Not something that typically would happen for those sites that employed “cheats” to attain their high ranks.

Strategies for Optimizing Your Content
First and foremost, what this new world order means is that you need good content, so your initial job is to locate an expert in internet marketing consulting who can produce that. Once you feel that you’ve got that person, you have to make sure that you are sharing your content in as many ways as possible – that means getting Likes and shares from Facebook, tweets and retweets from Twitter, repins on Pinterest, and any other social media services that you find valuable.

In order to stay relevant and fresh, you need to create new blog posts, press releases, case studies, and more on a regular basis. On top of that, you have to make sure to include backlinks that point to your site or a conversion page while continuing to promote the content via social media.

All of this, as you might imagine, can be a little time consuming. Worse, it’s something that is constantly in flux as Google and others continue to refine their approach. That’s why it is so valuable to work with an expert in internet marketing consulting as you try to grow your brand.

Who Are Your Customers and How Can You Reach Them?

For any location-based business, such as a restaurant or retail store, the key is foot traffic. You need to get people in the door to make sales.

But how do you reach customers? Who are they? And where are they located?

Technology has made the process of researching local restaurants or retail stores easier than ever for your potential customers. Building a customer profile is no longer something only major national brands can afford. Any business – whether a regional chain, a franchise of a national chain, or a single location – can take advantage of data to develop a more specific, more cost effective, and better targeted local marketing strategy.

Local marketing consistently outperforms national campaigns for driving traffic and coupon redemption. It can be more relevant and timely at the moment when consumers are making purchase decisions.

Local Retail Marketing Develop a Geo-Targeted Strategy: Use Data Appending to create a Customer Profile

At the core of a strong local marketing strategy is a well defined customer profile that can be targeted to a local geography. Your promotions, community relations, social web content, and local search optimization should all work together to appeal to this target customer profile.

Gather customer information.

The first step is to get information from your current customers. By looking at store receipts or asking customers directly for basic information, you can take as few as 1,000 names, input their addresses into software, and develop a radius on a map of where customers are coming from. You can literally circle the areas that you’re currently reaching.

Append data and develop a customer profile.

From here, you can use the zip code and address information to add additional information: everything from your customers’ average income and age to family size and media habits. This information can then be used to develop a detailed profile of your core customers.  

For example, in my work with a local bike shop, I found they had two types of core customers. The first is the “comfort-oriented” customer who is in the mid-30s to low-40s, wants a recreational product to enjoy with their family, is more price-oriented, and tends to value comfort over performance. The second is the “performance-oriented” customer who tends to go for longer, daily rides, is over 40, has higher discretionary income, rides in groups or by themselves for exercise, and highly values the performance of the bike. With this insight Location Traffic developed two distinctly unique marketing efforts.

In some cases, you may be surprised by what the data reveals about your clientele.

Target and expand.

Once you know who your customers are, you can take steps to locate and reach more of them. For example, you can buy lists based on the specific criteria you’ve developed in order to do a mailing, whether by postal mail or email.

Or if you find that you are not currently reaching the customers you want to, you can take steps to find out why and change that. This may involve a radical rethinking of your overall marketing strategy and business practices.

Develop a local marketing strategy.

Now that you know who and where you want to target, you need to develop the right local marketing effort to match.

Armed with your customer profile, you may also use different methods of reaching customer groups – mailings, flyers, social media, blogs, events – depending on what you learn about these potential customers. And you can better orient your branding and messaging to speak to potential leads. Here’s a basic example using the bike example above: a campaign aimed at the comfort-oriented customers at the bike shop might involve imagery of families biking together and focus on promotions, while a campaign targeting performance-oriented customers might use imagery of an riding group and provide more details about bike performance.

Since you know where your customers are located, or additional locations that you’d like to reach, you can build a strong local marketing campaign online, so that you come up when local searchers search for your type of business. 
The result is a more specific, targeted campaign, more likely to be found by qualified leads interested in your products or services – and more likely to convert into a sale.

Drive traffic to your location with Location Traffic