As the Internet evolves users are turning more and more to the Internet to find local services and products. This is true for businesses that sell directly online, and for those that do traditional retail marketing for their brick-and-mortar store.

A location based business doing retail marketing online or a destination business often get buried deep in search engines, if they are even there at all. Larger company sites dominate the best broad search terms as they can afford to hire writers to create content, and spend heavily on bidding for keywords. Localized search marketing requires a different approach, and offers smaller businesses the tools to get in front of larger businesses using online advertising.

Targeting Local Internet Users - Your Customers

Types of Businesses that can benefit

• Retail businesses
• Local Service Businesses
• Day spas
• Bicycle shops
• Restaurants
• Tourism: destination sites
• Real Estate agents
• Dentists
• Chiropractors
• Woman's Wellness Centers
• Independent Radiology Offices

The real estate industry is undergoing change. This dynamic change is facing many industries, not just real estate. However, industries with a service sector focus are most at risk. This change is being fuelled by greater reliance on the web as a direct channel between buyers and sellers; whether that is airline tickets, books, financial services or real estate. Buyers and sellers demand information to enable them to take a driving seat and have more control.

When it comes to real estate, the first wave of change happened in the early part of the decade as listings moved online and provided the perfect environment for searching and browsing to find the dream home. That early adoption has now accelerated exponentially to over 80% of all real estate searches occurring online, decimating the print media. The second wave of impact on this industry has now begun. This change concerns the critical issue of securing prospective future business for real estate agents, which involves the presentation and evaluation of personal reputation and respect — how to be found and how to build value online.

It is about content, participation and innovation. We believe that things are changing and that “agents will not be replaced by technology, they will be replaced by agents with technology”.

Put simply, if you want to be successful in real estate, regardless of sector, location or experience, and are passionate about how to harness the power of the web, we can talk. If you feel that leaflet drops and newspaper advertising is your future, then maybe we are not talking the same future.

Most service industries are in a constant state of evolution and changes every day with technology, regulation changes, and economic challenges, never experienced by most of us.  You can either bury your head in the sand or dig in and get in the flow of change. We believe that adapting and learning new ways to do business will help brokers, managers, and agents stay ahead of the knowledge curve and strengthen their ability to survive this paradigm shift.
 
Understanding these new trends, and adapting to a more complex industry are musts for brokers, sales managers, and real estate agents. This also includes ancillary businesses like appraisers, mortgage originators, and title companies that have experienced massive change. Adapting to new business strategies that give quality service, and meet the demands of the e-consumer are a must. Developing an edge in today’s market requires that real estate practitioners develop competency in Blogging, Social Media, search engine marketing (SEM), and how to work with the online consumer once they contact you.

It is imperative that those real estate professionals who have come through this challenging market be fully prepared to take advantage of new steady growth that will be forthcoming. Consumers drive the industry and have always driven it, however today they are looking online first. Are they finding you when they go to Google, Yahoo or Bing? If not, you owe it to your family, company, and yourself to get on board and learn this business all over again.

These are several opportunities for realtors to use technology:

• Enhanced listings for sellers that list with you
• “Hub” website to promote or "brand" yourself
• Use of social media to participate, and build reputation
• iPad and cell phone apps to access real time info
• Good Customer Relationship Management for repeat business

You have to have an online presence, or hub, that is reflective of whom you are and your business practice. If an agent isn’t representing themselves online, where their potential clients are, certainly those potential clients are finding agents that are online.

All this said there are no silver bullets, no canned solutions. Anyone who says there are is misinformed. Our solutions are based on analysis of industry trends in a specific industry sector, definition of goals for a business, and knowing how to apply technology creatively to accomplish those goals.

Call 609-737-8667 or Email Now to speak with a Marketing Consultant

Internet Marketing Process

As an Internet Marketing Consultant often I have heard a business owner say:


With Google’s dominance in search,
    their rules for how pages display,
        the increasing importance of directories and the growth of social media,
            the complexity of online marketing channels and
                building a web presence has increased.

A content strategy and site architecture that relies on competitor and keyword research will increase site rankings, on page SEO should always be part of the website design process… 

And this is just the beginning. Showing up when people search for you, or your products, is the “traffic” part of the SEO equation. There is more to using Internet Marketing to help improve a business:

In the News

Inventory and meeting customer needs have changed considerably since Morrow joined the Hart’s team. The store doesn’t sell its merchandise online, but it does advertise what it offers, and Shep has been able to track which items have been getting the most clicks. The data has translated into the shop’s operation, from where to display certain bikes to which products should be kept in greater supply, and it’s made a positive impact on sales.

“We’ve seen measurable results,” Hart says.

More...

B2B SEO

Keyword Research & website Architecture

As an Internet Marketing Consultant when I work with B2B clients I often find that SEO is not given the priority in the website development process it deserves.

Proper keyword research is vital to maximizing online visibility. Getting keyword research correct from the beginning is crucial. It drives site architecture. One of the mistakes B2B marketers continue to make with organic search is inadequate website architecture - the fact is that many B2B sites don’t have sufficient content (pages) to respond to enough search terms. The solution, however, isn’t simply adding more content. Proper website architecture is also critical.

The typical scope or work for a Keyword Research and webite Architecture engagement includes:

• Developing understanding of B2B prospect profiles and the nature of the B2B buying cycle
• Reviewing client’s list of desired keywords
• Reviewing existing site and those of stated B2B competitors
• Using multiple sources to research popular keywords and keyword variants actually used by searchers
• Identifying lower volume, high-conversion keywords
• Identifying important words in the search tail of keywords
• Identifying with the client the keywords for which the site should be optimized
• Designing the appropriate site architecture to support the keyword strategy

The investment for the B2B Keyword Research and Website Architecture varies based on the goals and complexity of the Internet Marketing project. But the cost can return itself in new business many times over.

Information Architecture

Many website development projects seem to focus too much on the design aspects of their website before they put any thought into the site architecture and information flow. By inserting information architecture at the beginning of your process, you can dramatically change your website's performance. The benefits of developing a strategic site architecture will not only increase visitor engagement but it will help you attract more of the right visitors. This process will also lead to higher conversions.

The first step, of identifying high-performing keywords, is essential if you wish to drive the right traffic to your site. Keyword research is no small task if done correctly, as it includes an analysis of competitors and the keywords that a specific target audience uses in searches. It's a given that you will be using branded keywords on your site, but more importantly identify keywords that your target audience might use to find you. As in any marketing approach, we are researching customer needs, and engineering a problem/solution content strategy in order to promote your Brand.

This simple process will help you get into the minds of your audience and anticipate their needs. When they finally land on your site, they will feel right at home since you have taken the time to lay out the information just for them. They will reward you with higher conversions, lower bounce rates, and undoubtedly word-of-mouth praise through social media channels.

Your Internet Marketing Strategy is your Brand.

I often hear web designers selling design services as if it is the starting place for web projects, without a full understanding of Site Architecture. Very often Brand is represented as the creative that goes into imagery, or site structure is thought of in terms of semantics and hierarchy derived from someone in a company, who “knows their business”. Like any Marketing challenge, what these individuals are minimizing is that marketing is about customers; what customers think, what customers are looking for, and the language customers use to Search for solutions to their problems.

At Location Traffic my approach to SEO is first to understand what the customer is looking for by carefully researching competitors and Keyword data. Then using the Keyword data I build a strategically optimized site architecture, for those keywords, that is understandable to Search Engines and relevant to visitors. Relevancy breeds trust, and opens up the opportunity for a Brand to position itself in the mind of the target customer.

There are a lot of factors that go into a successful SEO Campaign. There is content, keywords, titles, descriptions, usability, architecture, and link building. While website architecture doesn't contribute directly to the keyword optimization, it does give the search engines the best "sense" of a site. Without good architecture, your site can be keyword optimized to the hilt, but it won't matter because the search engines are unable to read and decipher the content properly.

Understand your Market

That may sound pretty basic, but few people realize how important keyword research tools can be in understanding your market, and in formulating an Internet Marketing Strategy that does a good job of Branding and displaying your content on the first page of searches.

To summarize: understand what's going on in the head of your potential customers, consider the ways customers think about your services, determine what words they use to search for your services, and give consideration to specifically what words your target customer uses in searches. Insight into that mindset equals insight into how to start a persuasive dialogue. Build a site architecture that optimizes the effectiveness of these keywords.

Aside from the technical issues, SEO basically IS internet marketing.

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.

A whopping 83 percent of people in the U.S. are now using the internet to search for local businesses, according to The Kelsey Group. That’s an amazing statistic, and one that every business – big or small, web-based or brick and mortar – needs to take note of.

In today’s world, lots of people won’t even try businesses unless they have websites or positive feedback on review sites. People want to see that you’re legit, and the internet has become the new way to get personal recommendations from your friends. With social media sites encouraging people to like businesses, sometimes this “recommendation from a friend” is even literal.

But why when you search for record stores in Bend, Oregon, does Johnny’s Records show up while Vinnie’s Vinyl doesn’t? Because of local internet marketing.

Local internet marketing includes aspects of broader forms of internet marketing like SEO, but makes it specific to your area so that it’s easier for you to attract customers in your neighborhood. Generally speaking, there are four practices that you want to engage in to make your local business stronger:

1. Analyze your competition
2. Utilize online directory service
   
3. Engage in targeted email campaigns
   
4. Incorporate location-based keywords
   

Analyze your competition.

Why is this so important? Because you want to steal customers from your local competitors. It might sound dirty when you put it that way, but the ebb and flow of customers from business to business is the heart and soul of the free market.

Sure, you want to create new customers where you can, but it is also vital that you siphon people from people competing with you if you want to grow and prosper. In order to do this using local internet marketing, you need to embark on a competitive analysis by researching who is offering similar products or services in your area and what methods they’re using to market themselves.

This is an especially valuable exercise to engage in before you start a business or when you’re ready to update your site. While looking around, you can get ideas about which methods you feel would be a good fit for your business and which wouldn’t, and learn from their mistakes so that you can be sure to improve upon everything that they’re doing.

What should you look at? Here’s a list to get you started.

• Website architecture
• Tags
  
• Written content
  
• Visual design and images
  
• SEO usage
  
• Social media incorporation
  
• Link building
  
• Email list
  

Utilize online directory services.

This one is fairly straightforward and shouldn’t require much maintenance on your part. You want to make sure that your business is listed in all of the major directory services such as Yelp, Citysearch, and Google Places. Depending on your business, you may even find that there’s a good industry-specific directory such as UrbanSpoon for restaurants.

Fill out the form correctly and thoroughly, and if something ever changes (like your address or phone number), make sure to update it immediately. Also, it’s valuable for you to pay attention to any customer complaints on these sites. Some offer ways for you to respond.

Engage in targeted email campaigns.

If you don’t have an email list for your customers, you need to get one, because local email campaigns can work wonders. Just include a link on your website where people can sign up to receive special offers. Be sure to ask where they’re located as part of the process.

Studies have shown that simply mentioning a particular neighborhood or city increases the likelihood that recipients will open the email because it will feel more personalized. Plus, you’ll raise your search engine profile if you incorporate location-based keywords, which means that more people will see your site. What are location-based keywords? Glad you asked.

Incorporate location-based keywords.

Describing location-based keywords is pretty easy actually. All that it means is adding a location to your keyword phrase based on research using the Google AdWord Tool. For example, your Cincinnati-based shoe shine business might be using the keyword “shoe shine” for general SEO purposes, but researching the location tells you that you can help yourself by using “Cincinnati shoe shine” or “shoe shine in Cincinnati.”

Be careful to look at what your competition is doing and how entrenched they are with particular keywords. If they seem to have a pretty strong hold on a certain phrase, often it’s best to move on to one that you can control, even if it’s a lesser-used search term. These location-based keywords should be as thoroughly integrated into your site marketing as possible:

• Page titles
• Static and fluid content
  
• Blogs and white papers
  
• Video content
  
• Email marketing
  
• Blurbs that you post on directory sites
  

Tackle Local Internet Marketing from All Directions

The goal should include not only doing things better than your competitor, but becoming as multi-pronged as possible by having your website, social media pages, directory pages, and even emails working together to strengthen each other, allowing everything to build and get more eyeballs (and revenue) to your business.

If you have a local family business that’s been around for a while but has now gotten into trouble or sales are slowing, chances are good that your success came from providing a high level of service and advertising locally via the Yellow Pages and through word of mouth courtesy of your long term clientele.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where change is happening faster and faster, and lots of small family businesses are getting left behind and forgotten.

Engaging in a major marketing push that involves radio, television, and billboards just isn’t in your budget, though, so you’re not sure what to do. How can you remind people that you’re there and attract more sales? In a closely held business change can be difficult, as often the culture is built on relying on the owner's specific way of doing things. Customers are percieved as the relationship the owner has had with specific clients.

Two simple words: get online.
The internet is ideally suited to help businesses with a lower level of cash flow to get the word out about what they do. In fact, online marketing can be more effective than traditional marketing methods when used corrected. The key is to find a professional who can work with you to create a plan that’s specific to your business and who knows how the market is trending and what the latest techniques are. That consultant must also have experience for facilitating change in a closely held business.The use of Internet Marketing can be the beginning of a new sales strategy, and can affect how the company is organized to serve customers and grow.

Get listed. Research has shown that the overwhelming majority of people don’t really use things like the Yellow Pages anymore. When they want to find a local business, they go online and type their search into Google. What that means for you is that you at least want to make sure that your business can be found on places like:

• Yelp
• Citysearch
• Google Places
• UrbanSpoon (for restaurants)

How you list your company can make a difference for how often you are found, so it’s helpful to consult with a professional. Then once it’s up and running, be sure to pay attention to the various directories just in case you receive any customer complaints; it’s always best to respond quickly and kindly so that other potential customers will see that you actually care about their experience.

Create (or update) your website. A website will help potential customers to view you as a legitimate and viable choice, and if you do it well, can become extremely lucrative. You may already have a website, but if you’re interested in expanding your audience, this isn’t enough. You need an SEO (search engine optimization) plan that involves learning the search terms most likely to drive business to your company and figuring out where and how to implement it in conjunction with the site.

The best way to do this is to build the search terms you want into the DNA of the website itself by using the terms in the titles, headings, and subheadings of pages, as well as sprinkling them throughout the body of the content. Doing this makes search engines prioritize your site more, which will cause it to appear higher in search rankings.

Expand your online offerings. Digital marketing can also involve offering downloadable white papers to convert leads, online videos to showcase your expertise, a blog with ongoing content to keep your search rank high, and setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts to increase the number of ways that potential customers can reach you and find out about your content.
Doing this is not only a great way to bring in more business from nearby, but also let customers from around the country and the world to learn about you. Build an online cart and checkout system, and you might find yourself experiencing a nice bump in sales from areas you never would have expected.

The best part is that it costs a lot less to seek out people and engage with them online than it does to market in practically any other medium, and it’s a lot easier to tell if your methods are working or not. If you haven’t looked into internet marketing for your family business, and it’s remaining stagnant or floundering, there’s no time like the present.

From my experience as an SEO and business consultant, search results are typically several months ahead of sales trends, meaning that they can affectively predict the near future of sales.

Why does this happen? It makes complete sense if you think about it for a second. When you buy something substantial, most of the time you don’t just do it on a whim. The time lag between search results and sales trends is showing that people are researching before they actually make the purchase.

Is there any way that you can use this information to plan for the future and increase your overall business? Yes and yes. In fact, there are many ways that you can take advantage of the data from your site’s traffic as well as your local internet advertising results to serve your customers better. Just consider if you are a retailer the advantage this information can give you in retail marketing, promotions, and inventory management.

Educating people should come before selling them.
This should be standard practice in internet marketing overall, but your goal is a slow build to a sale. This involves providing customers with quality information and positioning yourself as a trusted expert. All the while, you should slowly incorporate more information that pertains to your product and business in order to “convert” them from a prospect into a sale.

For instance, if someone arrives on your site after clicking on your local internet advertising, you can bring them directly to resources like white papers, information videos, and blogs that educate them on their particular issue and then guides them to the right product or service to solve it.

The more you can do in these early stages to show that you know how to solve their need and that your products really are the best – without pushing the sale! – the more likely you are to get what you want in the end.

Promote new and emerging products.
If you know that most of the people currently researching won’t be buying anything for a month or two, it gives you a great opportunity to promote things in advance. This might be a recently released product that isn’t quite as popular as your sales leader yet, something that is set to come out shortly, or even an event that’s on the horizon.

You can focus on hot items by adjusting your local internet advertising campaign, tweaking your home page, and even changing up the layout of your brick and mortar location. By doing this now, you’re increasing the likelihood that more people will make purchases or be around for those things a few months down the road.

Manage your stock more efficiently.
If you have a product that’s inherently seasonal (swimming trunks or road salt, say), you probably have a pretty good idea when you should order more and when you can ease up. Unfortunately, most businesses don’t have that kind of clarity. Except that, by analyzing search results, we kind of do.

If you notice that lots of people are searching for a particular product or clicking through your local internet advertising for a particular service, it’s smart to increase your inventory for the likely sales you’re going to get in the upcoming months. Conversely, a lower number of searches or click-throughs are evidence that you might want to slow down and try to get rid of the stock you have before ordering more.

Every business has a specific audience that they want to reach because they believe that those people are far more likely to become good, long-term paying customers than the general population – your demographic.

For years, real world marketers have sought out ways to help businesses pinpoint their individual demographic using a variety of methods to research and study consumers, but even their best efforts ended up causing companies to cast a wider net and hit lots of people who only partially fit the profile.

Online marketing has changed all that by offering clearer and more detailed profiles than ever before, while creating a number of new kinds of targeted advertising that help businesses to reach people who are already searching for services like the ones they offer, as well as people likely to seek out their help in the future.

How exactly can online marketing do this for you?

Niche sites. On the surface, advertising your company on niche site doesn’t seem much different than picking a particular newspaper or indie radio station to run an ad. There are a few big differences though. The first is that even the least expensive of “broadcast” mediums tend to cost a lot more than anything on the web. The second is that the internet is so vast that you can almost guarantee that there is a specific audience for what you’re selling, no matter how specific it is. Third, on a niche site you have the ability to create a brand image at a fraction of the cost of traditional media.

Lists and sign-ups. This isn’t a new idea, but rather an old one in a new form. Whereas many companies used to (and still do) ask customers to sign up for catalogues and newsletters and mailing lists, lots of people are getting fed up with all the paper junk mail they receive. Most studies show that we aren’t as annoyed by email advertisements that we sign up for, though, so hitting people up in their inboxes can be a great way to go. And once people have agreed to let you advertise to them, you know they are much more likely to be convinced to buy something.

Content Marketing. Wikipedia describes content strategy as “…the practice of planning the content creation, delivery, and governance. A repeatable system that defines the entire editorial content development process…”

When we think of Content Marketing we think of the customer, where they are at in the sales process, and delivering them the information they need, in all the places they are searching for it, across each stage of the buying process. This requires creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

SEO. Search engine optimization is a way to bring people to your website who are already searching for the specific types of services that you offer. With well-executed SEO, when people type “buy power tools” into a Google search, your power tool company will appear at the top of their results and they will be more likely to come to you. Obviously it’s not quite as simple as that, but with the right keyword strategy for your web pages and blogs, and utilizing other SEO methods like building backlinks, you can very successfully target the market that’s actively looking to purchase your services.

Location-based marketing. If you run a business that’s mostly local, or you’re primarily interested in getting more customers close to home, local internet marketing is an offshoot of SEO that can help you corner your local market with just a few words. Let’s say your power tool business is in Bloomington, Indiana. Instead of “buy power tools,” you might want to use search terms like “buy power tools in Bloomington” or “Indiana power tools.”

By making your search terms more specific, you’re likely to find that fewer people are entering those searches, but you’ll also decrease the competition you face.  This audience is far more likely to choose your business because you’re even closer to what they’re looking for. It can also greatly help with brick and mortar foot traffic, because research has shown that the vast majority of people try an internet search first when looking for businesses close to home.

PPC. Pay-per-click marketing uses advertisements that can either appear on specific niche sites that you believe your target audience frequents or show up when people search for particular terms. The upside of this kind of marketing is in the name itself – you only pay the company creating the ads when people actually click on them and come to your site. After that, it’s up to you to finalize the sale.

These are just some of the methods to pinpoint your audience online and use your advertising dollars smarter so that you increase your return on investment. The best online marketing gurus know that the landscape is constantly changing, so you always have to know what’s over the horizon and be ready for it.