No Kidding – Your Customers Are Searching for Your Local Business Online!

Your local business could really benefit from getting free or inexpensive leads from a local Google search, couldn't it?

You can't if you're not there. Or worse, if you think you're there, but you're buried under 50, 100, or 2500 other listings, what can you do?

Marketing Ideas

If you have a web site make sure it's indexed with Google. Granted, being indexed with all the major search engines is important – but Google is the grandmother search engine of them all.

Our on-line marketing service does this automatically for you. If you would like to do this yourself, you can get directions here at Google's webmaster help pages.

Indexing is just the beginning. In creating your web site marketing strategy the main ingredient is making sure that you focus each page on a specific keyword or two.

When we do this we create an entire site map in advance of keywords (sometimes hundreds of them) for the new web site. Keywords are the method that your customers are using to find your business online.

How Your Customers Find You Online

When anyone searches online for, say, fabric, they type in to Google, or another search engine, using very specific words. For a search on fabric related items, a customer might search for "quilting", or "cotton batting". One such search brought us 799,000 different pages from Google alone!

Customers searching for a local supplier of cotton batting may also include the town name with the search. This will narrow the numbers of pages returned. The previous "cotton batting" search is now "cotton batting ithaca ny" (search engines don't care about capital letters), and the pages returned is now 14,700. Better, right?

Well, 14,700 is still a pretty big haystack for your needle to be lost in. Granted, a lot of those pages will be "spammy", full of nonsense that people won't stick around for. The internet is full of them.

Web Site Marketing Strategy

Here's the secret to rising to the top of those pages: the doorway to your local business hinges on keywords, and lots of them. What better way to reach your customers than to give them what they're already looking for? Information.

Information in the form of articles can make your site rise to the top of the internet haystack and help your local business be found by the folks who are looking for you.

So a local business, such as our fabric store example, teaching customers about its wares can attract local internet traffic using the right keywords in the right proportions.

It's like having a perpetual training class going around the clock, teaching your customers about your products or services, attracting new customers and bringing back old ones for new information that you can feed them.

Your web site is interactive local advertising at its finest.

• your customers can reach you all the time via email
• each page of your site can teach your customers how to use your products
• your customers can email each other about your sales promotions and
• they can buy from you 24 hours a day, in your store and at your site

This is value marketing at its best.

And since Google works so well with local search marketing you can get free leads and buy leads for your small business that can pay off handsomely using a combination of AdSense and AdWords, Google's advertising programs for webmasters. (Some sites make hundreds or thousands of dollars with Google advertising alone!)

And your site will do this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and never ask for a coffee break or a day off.

You can use the tools we use to build your own sites – or we can do all the work for you. Click here if you have questions or download this free ebook to learn more about how to take your local business into your community on the internet.

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