If you have a business that only operates locally, spending time and effort on SEO and marketing practices that go out to a national or international audience is probaby a waste of time.  Most SEO and Internet marketing techniques focus on driving as much traffic as possible, casting a wide net.  Techniques for local SEO are a bit different and Traffkid has some good tips in their post Search Engine Optimization for Local Business Results.

Do you have other tips for local businesses?  Please share them in the comments section below.

I was speaking with a client today who said his previous SEO company asked him for 20 keywords and got his website on the front page of Google for all of them.  But he still hadn’t seen his traffic go up, nor seen any leads from the experience. I think this provides a very important lesson about SEO - first you need to understand your business goals and your goals for your website.

Just because you’re on the front page of the search engines for some keywords you think are important doesn’t mean you’ll get more traffic or leads.  You don’t know if those keywords are the same as what your potential customers are using.  SEO is really an ongoing experiment in finding out how your customers want to find you.

After speaking with the client for awhile longer, he came to the conclusion that he really wanted more leads from his website.  In his experience he’s found that he closes 80% of business from people who contact him.  Leads are important way to increase his sales and are a good goal for his website.  Now we have something to work with - and SEO isn’t the only answer, it should be part of an overall Internet strategy.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, internet strategy, internet marketing, internet consulting

One way to increase the awareness of your products and services (and your brand) is to have your website and/or blog content show up on social networking sites such as Digg, Newsvine, Del.icio.us, etc.  Users of these social networks will hopefully discover your useful content and visit your site - possibly becoming returning visitors and passing on your name to co-workers, family and friends.  Social networking sites usually have different types of audiences, so it is worth investigating them to see which ones work best for your target visitors.

Here is an summary of some of the top social networking sites:

• Digg - Started initially in the tech industry as a way to link and rank news and articles and has quickly spread to gaming, and off-the-wall.  Digg is trying to widen their audience, but in my experience, many business-related articles are quickly lost in their huge amount of submissions.
• FaceBook - Started as college students only, but now open to all.  Best for connecting with long-lost friends and for networking with acquaintances.  There are business networks and groups, but FaceBook does not make it easy to separate close friends with business networking acquaintances.  One possibility is to create two personas - one for work and one for personal use.  Posts from your blog can be displayed in your profile and you can create pages to promote your business.
• MySpace - Probably one of the more mainstream of the social networks, MySpace is heavily used by younger generations and by entertainment and music groups wanting to connect with their fans.
• LinkedIn - Targets business users who want to keep track of their networking contacts.  Business can join and create groups to promote themselves.
• Del.icio.us - Is a link sharing social network where you can share links with notes and tags.  Can be useful across multiple industries and a nice way to add more content to your own blog/site (check out their widgets).
• Technorati - Started as a way to view news on tech blogs (hence the name) and see their ranking (as a function of how many other tracked blogs link to them) - is now used across many industries for an overview of what’s going on in the blogosphere.
• StumbleUpon - Has a fairly general audience who use the site to ’stumble upon’ new content that others have submitted.
• Newsvine - Started as a sort of portal with voting for content from news organization, it now accepts content from anywhere, but still heavily favors news websites.  May be worth a look for your business blog since you can also start your own column on the site.
• Sphinn - Targets Search & Internet Marketing Professionals.

As mentioned previously, it is also worth taking a look at industry websites to see if there are smaller niche social networks and communities in your own industry.

Need Help using Social Networks to Promote Your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

This is also an important question because there are a limited number of hours in the day and we need to put our efforts into what makes sense for our business.  Just because you heard about MySpace in the news doesn’t mean that your audience of roofing contractors is there or has even heard about it.  You’ll need to do a little research to find out where your audience is.

Here are some places to look:

• Start with publications focused at your audience - their websites often offer or link to a existing community.
• Look to see if there are dedicated groups on existing social networks (like Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, etc).
• Use Google to search for your industry name to see if any other websites have or link to a network.
• Try a blog search to find blogs (try Google Blog Search or Technorati) in your industry - they often have communities or link to them.
• Ask professionals in your industry if they know of any online communities.

If you still come up blank it may be that there isn’t a community for your industry (yet).  Before you run off to start your own community, it is also important to understand your audience.  Are they even online?  Do they just read websites or will they create content and join the conversation?  The Profile tool at the Groundswell site can help you understand the tendencies of your audience.

Other posts in this series:

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business?

Using Social Networks for Business - What Are Your Goals?

Technorati Tags: social networks, social networking, internet consulting

Google shares their ranking philosophy, which is used in many of their products, including News, Images, YouTube, Maps, and, of course, Search.  Their philosophy breaks down to:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

- Official Google Blog: Introduction to Google Ranking

What does this mean for your business website?

Best locally relevant results - if you have a small local business you are still very much in the running for search results to people within your area.  Your company does not need expensive nationwide advertising or reach to still be relevant in Google’s eyes.

Google may change their algorithm which may change the ranking of your website in their search results.  However, they are not manually removing you from searches unless you violate their terms of service.  Most importantly, keep it simple, implies that having good content that is of value to your customers will get you further than just relying on SEO tricks.

I still believe content is king. If you have information that your customers want (remember to listen to them), they will come.

You may have heard that websites built in Flash or as Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are invisible to search engines and are not a great idea for search engine optimization (SEO). This is not entirely true as sites which are built properly may enable search engines to reach a great deal of their content. However, this usually requires that the developer really knows what they are doing and may require special coding just for the search engines - even that is not a guarantee that search engines can reach everything (or anything depending on the content).

Today, Adobe (the makers of Flash and many other RIA products) announced that they are working with search engines to make the content in Flash and RIAs more visible to searches (or indexing). Yippie! Let’s code all our websites in beautiful Flash, right?

Well, hold on. The problem is much more complex than just working to get the content searchable (which in itself is quite complex). As Hank Williams discusses, the way RIAs are created inherently makes the information in them very difficult to display to a search engine. He uses the example of Microsoft Word where the type of information that is available to search engines is the menus and what is in the menus, which is not particularly useful. Much of the information that is available in RIAs requires a person to make some type of interaction (choosing to see all the red shoes for example), which then displays a specific set of information - very difficult to reproduce for a search engine and even more difficult to make meaningful to a search.

This is certainly the first step in having information in RIAs available to search engines, but there is much work yet to be done. Flash and RIAs can be used to provide great customer experiences, just don’t bet on them to provide search engine traffic to your website (yet).

More coverage:

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog - Improved Flash indexing
• TechCrunch - Once Nearly Invisible to Search Engines, Flash Files Can Now Be Found and Indexed
• ReadWriteWeb - Adobe Makes Flash Searchable - The Holy Grail of Website Usability?

Technorati Tags: Adobe, Flash, RIA, rich internet applications

As Dharmesh Shah said in our interview, HubSpot sells a product, not a service, and intends on giving small businesses the tools they need to do their own search engine optimization (SEO).  HubSpot Inbound Marketing System has a three step approach:

1. Qualified Traffic - Traffic is nice, but if the visitors to your website are not going to purchase from you, they won’t make you any money.
2. Convert to Leads - Once you have qualified visitors, convert them into sales opportunities.
3. Measure & Optimize - Take a look at how well your strategy is doing, make adjustments and continue to improve.

Continue Reading »

Knowing what people say about your company is pretty important for maintaining your brand image and quality of service. The Internet allows people to easily post opinions, problems and reviews. How do you know what people are saying about your company?

One way is to provide a forum where people can go to post reviews, problems, questions, etc. Get Satisfaction provides neutral ground for this conversation, which you can easily link to your website. Anyone can startup a conversation about a product or company, but if you own the company you can claim them (Get Satisfaction then verifies your claim). Once you’ve claimed or started a conversation, you can represent your company as an official representative or just an employee. More importantly, you can interact in an official manner with your customers and potential customers to provide your own side to any problems, questions or issues. As a customer-centric company you should take this input in order to improve your products or services and then interact with the community to get their continued feedback.

Besides linking or creating a badge to the conversation from your website, Get Satisfaction also provides the ability to add topic widgets in order to increase the visibility of your customer support conversation. These topic widgets can be customized by topic, order, number, summaries, etc. and you have have multiple widgets if you want to target different topics. Anyone can add their own customized topic widgets to their own sites - allowing your customers to increase visibility of the conversation as well. If you insist on keeping the conversation on your own website, an API is provided for integration with your site.

Conversations are organized by products, tags, questions, ideas, problems, and talk and can also be identified by recently active, latest and unanswered. Replies to the conversation can be rated by the participants so you can quickly get an idea of the overall emotion of the community to any particular idea - information that has previously been the realm of in-person focus groups.

For companies looking for a quick and easy way to interact with customers, Get Satisfaction can offer a great deal of functionality for free. However, keep in mind that the company is still in beta and hasn’t yet decided on how they will make money. Obviously without a business plan, the company may also disappear at some point - but right now, according to The NYTimes, they have comments on over 2,000 companies with 40% of the companies responding.

Technorati Tags: get satisfaction, customer service, customer support, customer-centric, B2B, B2C, B2B internet consulting, internet consulting, business internet consulting

Your customers - current, potential, disgruntled, etc - are talking about you. Do you know what they are saying? Do you know where they are saying it? How do you keep negative comments from tarnishing your brand image?

In his post, Who do people trust? (It ain’t bloggers), Jeremiah, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, has gathered data which shows that people turn to their peers - or people they know when they need information (especially information for making a purchase). When people are researching your products or services, they are going to turn to their peers to see what they think about them.

The Internet makes it extremely easy for anyone to post their opinions on your products - good or bad - and it is very easy for your potential customers to find these opinions. This easy of posting and the ability to easily find competitors has created the need for customer-centric websites and customer-centric companies. You need to know what people are saying about your products and services so you can address those people (to help them and to improve your products). There are many ways to find out what is being said about your company, and in my next series of posts, I’ll be running through some valuable tools in the battle of your brand awareness.

Technorati Tags: brand awareness, customer-centric, internet consulting, B2B, B2C

Kakul Srivatava from Flickr spoke about how tagging is evolving. Tagging started as a way to find things or to play with friends and family. Then additional meaningfulness was found from community tagging - things the author would not have thought to mention. Inferred tags used in clustering, hot tags, places, etc. can show you what is important at a point in time.

What’s next?

• More Metadata - using subtags (people, regions, etc), machine tags, “suggest” tags, “correct” tags, “play” tags to merge data sets and get new connections and meanging.
• More Network Magic - is this interesting? is this related? is this a story? is this news? To find more information and new relevancy.
• Greatest Challenge - all this data requires more and more screen space so how do you make it available and useful?

Using tagging on your business website can help your readers find more relevant content on your site, which increases their length of stay (and the opportunity to brand and/or sell to them).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, tagging, flickr,