First Page Of Google Costs More Than $100

As a company that works with local businesses on bringing them online and helping them with online advertising and local SEO we spend quite a bit of our effort on educating the customers.

This is quite rewarding and our team enjoys showing customers how taking advantage of how the customer uses the web everyday actually helps them bring customers to their door that use the web in the same way they do.

We like to talk to our customers about more than their website and when building the website we like to start with some level of basic SEO. With most of our customers being local businesses and local search on the rise, most of our customers understand right away how important it is to show up when people search for local services.

Although many customers are still learning how to understand that just because they are found online does not mean people are buying from them online, they are understanding that they need to be there.

We have another set of customers that start to see the benefits of SEO and see that they can increase their market presence and expand their product reach nationally, if not globally. It is great once this realization sets in. But there is one issue.

Many customers have a look of disbelief once it is explained that it takes more than $100 in extra services to make the first page of Google for a one word term. One way that it is easy to explain this is by showing the number of results shown for a search term and the companies that are on the first page and showing some simple results of why they are there.

Another way of showing the value is equating it to something that customers are familiar with, things like paying more for higher eyeball having TV shows, larger reach radio stations, etc. If a term has 500 searches a month it is likely to be much less competitive than a term that has hundreds of thousands of searches a month.

If organic SEO cost is a concern it is typically a good plan to offer PPC help up front but as we all know it makes much more sense over the long term to have a solid organic SEO plan in place.

Large companies understand this and as time progresses smaller businesses will start to understand this as well. It is great when a prospective customer starts to see the potential, they start to think about how they use the internet. For those customers that realize that but do not have the budget in place for a larger marketing plan it is important to start them from a base they can build from in the future for a larger reach SEO plan. Sooner or later they will want, or NEED it.

Social Media Is About More Than A Facebook Page

Even though Facebook and Twitter have been around for a few to several years it has really been this past year that main street small businesses have really started to take notice. As people realize more and more that their customers are not consuming information in the same way they have in the past it becomes obvious that billboards and newspapers are not the only way they have to market their business these days.

Although some business owners and consumers still look at Facebook and say, what a waste of time, why would I use that? One thing to keep in mind is that we as business owners need to realize it is not about how we used the social media and in particular Facebook, it really has everything to do with our customers. And they ARE using it, more and more everyday. 55 minutes per user average per day.

Let me make one more reference, the other thing people say is a complete waste of time is TV. Most businesses WANT to advertise on TV but cannot afford it, yet social media is a very targeted medium that is a "time waster" yet people resist because they do not understand. Once again, people need to step outside of how they use the internet and think about how their CUSTOMERS use the internet.

Social media is the ultimate "word of mouth" marketing, if you need away to think of Facebook or Twitter, look at it like this, it is a friend telling another friend what they like. Sometimes seemingly meaningless posts about what store someone just bought something in is the ultimate advertising for your business.

All that said, many people, once they understand they have to take the leap and open a free Facebook page for their business, make the mistake of not moving the page forward and thinking about a true plan of how to engage their customers.

Although a Facebook page or Facebook Places page is free, in many cases it is worth it to pay a small fee for a local company to help you get your page setup properly. Although you may not be ready to do everything that is possible on Facebook at this time it may be worth it to take the advice of someone that has taken the time to understand the possibilities of how it can be used to engage customers of your business.

In some businesses, such as a coffee shop, it may be important to send specials, events, or other things out on a daily basis but also you can use it as an educational tool to teach your customers about the various coffees and types of coffee drinks. Your customers will pay attention and spend more time on your page or website if you try to educate them rather than sell to them everyday.

Also, sometimes it takes thinking outside the box, some businesses that seem "legacy" still have a need to get a message out. Large corporations have figured this out but many of the local marketing companies that people work with daily are really just now getting their minds around social media and are having a hard time articulating a plan to their customers about how to use online marketing and social tools as a solid marketing mechanism. Once again, ask for ideas outside of just creating a Facebook page. It takes more than that.

A few examples of what your business should be prepared for is proper pay per click advertising on Facebook, understanding how to use it in a manner that is effective and targets customers in your target demographic and area is very important. Once again it is about more than just buying keywords and paying per click, if it is not targeted and driving people to your Facebook page or website that actually matter to your business the clicks are of little use. As I said before, it is about more than being able to create a Facebook business page.

Another great example of create Facebook use is creating a visually appealing landing page or tab for your Facebook page. A couple examples are:

Coca Cola

Crane Coffee

As you can see it is a page within your Facebook presence that allows for you to give people a way to interact in a way they are used to with common websites.  Although these webpage like interfaces are by no means required it is becoming more important to have a professional appearance for your business when people find you on Facebook. This is a great way to do that. The cost to have a professional create these types of pages is minimal compared to what the cost of creating marketing materials or logos costs in many cases.

Once you have your page setup you need to make sure you keep it active. What does this mean?

It can be as simple as taking 30 seconds to a minute to post a link to a specials page on your website. Or maybe ask your customers a question about what they would like to see added to your store. Little things to connect with people that have shown interest in your business in the past but may of lost top of mind awareness of what you offer.

The key though is working with someone that can see the bigger marketing picture, although you may start with just having a Facebook page, if you are taking advice from someone, make sure they have a history or working online and understand how people are engaging with businesses on the internet. If they cannot help you come up with a real plan that makes sense for how your customers are using social media tools it may be time to switch the marketing company you are working with.

Also, for further reading, here are a few Facebook How-To's and Tips.

KTJJ and KREI Radio Working For LocalTek

I spend a lot of time explaining to people that they need to change the way they have been promoting their small business, typically this starts with choosing the right domain name and ends with a marketing model that pulls all the various advertising mediums together.

As you can imagine there are times that we explain that certain media types are not as effective as others but we never tell any customer to spend all their money online. In most cases local businesses need to market in more than one place but we try to help them understand that it is much more effective to wrap all the promotional efforts together into a holistic marketing model.

Radio is type of advertising I have always had a hard time grasping how it would be effective for certain types of businesses but I wanted to  give a big thank you to the team at KTJJ and KREI who also happen to run MyMoInfo.com for proving that it can work for virtually types of businesses if done right. They are based in Farmington MO and cover Farmington, MO news as well as the entire region of Missouri they are based in through their network of stations (KJFF, KREI, and KTJJ).

Dick Womack and Kim Long had attended a couple of our local online marketing seminars and had found that the information provided could also be useful for their local news site. We had some great discussions about the future of marketing for small businesses and decided that it would be useful to have both a technology radio show and technical tip spots on their network of stations.

As I admitted to them at the time I was a bit skeptical that this type of promotion would be useful for a business such as ours but have been pleasantly surprised. Based on the methods we used we have been receiving customer calls and emails asking for follow ups every week and virtually everywhere my sales team goes they get feedback that they have heard the radio technical tip spots

In the spots and radio show we spend a lot of time driving people to both our Facebook page and our website. One thing I have noticed is a uptick in traffic to our website from the ad spots and specifically on days we have the radio show (twice a month).

What does this mean? Use a model of marketing for your local business that ties legacy methods such as radio together with both your website and social media to get the most from your marketing campaign.

Want Free Small Business Promotion?

Spending time with local small business owners over the past couple years there is one theme that is constant no matter what type of business. How do I get the most bang for my buck?

Most of the businesses want to find away to start working online and promoting awareness of their brand online but typically do not have the time or the ability to change their marketing spending on the fly as it is planned out in advance.

This means that when working with them it is very important to help find cost effective ways for them to promote themselves, sometimes in ways that may not be obvious in the beginning but once recognized are easy to implement and take advantage of. Many of these companies have been working with legacy marketing companies for years who do a great job with creatives, brochures, and overall design but may not have worked in making sure they do the same level of branding online.

It is important as a small business starts making the move to taking advantage of the growth in local search to make sure they brand themselves and not someone else each step of the way. What do I mean by this? Consider this example of a way for any business that has a website to easily keep their business name in front of people they are communicating with daily.

Everyday I get emails from various types of businesses: customers, partners, competitors, etc. They may be the most professional, perfectly written emails with great logos, maybe even a really nicely designed brochure attached that was done by a marketing firm paid thousands of dollars, but then you see this:

Jane Doe

Business XYZ

jane@hotmail.com

It may not be obvious but there is a major issue here, especially if the company is paying people to help promote their company or working on branding campaigns. Business XYZ , in this case, is promoting Hotmail, not themselves. There is a very simple solution to this.

Use your website name as your email address as well, in other words use jane@businessxyz.com instead of the hotmail address. Although not every business has a website the cost of a domain name and email at most places these days is a very small percentage of the cost of advertising in most mediums these days. Why not take advantage of a free or low cost way to promote your business name?

These days setting up email and buying a domain name is almost as easy as setting up a free email account at most services. And if you are concerned about the technical nature there are more and more companies available to help local businesses with simple technology needs at reasonable costs compared to what companies may of charged in the past.

If you do have a website and the company that put it together for you did not offer the option to setup your own email make sure you talk to them, there is no reason you should not be offered email as part of your website package.

No longer can you look at your website as a technical, nice to have, item. It is an essential part of your marketing. Over 51 percent of searches are locally focused now (read this article at Frager Factor). This means people are not looking in the places they have in the past  like the Yellow pages. Make sure when you start your marketing online it is not just your website though, use every email as a chance to keep your website name in front of your partners and customers as well.

If you need help with understanding how to extend the marketing of your business online visit us at Localtek.com

Thanks To The Best Customers In The World

In the past two days I have had multiple deals come from multiple customer referrals. To me this is the best advertising you can possibly get, and I sell advertising. This also means as a business we continue to turn a corner into a phase of having both active feet on the street as well as having our base of customers doing selling for us as well.

One of the new customers is actually a website for a local community, always good to have the city governments or associations on board. To get the call that they have heard and seen our work and called us based on that helps a ton.

But the second story is even better, one of our customers actually had a long radio spot where he was being interviewed. During the interview the radio host actually made reference to the customers new website and ad. The customer, God bless him, actually said yes we have a new website and I want to say thanks to the team at Localtek for what they have done.

The announcer then asked for the website, instead of giving the address the customer said, well you can find us by searching for (insert several various related terms here) because after the work Localtek did we are number one on Google for all of them. Sure the radio host had said the businesses name so there is confidence that the audience will find the website anyway, but how is that for a customer that understands the value of local search.

On a side note there, I went and checked traffic to the customers site and it went up tonight and most of it was search traffic for the various terms he would want to be ranked for.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to my great customers. I know many of them read this blog and this is a public thanks for all the references we have been getting.

Yellow Page Decline Continues While Facebook Search Grows

During this past week a couple different things happened both worthy of their own blog post but time never really allowed me to get them done so I am getting them out together.

We all know that the Yellow Pages (and all copy cats) have had a continued decline in the usage of their print version, no secrets there. If early indications from real life examples are a sign of an accelerating move of their customers to smaller, less expensive ads then this year it could be a real scary ride for the industry.

A couple examples:

• While meeting with a large regional bank this week the marketing director indicated they cut their budget to a very small percentage for this year as compared to previous years based on the trends of people moving online. The person indicated that they previously had full page ads in their section of the Yellow Pages but had decided to move to the smallest listing available with a logo. How is that for a significant shift. When a conservative regional bank is making moves like that and starting to put more of their money into online marketing you know it is going to be a tough year.
• A fast growing local restaurant actually moved completely away from any paid listing in the Yellow Pages and moved back to the completely free listing. They thought it made more sense to focus their effort on expanding their web presence.

What I find particularly interesting is that the bank, who sets a yearly marketing budget and starts implementing it as soon as 2010 starts, has made such a strong move away from such a long running tradition as full page ads in their regional Yellow Page edition. This tells  me that last year was horrible for the Yellow Pages but now even the most rural and conservative of businesses are pulling out, in other words, even the strongholds in the rural regions are starting to move away.

Now on to Facebook, over the past month and a half I have seen a STRONG, and I should emphasize STRONG move upward in the amount of traffic I am receiving from Facebook search. I had read quite a bit about Facebook and the work they were putting into their search functions and had paid quite a bit of attention to that and had actually tested some things around that to see how it affected traffic to various sites.

Well the verdict is in and the Facebook dream scenario is happening more and more, Facebook would love for people not to go to Google to search (which is one of Googles biggest fears obviously), and with the amount of traffic I am seeing from Facebook search for quite a few different keyword terms it tells me that people are starting to be even more sticky to Facebook. Hopefully I can test a few scenarios with this soon and report back with some real numbers, but I can say that for certain terms that I rank well for in Google that I am getting just as much traffic from Facebook from them. A little side note, Facebook web search is powered by Bing....

Local Search Review From 2009

As someone who spends the majority of his time thinking about local search and all things that pertain to small businesses taking advantage of all that the web has to offer I was absolutely overwhelmed by all the information linked to and provided in this great 2009 year in review post at SearchEngineLand.com:

SearchEngineLand.com Local Search Review

There is so much information linked to in that one article you could spend a week reading and analyzing it. We all know that geo domains are primed for success after the failure of newspapers and legacy media and Google is becoming the default "Yellow Pages" of today. 2009 will go down as the year the shift started full bore.

I highly recommend reading the story in the link and taking your time to read a good portion of the links within it.

New Website Advertising Fail

One of the themes that seems to come up fairly frequently when we talk to customers about their current website or plans for their new one is the lack of a plan for promoting it.

So many times we have spoke to customers and they indicate that they have never really thought about promoting their website, they buy it with no idea of what they are really going to do with it or how they can promote it to bring people into to see their message. This really came to mind today when we passed a billboard for a customer of ours who we had done a re-branding effort with and created a great looking new logo, a really nice e-commerce site and some other items that would help them move from their old image to new.

The customer had asked us to do this work for them so they could move forward on some other promotion initiatives they were working on that involved some offline marketing (billboards and also signs around their office complex). We did not have our hands in that part but I wish we had now.

My wife saw the billboard today, now keep in mind my wife is not a tech person, at all... But the first thing she said was "Why do they have their phone number but not their website on that new billboard?".

Good question.

We actually send out promotion tips to customers and give tips and advice but at times there is work done that we are not involved in, as mentioned above this is a case of that. As I mentioned in previous posts, more and more I hear people tell me that they do not even look for phone numbers on billboards or signs but they look for websites (DOMAIN NAMES).

Why?

Well, it is because they can go get the info they need from the site. Sure you need the phone number on there, but you also need your website on the billboard, driving people to the website allows a small business to promote more of their companies products. I would venture to guess most people can not remember 7 or 10 digits but most will remember a few words (I wish I could remember the book I read this in, but it was tested and proven).

Anyway, we will be reaching out to this customer just to let them know that they should also include their new website in any new marketing push that they do.

If you are looking for ways to promote a website offline check out my post called 10 Offline Ways To Promote Your New Website.

iSupportServices.com Launches NorthCarolina.me and Business Support Services

Localtek is proud to announce a partnership with iSupportServices.com, the company owns several state .ME names and after the success of Missouri.me had interest in using our state Geo development platform for the launch of their state names and also extend the partnership into other areas where we provide rural small business services.

NorthCarolina.me is the first of the states to launch, over the coming months iSupportServices will be working directly with small business customers to support their technical and marketing needs and we are proud to be a piece of that solution.

Here is the press release that went out today:

iSupport Services, LLC
Chris Poer, 877-228-9002
cpoer@isupportservices.com
www.isupportservices.com

Speaking Today To Farmington Business Leaders

Today is going to be booked from start to finish with the morning kicking off with a seminar speaking to the business leaders of Farmington, MO. Farmington is one of, if not the (depending who you ask) fastest growing areas in Missouri. Our partner Big River Telephone worked tirelessly in promoting the seminar and once again went offline to promote to businesses that need to start thinking about how to promote online.

I must say that spending time with medium and small business leaders in a group setting like this is about as good as it gets, I enjoy every minute and some of the questions and discussions are very insightful  as they can help me (and others) understand what the people not focused on the online world are really thinking about technology.

One of the things that really amazes me is the number of people using Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. I always ask for a raise of hands before I start speaking to find out how many people use each of the services. Facebook always leads, Twitter is always second, and Linkedin third. No real surprise but what I do find interesting is that the crowd is typically not real tech savvy but a rough estimate would be 70 percent of most rooms have Facebook accounts.

As I type that I also realize more and more I am seeing people not even put their website in their commercials on TV, they just go straight to their Facebook page. What a coup for Facebook....

Now, I do spend a portion of the presentation talking about proper domain name selection and after seeing the acceptance of social networking there are very few people who even understand what  a domain name is. I am happy to help do that education.

Farmington is a very progressive area and I expect todays presentation to be a bit different than others and since I know some of the people in the room this time it should make for good back and forth.

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