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.

What Next For Your New Website

Earlier this week I had a few things come up that made me think about some of the failures of small businesses after they receive a new website or start a new social media presence on Facebook or Twitter. I got sidetracked and could not write the post but a very timely post by Mark Fulton at DotSauce.com fit nicely with my thoughts as well. The post also reminded me of my post I did awhile back concerning offline marketing tips for promoting a website.

When presenting to small businesses we online marketers tend to focus on talking about driving traffic through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and other methods that drive targeted web traffic to the customers, hopefully, quality domain name.

Although businesses like Amazon.com can focus the majority of their marketing online local businesses have different needs and in many cases a good portion of the traffic to their website will come from offline marketing methods.

Many of these local businesses are new to promoting on the web and have a perception that they need not do anything to promote their website once it has been turned over to them. I cannot tell you how many times I have witnessed customers pay real money for a new website but visit the business month after month and never see their domain name on their business cards, menus, t-shirts, or billboards.

What a missed opportunity. Most consumers will NOT remember a phone number or address. A phone number is really 10 words, a website can be as short as one word. Which are you going to have a better chance of remembering?

It is important that small business owners remember that, yes their web development partner should make sure their site is properly optimized for the search engines, but unless they are paying a marketing company to handle all their marketing promotions, that they treat their domain name as they previously treated their phone number or address. They can provide more information on that domain name than they could possibly provide on a business card or an ad in a newspaper or billboard. Use those methods to drive people to your prime real estate on the web, your website.

We at LocalTek make it a point to help our customers understand holistic marketing and making sure customers promote. As much as we do our best to help our customers it is typically less than a 50 percent ratio that take advantage of the FREE ways to promote their website in the places they are already paying for.

With more people using mobile phones and search everyday it is important to keep your online brand in front of them, let them search for your website and cut your competitors off at the pass. Your online marketing does not stop once the website is handed over, no matter what web development company you are working with, the ability to attract customers only starts with the website hand off. Making sure your website continues to work for you is part of a holistic marketing approach that continues like any other marketing that you may be doing.

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

Holistic Marketing Plans For Local Business

This was a very busy week for Missouri.me / Localtek. We had seminars in both Park Hills and Chamois, MO and had a great time meeting with members of the business leadership in Cuba, MO. I wanted to say thanks to all those who spent the time to listen to what it takes to succeed online today and how marketing is changing compared to years past.

No matter what size the community today people are looking for products and services online. This means that your competitor is not necessarily down the street but is more likely someone in another state, the Internet has leveled the playing field and customer retention becomes as important as business growth.

The way things are changing from a marketing point of view really requires an open mind from business leaders who typically have had purely legacy media to work with, newspapers, radio, yellow pages, and billboards. Although it is impossible to go strictly online as a local business it is important to think about how you work a holistic marketing plan to get the most bang for your buck as you move to having a web presence as well as market offline.

From the selection of your domain name to the ad you put on the radio you must think about how they all work together, even more so that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter start to play a daily role in many peoples lives (especially in the disposable income crowd).

For those business leaders from the communities listed at the top of this post, thanks for the time this week, we look forward to working with you.

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.

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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