Proven & practical local search marketing strategies for small businesses. Gain visibility in Google Maps, Yahoo Local Search, MSN Search Local & much more!
It looks like there are more shifts taking place in the Local Search with Google.
Today one of my favorite bloggers (Greg Sterling) in the Local Search Industry writes about how Google has sent out physical window decals to these 100,000 businesses for them to display in their windows.
Now what is so cool about these window decals is that consumers will be able to use their social mobile technology to interact with Google’s Place Pages by simple scanning the bar code on the window decal into their smart phones.
They’ll be able to see:
Hours of operation
Cards accepted
Reviews
Brands carried
Menus (if applicable)
User-generated content
Coupons/deals (if they exist)
They’ll also be able to “star” businesses for later recall or write reviews if they’re inclined. I wrote a post (a year ago or more) about the power of these new smartphones and how they will become an integral part of marketing for Small Businesses. We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg of Local Search Marketing here.
Check out the full details on these Place Page’s window decals here.
Google is in beta testing on their Local Listing Ads, the question I have is why do you think its taken them so long to start to monetize these local listings? Do you think there was no need in the past because they didn’t display the 7-Pack in the organic search engine pages.
Now that the Google Maps 7-Pack shows at the top of the SERP’s 95% of the time (as long as their is a local modifier added to the keyword phrase), its become increasing important to make sure your business’s G-Maps Local Listing is optimized and actively managed for top rankings. Do think this is why they have finally chosen to monetize this section of Google? Let me know your theories in the comment section below.
Regardless of their reasoning, its a steal at a flat $45 a month. Any local business owner who doesn’t capitalize on this (in my opinion) is crazy. Now with Local Listing Ads you can now possible get a double listing above the fold. One listing for your business in the 7-Pack and one listing in their new local advertising slot. Like the way SOS Rooter has done shown below.
Who wouldn’t want a double listing like that for their local business on Google. These Local Listing Ads seem like a great deal for Small Businesses. Completely affordable and turn-key. The merchant doesn’t really have to anything except fill out their listing and press go. Here are some of the highlights:
Drive more sales. Over 80% of people look to Google for local information. Make sure your listing stands out.
See – and hear – the results. You’ll hear “this call brought to you by Google” with every call from your ad.
Free for 30 days. Try it out, risk free. You can cancel anytime.
Local targeting. We’ll make sure your ad only shows to people near your business, with no work for you.
In my opinion this is a winner and is a no brainer for most small businesses.
Maybe now that Google is starting to monetize their Google Business Listings, they will start to clean them up from all the spam. I always figured the reason why support and spam clean-up on the Google Maps was poor is because they make no $$, but now that they are looking to monetize it, I think maybe they’ll put together a team to clean it up a little. What are your thoughts on this…?
Too bad these services are only currently available in San Francisco and San Diego, CA. Even worse for us Canadians because once its released to the entire States, it’ll take another 6 months or more before we see. We just received access to the new Google LBC analytics dashboard a month ago, even though our Southern neighbors received access to it in June of this year.
What are your thoughts on Google’s new Local Listing Ads…? If anyone is currently using it in those cities I’d love to hear your experience thus far below in the comment section.
Claiming and filling out your Google Maps Listing is the easy part, but it’s usually not enough when trying to rank within the ultra-competitive Google Maps 7-Box. The last place you want your local business to be listed in is the “More results near…such, such city” which might as well say “More results near invisible city”.
Even if you do manage to get a decent ranking within the 7-Box by only claiming and filling out your listing, don’t hold your breath because soon your local competitors are going to realize that is a prized position to have and will compete aggressively for that slot. They may even hire a local search marketing company like ours to do it for them – then you’d better watch out!
You have to understand that Google does here is very smart. With a similar idea to link building, everything Google does is kinda like a big social popularity contest. Google is always responsible to their users and so they want to serve up the most relevant results to them. As long as Google does a good job at serving up relevant results to users they’ll continue to dominate the search marketplace. So the way Google chooses which G-Map Listings are the most relevant is by which listings have the most activity associated with them via citations, reviews & user content.
Let’s look at why citations, reviews, and user content is the glue that makes your Google Listings stickier.
Citations
A citation is where your business name and address are mentioned (or cited) on another website. Citations don’t necessarily have links leading back to a website since many business owners don’t have website(s). Google crawls content across the web and anywhere they find a citation on your business they give you a point. A citation is a mention of your business name, address, & phone number.
I am not positive if some site’s citations carry more weight than others, but my guess is yes. I personally believe that with traditional SEO, not all inbound links are created equal. When it comes to citations the same rules apply. I believe some citations have more weight, that is most likely based on some Google Local algorithm similar to what is called Trust Rank.
Trust Rank simply means some sites carry more authority and trust than others and if you have links or citations coming from these sites, then you are given bonus points which ultimately increase your rankings. So sites like the BBB.org or Wikipedia or Yahoo Directory may have more authority and so Google may give you 2 or 3 points for that. Again, the theme isn’t always about quantity, its also about quality.
There are tons of ways to get citations, from using directories to blogging, having your business listed on your Local Business Association Website, or mentioning your business on your local newspapers website. One great way is to look at your competition’s citations (currently, Google is listing them all) and see if you can get a citation from the same source. If your competition has a citation, then you will most likely be able to gain one from the same source. Use the obvious.
One of the best ways to get a good head start on citations is to submit your business details through Universal Business Listings. For approximately $30 a dollars a year, it’ll hit the top 30 authority directories & data providers like: Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, infouSA.com, Acxiom and so on. BTW, this service is really only good for USA businesses, if you are in Canada like most of our clients, then it’s not that great of a service. I’ll be sure to put some great citations spots below for Canadians too.
If you can get your business information into these major databases (like Acxiom, Localeze, & infoUSA) which form the foundation of the search engines’ Local indexes and of a variety of second-tier portals as well, you’ll notice a decent amount of citations point back to your G-Maps listing. This can take 2-3 months before your info populates into these verticals so be patient.
The goal with citations is to (obviously) have more than your competition, but much like link building, you want to be consistently dripping in new citations week after week. Build slowly and consistently. Play for the long haul.
For our clients, we have a long list of places to which we can add citations (all discovered from what Google already indexes as a citation) and we have been collecting this list for quite some time and have hundreds of easily accessible places from which to acquire citations from. You want to develop your own swipe list of great citation spots. I will post 100 or so common citations at the end of this post from where any business should be able to get a citation from. I’ll do this because I’m such a good guy. If you know of more great citation spots, why not add them to the comment section below and help the community.
We then drip in these citations consistently over time for our clients, often winning them the number 1 spot within the 7-Box. Don’t go slamming citations. Just like you wouldn’t hammer 1000 links at a site overnight, similar rules apply to getting citations. Think Drip, Drip, Drip.
When working with citations, one of the most important elements is consistency. Your DBA name, address, and/or phone number should never change. If you have different information, it can have the opposite effect you desire with your G-Map Listing. Even if you are thinking of using tracking phone numbers to monitor advertising/marketing efforts, I would highly recommend in this arena that you find another way to measure data if possible. There is an interesting post here about using Tracking Phone Numbers in your Local Search Marketing that would be worthwhile reading. I am a metrics fanatic too, but not having the same information about your business name, address and contact number builds distrust with Google (It would with humans too). Consistency is KEY from your citations.
Reviews
The Google Maps Listings allows the public to add reviews to your listing. Right now I don’t think Google is looking at the quality of reviews, but they look at the quantity of reviews, so even receiving lots of poor reviews will improve your rankings within the 7-Box (not the obvious goal, but interesting to note).
There have been some recent speculations that Google may put more weight on Power Reviewers sometimes known as Maven Reviewers. These are individuals who have full-fledge profiles and leave lots of reviews across multiple categories of business. Just as there are power bloggers, there are power reviewers and getting a review from a power reviewer may just carry more weight. When dealing with power bloggers & reviewers, approach them the same way you’d approach Oprah. Send them a free sample and press release to entice them to leave you a review.
From my testing, loads of reviews can outrank a competitor with lots of citations. Therefore, I say that reviews hold some serious weight to your G-Maps rankings. The Google Maps will even snag reviews from other authority sites and populate them into the G-Map listings.
NOTE: This only holds true if your reviews are current. Having 200 reviews and having the last one post over a year ago will not help you anymore. Not good for the algorithm and not good for humans. Make sure you are getting constant stream of fresh reviews on your Google Maps Listing and other authority reviews sites.
Some common authority review sites from which you may want to focus on getting reviews from besides Google Maps are: Yelp, JudyBook, Yellowbot, Cityvoter, Citysearch, Yellowpages, Kudzu, etc. You may also want to look at finding authority review sites that are related to your category of business like Rate MDs for Doctors and Homestars for the Home Improvement Contractors. Pay attention to what authority reviews sites Google is citing from in your niche’s industry, whatever they are citing then make sure your info is up-to-date at that site and that you are actively pursuing reviews there too.
Review management (also known as Brand Management) is a very real challenge for all businesses in today’s marketplace. Users can easily jump online and add their opinions (good or bad) to tons and tons of review sites about your business. What we recommend is that you find creative incentives to barter for reviews from your clients. On almost all of our client’s regional sites, we trade discounts/coupons for reviews in Google Maps. Getting reviews is ALL about creating a ethical bribe. We also create a video showing people how easy it is to post a review and if they do we offer BIG discount or coupon that will be mailed to them or emailed them privately after the review is verified. The strategy works great!
I’ve seen some companies who have gone as far as to hire employees with laptop computers and their sole job is to ask customers before leaving if they wouldn’t mind leaving a review on a particular a site and by doing so they receive a special gift (usually a gift card or coupon redeemable on their next visit – you want them to have an additional reason to return, don’t you…?) The point being is you need to have an active and creative way to acquire online reviews for your local business.
Our company offers another review management solution (besides the online incentives) to our customers. We use an offline to online approach to helping our clients get loads of reviews for their businesses.
What we do is supply our clients with a 4 X 6 postcard that asks people to write a review about the business from which they just received products and/or services from. Our clients make sure they put a pre-paid postage stamp on the postcard and ask the customer for a review after services have been rendered. They let the customer know they use a third-party service to learn how they can improve their services and it would be really helpful if the customer could take 60 seconds to leave an anonymous review on the postcard and stick it in the mailbox.
NOTE: Don’t forget to add a disclaimer on the postcard that notifies your customers that the review may be used for marketing purposes or posted online.
Well, the postcard comes to our P.O. Box and we have our team post that review online with one of our many maven reviewer profiles for that anonymous reviewer. We add the review to Google Maps or to some of the other major authority review sites that Google tends to pull data from.
We allow for each of our clients to get between 4-7 reviews a month (depending what is normal amount of reviews to get for their particular local niche): any more (in our opinion) would be unnatural. If our clients use this to its maximum benefit that is 40-70 reviews every year. Now that is what you call actively managing your brand and online reviews. It’s one of the best ways to drive traffic and help convert online searchers into offline buyers.
You see, we understand that it’s very difficult to get people to review your business online because of the multiple steps involved to get a review. We recommend you come up with some sort of offline to online review management strategy like ours for your business. We do want to warn you though, of the potential risks involved with this strategy.
First off, don’t add fake reviews!
Some people ask if we edit the reviews. The answer is… we DO NOT alter the reviews from the postcards. We believe having some poor reviews is natural and it wouldn’t appear normal to only have 5 out of 5 stars all the time. If fact, Matt McGee even thinks Negative Reviews are good for business and we agree with him.
What you want to do is create a strategy that makes it easy for your customers to review online. Don’t spam and keep it real. People can always tell when someone is creating unnatural reviews. The reason our system works is because they are REAL reviews, we just facilitate them getting online.
Writing made-up reviews about your business will not help you. Be very, very careful with this strategy and do not get spammy. You can always tell when they are made-up and eventually someone will catch you and call you on it. It could even cost loads of cash. If you need to resort to fake reviews, then you should rethink why you are in business. If your business provides real value and you take an active role in asking for reviews, you can easily get them.
If you do employ an offline strategy like ours, don’t do stupid things like post reviews under your business profile & post multiple reviews in the same day. Remember, even though you are facilitating your customer’s reviews to getting online, it still has to appear natural. Otherwise, this strategy can backfire in your face.
User Content
User content is generated when people create their own Google “My Maps” where they create a unique (sometimes personalized) list on Google Maps. Anyone can tag a place or location on Google Maps. The more people that tag your business on G-Maps, the more activity you have about your business and again the more popular your business must be (or this is at least how Google thinks).
Therefore, having more references in people’s “My Maps” will give your listing a boost in rankings in the 7-Box. I have written a post in the past on how to use Google’s “My Maps” to market your business. Creating some user content on G-Maps is easy and quick. Create some useful content driven “My Maps” about your city and remember to find creative ways to tag your company. Or run a local contest that involves “My Maps” and get dozens of people adding your business to their own personal G-Maps. The ways to accomplish this are endless if you are a little creative and think about how you can add value.
Well, that pretty much wraps up how to improve your rankings within the Google Maps Listings. Most of this is obvious if you study the G-Maps a little closer and read between the lines. If you follow the advice listed above and actively manage your Google Maps Listing, you can easily achieve those preferred rankings for your local business in the 7-Box.
If you like what you have learned here, but know you are the type of business owner who would prefer if the PROS managed your listings, then please visit our Local Search Engine Marketing Services page.
NOTE: We only take on 1 client per business category per city, so if you are considering using us, please take action sooner than later. We’d hate to tell you we can’t help you due to us helping your competition already. The early bird gets the worm!
BTW, let us know your thoughts and let us know if you have any questions in the comment section below.
Citation List
This list is in no particular order. Any business should be able to get a citation from these spots. Most are 100% free.
It’s amazing how many things you can do wrong with these free listings. Just following our advice to filling out your Google Maps Listing within the Google’s Local Business Center (LBC) can make the difference in your business outranking your competition in the 7-Box.
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to set up your listing, you may just want to quickly read the Business Listings Quality Guidelines, so you are fully aware of their terms when you are setting up your listing. I have seen example after example of merchants who knowingly or through ignorance break these simple guidelines and end up being flagged and then banned from G Maps. Don’t end up like the many panicked merchants in the forums struggling to get help with their banned listing.
Before you post your listing you may want to go to GetListed.org and check to see if you have a listing already. If you do, claim it. If you don’t have a listing then sign up for your Google Maps Listing at the LBC.
Here are the 7 Elements You Must Have in Your Google Maps Listing To Have a Optimized Listing.
Just filling out your local listing blindly without any thought is a HUGE mistake. Treat this listing with the same respect you would for your on-page SEO for your website.
Google Maps On-Page Optimization
Here are the seven most likely Google Maps ranking elements that you will want to put some thought into before submitting your listing. (If you have already submitted a listing don’t worry all listings are easily editable, as long as you have access to edit your listing)
Address: Often Google likes to display businesses that are closest to the city center. So if you are a mobile business try to get an address that is closest to the city’s core. For example, if you are a contractor or work out of your home and your home address is not in that city then you may want to get a P.O. Box that has an address and ZIP/Postal Code that correlates to the city core, otherwise you may find your listing is not ranking as well as you’d like. NOTE: Make sure your contact address is consistent across the web. Don’t have different sources showing different addresses for your business. Consistency is KEY when it comes to citations in G-Maps. Also note: that using a P.O. Box is technically against Google’s Maps TOS. You man want to rent a mail box or office space closer to the core. I personally have used UPS boxes because they are called “Suite #’s” as opposed to a BOX number. Right now I believe you are not penalized in anyway by using a UPS address because it’s no uncommon for a building to have many businesses in it and there is no way for Google to know how many business reside in that building. Just note it’s technically against their terms.
Category: There is a ton of chatter about how to optimize “Categories” in Google Maps, but I suggest you make sure you choose the most relevant category for your business in the ‘choose category’ section. Getting this wrong can cause your local listing to not show for the GEO keyword terms you would like. My advice is to not add local modifiers to your category keyword terms. My suggestion is to do some searching with category keywords in Google and note which keyword categories trigger a 7-Pack. If it’s pulling in the 7-Pack then you may want to consider using that category term. Make sure there is some search volume for the term too – do some good old keyword research. The one thing you want to make sure you do is to use ALL five category spots. David Mihm offers a good article on Google Maps Categories here.
Title/Business Name: Make sure you ONLY use your (DBA) Doing Business As Name when creating your Organization name. Don’t listen to others that tell you to keyword load your Business Name to try to get better rankings. That is against Google Map’s Terms of Use. You can still get great rankings being white hat.
Business Description: Make sure you have your product and/or service keywords listed in your business description. Now this is not as important as the Title, but it too is important. It is the equivalent of a website’s “meta description” for SEO.
Content/Media: Add rich media to your local listings. Add photos & video, etc. I’m not sure if it improves rankings in the local listings, but it can only help turn online browsers to offline buyers. Add before and after photos. Add video that demos your product or services (like ‘will it blend’ videos). Add a video screen capture tutorial that offers value. It has been proven that video helps convert more click-throughs then any other medium. Why not use this free gift given to you? NOTE: If you don’t add your own rich media then Google may pull that data on your business themselves from places like Flickr, Panoramio, YouTube, etc. and you may not like the media they pull. Therefore, it would be a good idea to go in and fill this section out to the fullest ability which is currently 10 photos & 5 videos. Also, remember to watermark all your images & videos before uploading them.
Coupons: Use them. This can be what differentiates your business from other competition found in the local listings. Not offering a Google coupon is risking losing business to those businesses that are. It also gives you a great way to track your sales generated from your local listing on Google. You can even create a XML Feed for your Google Maps Coupons and have them upload to be different every day, week, or season. It’s a great way to have fun with timely promotions. NOTE: If you have coupons listed on other local listings, make sure you make them different so you can track them all properly. This feature will become even more useful if Google starts releasing their Coupon Search feature again.
Double Listings:Don’t do it. Make sure you only have one G-Maps listing. You don’t want to lose your listing over something so ridiculous. People can easily report and flag your listing, I know I would if you were my competition and I saw you putting up Google Maps SPAM.
Verification
Once you are done setting up your listing, you will need to verify it. What they do is send you a PIN number (via your contact details that you added in your listing) to verify that it is actually a real business adding its info. You can do this verification 3 ways with Google’s LBC:
Phone
SMS – Text Message
Mail – They send a sealed postcard with a PIN #
Obviously, if you verify via your phone or cell phone text, then your listing will go ‘live’ with all the changes immediately. However, often businesses are forced to verify via mail (good old snail mail) and many small businesses can easily mistake this postcard for junk mail. Don’t let that be you – watch this quick video on what the Google Maps Verification Postcards look like.
Tracking Google Maps Traffic
Now you may also want to track your Google Maps Listing using your free Google Analytics Account. I found this amazing how-to guide: Google Analytics (GA) for the Google Maps 7-Pack. I highly recommend you go through the 7 tutorials on how to use GA to track your local search marketing campaigns.
That covers all the main points when setting up your Google Maps Listing in Google’s LBC. If you have any questions, be sure to ask us in the comment section below.
I may have rambled a little in the video above , but the point I was trying to make is that a very large percentage of all searches have a local intent, so much so, Google is displaying a (7-Box) Google Maps listing in the organic SERPs (search engine results pages) on many searched broad keyword terms.
When someone searching adds a local modifier to the searched term (like a city or postal/zip code), then the searcher has 100% local intent. Google knows this and then serves up the 7-Box Google Maps listing at the top of the organic search results page (above the traditional 10 website listings).
If you have a local business this is really important to know. If there are hundreds and often thousands of searches every month for your businesses services where people also add in the local modifier to their searched term then you want to make sure you are actively participating in your Google Maps listing.
Look at some of these other important stats/facts:
66% of North Americans use search online to locate local businesses
82% of local searchers follow up via an in-store visit, phone call, or purchase
80% of all retail transactions happen within 15 miles of people’s homes
32% of people with smartphones conducted a local search
These are people who are looking for EXACTLY what it is you do and Google Maps is the first thing they see in an organic search engine results page. All you need to do is get your business information in front of this traffic and you will have a steady stream of new clients and customers.
Not actively managing your Google Maps listing is like flushing money down the drain. The Google Maps listings are totally free and you do not require a website to be listed. Getting a listing is free and easy, but it does not guarantee that your business will show up in the 7-Box Google Listing displayed in the organic SERPs. Even though claiming your listing is a good start, it’s not enough in today’s marketplace to really secure a position within the 7-Box which receives the majority of the traffic for local searches. We will get into this further in this Google Maps Course when we discuss how to increase your chances at securing those preferred rankings within the highly so desired 7-Box.
First things first, if you have not claimed your listing, then do so. Your chances of ranking well with the 7-Box are virtually nonexistent if you don’t claim your listing. If there is no listing of your business yet then simply create one.
BTW, let us know if you have any questions so far in the comment section below. If you add your question we will answer it.
NOTE: If you are like most small business owners, you may want to leave this type of stuff to the pros and we would be more than happy to manage your Google Maps Listing. Please visit our local search marketing services page for more details.
I just found this interesting post today at WebProNews.com where they revealed the Coles Notes version of a recent study done by two NYU Professors. It basically shows that by having a strong SEO presence and running PPC ads together will improve your conversions rates. If you would like to read the full meal deal, then you may do so here. For WebProNews.com’s condensed notes see below:
On average, the impact of organic listings on paid advertising is 3.5 times stronger than vice-versa, possibly because of the tendency of consumers to trust organic listings more than paid ads.
The positive association between paid and organic listings increases advertisers’ profits by at least 6.15% when compared to profits in the absence of either of them. The positive association is strongest when advertiser-specific keywords are used and weakest when brand-specific and generic keywords are used.
Click-through rates, conversion rates and total revenues are higher when both paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when paid search ads are absent.
The combined click-through rates are 5.1% higher when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when only the organic listings are present.
The combined conversion rate increases 11.7% when paid and organic listings are present simultaneously than when organic listings alone are present.
Paid search advertising drives up to 54% of total revenue growth.
I have been telling merchants for years now that the best strategy is to have both SEO and PPC campaigns running parallel with each and this study just proves more that this a great plan. They make the perfect couple. The King & Queen. A great partnership that compliments each other…. you get the point.
What are your thoughts…? Let us know in the comment section below.
Getting a free local listing with Google’s Local Business Center is easy, but attaining top positioning is not. You must understand the ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ of how Google ranks their local listings, which does NOT play by the same traditional SEO strategies for the organic listings.
Here are a few tips (but not all our stealth Google LBC’s strategies, reserved ONLY for our paying customers ) :
Do your research and make sure you know which keywords locally are triggering the Google Local 10-Box. Then do some keyword research to see which one of those phrases is getting the most traffic and optimize the listing for that keyword. It’s really hard to optimize for tons of keywords on a local listing (Pick your battles right).
Make sure you fill out a FULL listing, by adding photos & video (Pimp out that listing).
Make sure you get your category section correct and that it contains the keyword phrase you’d like rankings for.
Make sure your main keyword is in your business description.
Get as many citations from creditable websites – make sure the data matches exactly as is in our Google Local Listing.
This case study didn’t have a ton of competition for their localized GEO-specific keywords, but many small businesses are in similar situations. This doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to have great search engine rankings those GEO-specific keywords.
When people add local modifiers they are usually really close to making a buying decision. There may be less searches for those keywords, but they tend to convert better due the online browser’s intent. This way you can have a keyword that only gets 50 searches a month, but those people searching with that specific keyword phrase is ready to buy. As opposed to a broader term that gets tons more search volume but the intent is only for information.
Statistics show most people spend the majority of their money within a 20 mile radius and over 80% of people do research on products and/or services before they buy, therefore it only makes really good sense to make sure your local small business is ranking well for it’s GEO-specific keywords.
In this tutorial we will discuss what is the best web-hosting service providers for Small Business websites and which type of hosting is best suited for WordPress, since this is a continued lesson from our ‘The Complete Guide to WordPress for Small Businesses‘.
Web Hosting is pretty straight forward and simple. When it comes to expenses for a small businesses this is a expense that is very low for it’s ROI. Typically you can secure hosting for about $10-$15/month. Some companies charge you the yearly fee upfront like HostMonster, while others like HostGator will charge you monthly for your web hosting services.
If you are going to require hosting for several websites I suggest you go with a resellers account to save money. You can get a great resellers account for about $35/month and that should be able to host 100-150 plus small business websites. As a general rule, if you think you will need hosting for 3 or more websites than just snag a resellers account from a company like HostNine.
HostNine is my favorite for a resellers account because they have servers in different cities and countries, which means you are getting different ‘Class-C’ IP addresses without having to pay for it – great for SEO’ers, but not really something a small business needs to understand nor know.
What you do want to make sure about your hosting is that it’s linux and that operates on C-panel and offers MySQL Databases. Most do. Godaddy unfortunately doesn’t offer C-panel and their hosting does not make it easy to install and activate WordPress.
If you have C-panel, MySQL Databases, and Fantastico you are then good to go.
If you liked this tutorial on website hosting for small businesses then be sure to leave a comment in the comment section below. If you have set-up your hosting and now would like to learn how to use C-panel and activate WordPress through Fantasico then click on the following link for the next WordPress Tutorial.
Internet Marketing for Small Business: Buying a Domain Name
Buying the right domain name is essential for quick & easier rankings. If you buy and use the wrong domain name it can make your SEO efforts harder than necessary. In this tutorial, we are going to offer tips on how to purchase a domain name for your small business that will allow you to gain faster rankings in the search engines.
The most common mistake that many small business owners make when buying their domain name is buying one that matches their ‘Doing Business As Name’. Now there is nothing wrong with branding your business, but when it comes to marketing your business online through search engine optimization, it makes your life more difficult to secure quick and easier rankings if your domain doesn’t contain the keyword(s) you want to rank for.
For example, if your DBA Name is: ‘Holistic Body’ and your business offers massage therapy services in Calgary, AB Canada. If someone doesn’t know about your business, but they go to the search engines to find a local massage therapist would they ever type in “Holistic Body” into the search engine…? Most likely not. What they most likely type in is: “massage Calgary” or “massage therapist Calgary”, etc. You get the point.
Now, think if you were a search engine and you are a search engine algorithm (very analytical) and you were handed two domain names:
www.holisticbody.com
www.calgarymassage.com
Which one would you rank better for the keywords “massage Calgary” solely based on the domain name…? Exactly! This is why you want to purchase a domain name that has your major keyword(s) in it.
Here are a few other important elements to consider when buying a domain name for your small business:
Keywords (related to what you do)
Short – keep the domain as short as possible to make it easy to remember
Easy to Spell – this is not a time to get creative – not good for humans nor search engine spiders
Age – Whenever possible buy a aged domain
Note: Now remember to always base your decision on humans ultimately reading seeing your domain name. Don’t buy a domain name that is only for the search engines. This is where a little common sense comes into to play.
Using the right dot extension to your domain: If your business is in the US or if your web site is targeting a global audience then you should use .com as your top-level domain. Generally .net and .biz domains are not perceived as being as professional as .com domains. If however you are marketing to a local audience in another country, for example in Canada or Australia, then using the local .ca or .au may make it easier for visitors to recognize that your site is local. I would still recommend you get the .com for local marketing and then have a permanent redirect to the local dot extension because people still seem to remember most domains with the .com extension over any other version.
No Trademark Conflicts: Make certain that your domain name is free of legal conflicts due to trademarks belonging to other businesses.
Warnings: Watch out for buying domain names with double meanings. When joining words without a hyphen be careful that you don’t create any double meanings that might be embarrassing. Here are some examples to illustrate this point:
TherapistFinder.com or could be mistaken for TheRapistFinder
MoleStationNursery.com or could be mistaken for MolestationNursery.com
Domain Buying Resources:
Godaddy – one of the most popular places to buy domains, go spot to have if you ever think you are going to sell it because most people have a Godaddy account and it makes easy for transferring ownership. Ditto or buying domains too.
1and1.com – I buy my domains from here when I don’t plan on ever selling it and it offers free private registration which saves you some coinage.
Whois – This will allow you to find the ownership details of a domain name, great tool when looking for aged domains.
If you follow these domain buying tips listed above, it should give your local business a serious advantage over a lot of your competition. Please let us know what you think of this tutorial by writing comments below in the comment section. If you like this small business internet marketing tutorial why not share it with your friends by using your favorite social listed below.
