When it comes to marketing planning for your local business in today's fast paced business world creating an optimized web presence is a must if you want to stay ahead of your competition. As more and more of your customers are turning to the Internet to find local businesses and services that they need having a strong web presence is a necessity for any local business. It is also a more cost effective investment for your marketing dollars than any of the traditional methods like Yellow Pages, newspaper ads, radio and TV commercial. What's more you can easily track and measure your results from your online marketing efforts so that you can shift your small business advertising dollars away from what's not working and put it towards marketing that is working.
Your small business marketing planing to grow your web presence can be broken down to 7 steps.
1. Market Research: This is a fundamental part of any marketing planing, Market research will reveal the core keywords your market is searching,help you choose your optimal domain name, reveal what issues or problems your target market is having that your product can solve. It also will show you who your competition is, how they market and any weak points they have in their marketing sales funnel. You may also find similar niche businesses with which you can go into joint ventures or promotional partnerships with.
2. SEO Friendly Websites: Creating an SEO friendly website means having a website full of keyword rich content that is relevant to your local business. You will discover the best keywords and content ideas from your market research. Another part of an SEO friendly websites is having continually undated website content. This is easily achieved by having a blog
3. Onpage SEO: Onpage search engine optimization (SEO) refers to how relevant your whole website is to the search terms your local niche market is using to find your business. This includes having keyword rich domain name, Keyword rich website title, meta tag description, website description, and tags. This also includes using your core keywords for your blog categories, well as pages and your posts should be full of relevant and useful content with keywords rich titles and keywords strategically placed into all you web content.
The following 4 steps are part of off page SEO.
4. Local Directory Listings: These are the Google Places business listings, Bing and Yahoo maps and other online directories like 411 and GPS directories. This will give you greater exposure on the Internet as many of your potential customers will use one or more of these local business directories to find your business. Local directory listings will also help you create more high quality linking for your small business website helping you in your off page SEO efforts and ranking higher on Google, Yahoo, and Bing..
5. Creating Social Media Presence: This is an integral part of off page SEO. Social medial marketing is not only great for your SEO efforts but it helps you to position yourself as the expert in your local business niche. It will help you showcase your expertise in your business field and help you develop a referral type business as the people who follow you will most likely recommend you to their friends who may need your business services. Your first step will be to create social media profiles in popular networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and may other social networking sites. I will also recommend that you create a Facebook Page your your business, this way you can keep your personal Facebook page just for your personal needs and show case your business using Facebook Pages, which is the purpose of these.
6. Posterous: I chose to separate this one because this network is an online social blog that integrates all your other social networks into one. It allows you to post your content via e-mail to Posterous which will post to all your social networks and blogs, creating very relevant links to your website. Concentrate on integrating all the networks Posterous offers as this will create a stronger online presence and help to brand you as a leader in your local business market. This service offers you to post content via e-mail and from your smart phone. If you are not yet using Posterous get to it, it is a free service and its very powerful.
7. Content Syndication: Helps you to create high priority links based on popular social bookmarking sites and content voting sites. Goolgle holds these links in high esteem as these are actual real people deciding on the relevancy of your content and on the quality of your content. Since Google is all about user experience it ranks content and websites highly when its actual users tell Google that they like the content. This is an extremely powerful method to rise in page rank for your local business website as well as get on to the top five of Google search results. I use a network called Synnd, it is a paid network of people who help each other in syndicating content in giving your content higher chances of hitting viral status.
If you feel overwhelmed by all that you read do not fret. You can always hire me to consult with you for free on your Marketing Planning. Together we'll develop a marketing strategy that works for your business and have it all done for you so you can concentrate on serving your customers and growing your business.
No comments:
Post a Comment