One of the core types of content that most local businesses should consider having is a blog. A blog is a great place to start your content development because posts are not too overwhelming to produce and a well-maintained blog gets you a lot of “SEO juice”.
Here are some tips on making your blog posts attractive to search engines.
According to research from Ignitespot, 61 percent of consumers bought something because they read about it on a blog.
A landing page is a web page with a singular focus. Landing pages are used to capture visitor information or sell something outright.
When someone visits your landing page, they can either leave the page altogether or they can do the one thing you want them to do, whether that is fill out a form or buy a product from you. They should not be able to do anything else!
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a way of purchasing targeted online advertising based on a pre-determined rate for each time your ad is clicked.
This is a great alternative to buying ad space because you are only paying for clicks. At the same time, as with all approaches, there are some drawbacks as well.
Should your local business be running Pay-Per-Clicks ads? There’s a good chance you should. This post gives an overview of Pay-Per-Clicks (PPC) ads so you can decide.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is the advertising format popularized by Google (the #1 search engine in the world with 80% search market share—according to Search Engine Land). The name of these ads is “Pay-Per-Click” as you only pay for an ad when someone clicks on it. Each time someone clicks your ad you pay Google the agreed fee.
Google Analytics has become the de facto standard for tools that track the traffic on your website (and blog). Google Analytics rather took over this market (at least as far as small businesses are concerned) as it’s free and it’s good. Quite a combination.
As the Internet matures, we’re seeing an evolution in how people search the Web.
People are searching for longer more specific phrases vs. single words. So for example I might search for “best beer pub near Montvale NJ” vs. “pub”.
As searchers, we are learning that search engines like Google are getting smarter and that these more specific searches turn up results that are more relevant to us. We can find what we want more quickly by using these longer searches. These longer searches are what Internet geeks call “long tail keywords”.
It seems to me that local SEO is a big opportunity right now for many local business owners.
Right now is the time to grab your share of the “Google pie”. Later may be too late.
Google’s search engine has been around 15 years now. It’s old news. It’s almost ancient in terms of today’s world of technology where changes occur overnight. Many opportunities in search have been fenced off by others at this point. But not so true for local search. And it’s these opportunities you should care about as a local business owner.
Marketing today is data driven. You need data to send emails, send ground mail, send invitations to events, make sales calls and check on customer’s records when they come into your store.
Everything runs off computers. Computers don’t understand uncertainty. Everything in a computer’s world is black or white. Your data is right or it’s wrong.
When you send an email to one of your customers called “Alan” you want the email to say “Dear Alan” not “Dear Jane”. But if your customer database is a mess, you can easily end up addressing “Alan” as “Jane”.
According to the Direct Marketing Association email marketing offers a roughly $40 return on investment (ROI) for every $1 spent. Compared to the $17 ROI of SEO marketing and the mere $2 ROI of banner ad marketing.
Email is an essential component of any company’s marketing repertoire. It boosts sales, cultivates customer loyalty, and provides a high return on investment. But it is important to remember that not all email campaigns are created equal.
When it comes to crafting effective email campaigns, list segmentation is a powerful tool. Email segmentation refers to the practice of dividing (or “segmenting”) your email database into various small groups.
