A Few Ideas for Local Small Business Marketing Online

In working with my clients and many of their friends I find that a lot of smaller businesses are interested in how to get a “web presence” without spending the thousands of dollars a month many SEM firms will charge. May companies have a small website (10 pages or less) and just want to get found in the best way possible.  With all of the scams and confusion out there on what to do, I thought I’d list a few things you can do right away to help get your company out there.  If you can do this on your own, it can cost nothing but time, or if you stop by at www.youcanbefound.com and send us a note, we can make sure it is done right for very affordable prices.

1. Local Setup – Get your business set up in Local directories.  There are thousands out there that you can get taken care of with a good SEO company, or here are a few important ones you can reach out to on your own.  Be consistent with your information.  There are a lot of sources feeding a lot of databases out there, so the more consistent you are with your message, the less chance for issues or errors or getting delisted due to inconsistencies. Google, Yahoo and now Bing all have different local setup programs that can get you found on their standard maps that show up in search engines when people search for your given product/service using town names close to where your business is locate. 

The more competitive the industry, the harder to be one of those top listings.  However, it is better to be in there than to not be, and it costs nothing buy your time or a small fee from an agency to get listed. You can pay a little bit and get more featured listings as well.

2. Find your local superpages.com site and get a free listing.  This way you’ll at least show up in their listings for those that search there.  There are so many sites these days offering local services that some search pages are becoming over-run with other sites that just offer another list of local sites.  I don’t think this is a good user experience and rumor has it Google realizes this too and seeing a first page of search loaded with local directories hopefully will become a think of the past. However, for those die hards out there that do only search specific local directories, it can’t hurt to be in there, especially at basically no cost to you.

3. Use Social Media: Create a free blog for yourself, use twitter and facebook.  True, a specialized SEO firm can probably get you more out of these, but for free you can at least have a presence there. When you blog, link to your website.  This helps build strength in the search engines.  Tell your facebook friends and twitter followers when you blog.

4. Show that you know what you are doing: Go to sites like Yahoo answers and find relevant questions that you have an expert answer for. This can help users as well establish you as an authority.  Find Tweets in twitter about a subject you know well and chime in.  Followers will see this and can work their way back to your site.

There are also low cost ways of marketing yourself such as doing a local adwords program based on zip codes or low price SEO if you have the right firm helping you. Be careful with programs like Google Adwords if you aren’t familiar with getting the most out of your budget.  These are great tools if you know what you are doing, but they can also eat up your budget pretty quickly if you aren’t careful with how you set them up. Feel free to contact me if you are interested in more information on some of these tactics.

I hope this helps and I wish you luck getting found on the internet!

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