Focusing on your local community makes sense because, unless you have a highly sought-after product or service, going local is going to give you the highest return on your investment.
The hubze squad is all about social media, but it is time that we also look beyond that and find ways to build links for search engine optimization purposes, as well as advertise on local sites.
Your social media sites and accounts are a great help at having existing customers and potential clients stumble upon your business. But, if you want to be more proactive about your marketing and at reeling more people in, here are three things we suggest you do.
1. Get a Google Places listing. Google Places is a free way for you to advertise your business and get an incoming link to your website. It is also a good means for your name or your brand to potentially show up on the first page of a relevant Google search — which means a search that uses keywords relevant to your business or field of expertise. So, yes, you get all these benefits in just one go.
And oh, your places page can also serve as your online catalog. You can put up your information on your places page, even photos and videos. Google then pulls reviews from trusted sources into your page. How’s that for social meeting local?
Do the same process for other local business listings pages such as Bing Business Portal, and other sites such as CitySlick.net, Yelp and JudysBook.
2. Find out where you are being discussed. Discussion groups and forums are components of social media that you can get into, on top of Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites. Do a Google Discussions search (just enter your query into the Google Search box and then click on the Discussions link at the left side portion of the page) to find the relevant forums where your service, product or even your company is discussed.
This is priceless because like social networking sites, you can do sales and customer service on these forums. Be aware though that most forums do not allow blatant advertising.
The best you could do is to contribute to the relevant existing discussions or start your own topics or threads. Check with the forum rules if you are allowed to have signatures where you could put a link to your site, as well as a short description of what you do.
In the example above, the user “C.Rebecca” answers a question put forth by another member, and provided more information to support her answer. She contributed to the discussion and then left a signature and description of her business (the last line), where people could get in touch with her.
The beauty of participating in forums and discussions that are highly relevant to your business is that it is not just a way to get new customers but also a good way to keep up with what’s happening to your industry, and what your potential customers may want. Or you could ask a question that’s been nagging at you and it may just be answered right away!
3. Find out where your competitors are getting their links. A good way to know where to get inbound links to your site is to look at where your competitors are getting theirs. We have two really easy ways to do this:
a. Google’s link: operator. To find out who links to your competitor’s site, you can use link:www.domain.com on Google. The search result will feature a list of those sites that link to your competitors. In the example below, the search results show you a list of sites linking to Starbucks.com.
b. Search for competitor images. Using Googles Image Search, type in your competitor’s business name and try to see which sites they get their links from. You can hover over the pictures you are interested in to find out where these images come from and try to get links from that site.
In this example, check out if TravelPod.com is something that you could get into. Perhaps, you could create a profile with them or ask them to review your own condominiums.
Some random posts:
Using online marketing to advertise your health coach business is getting easier and more neccessary. Google places is a great place to start since it is FREE! You do need to know how to optimize it so people will actually find you, but that is the best place to start in marketing yourself locally. Type something into google these days and if it thinks this is some service you can find locally, then the Google Places listing are very prominently displayed. You need to get in the top 7 spots (the number keeps changing) to get on the first page of google.
