What web marketing can be done for my small local business?

November 5, 2009 · Posted in Small Business 

Livros de Redes Sociais, SEO e Web 2.0

I’ll soon be addressing an organization about social networking. Most everyone in the organization has small businesses that serve the local market. Many are in real estate, financial advisors, mortgage brokers, carpet cleaning, catering, and other truly local businesses. They don’t need a national audience and they don’t need to spend money or waste time with efforts that won’t bring them benefit. So what are some strategies they can use with their customers for marketing locally?

There are three areas that to considered for small local businesses and one commonly considered area not to considered.

Lets start with what not toconsider. What I’m about to tell you may come as a surprise. You may need to sit down before hearing this from a web guy. BUT DON”T waste your time with SEO. SEO – Search Engine Optimization is great if you are a web-based business that serves a national audience. SEO is great if you have lots of money to spend on it. However SEO just doesn’t provide the return on investment that is required if your business doesn’t serve a national audience.  This being said does not mean you shouldn’t understand your marketing message or the Key words that are important for your web site.

So what should you focus on: Local Search, Paid Search and Social Networking/Web 2.0. Look for tomorrow’s post addressing Local search which is free and/or cheap to implement.

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Comments

  • MetzgerBusiness
    My ambiguous comment about "most users still don't recognize the difference between paid search results and organic." was bothering me. I had recently read an article and decided to find the source. I can't find the source I initially read but check out this article. 45% of users don't know the difference between organic and paid search results.

    The 70% number was also bothering me. So I went out and found another article to support your assertion. I'm not familiar with the blog that I'm citing but the article is well written and supports your 70% number. However they point out that real SEO takes years and costs lots of money. You can find the article here

    The point being that while paid advertising only provides 3 clicks for every 10 that organic clicks provide a small local business can't afford the SEO cost. The long tail is unfortunately that a long tail and often not searched for often enough to merit those high SEO costs.
  • admin
    Francis,

    Thank you for your reply and I'm not disputing that SEO can get you above the fold on organic search. However it is less likely for a user to search "Flower Shop Vancouver" than it is to search "Flower Shop." If the business has optimized for local search and paid search then they most definatly will appear above the fold and most users still don't recognize the difference between paid search results and organic search results. For a search term such as Flower Shop and a budget of $5 per day a business could have as many as 20 - 30 clicks to their site daily. This is much cheaper then the SEO alternative. Do you disagree?
  • Sorry But I don't agree with your assessment of SEO for local interenet marketing. If your site is optimized for longer tail keywords that include your business trading area it can prove to be a huge advantage. For example, someone is searching for a flower shop in Vancouver, they might type "flower shops Vancouver" if the site is optimized for Vancouver Flower Shops its likely they will be found. And depending what the competition is doing and the quality of your optimization yo could be found above the "fold"

    ignoring 70% of potential clicks is a mistake in my opinion.

    Francis Mella, Internet Consultant
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