Local Search Is A Must for Small Business

1. Add your site to Google Places, Bing and Yahoo Search Engines. Claiming your site requires some information but be sure to include as much key rich words into these listings including categories, hours of operation, forms of payment, images and social media profiles.
Add your physical address (including the suburb and city) to every page of your website.

2. Current and useful content is a great way to direct traffic and the search engine to your site. Either linking to your blog and listing this on your web as an RSS feed or having an e-newsletter in your website with key rich categories and topics is a great way to be found.

3. Look for opportunities to build credibility to your site by getting backlinks from good sites. Referral sites, industry directories and online media are all avenues you should explore to get listed, quoted and mentioned.

4. Social media profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, U-tube, etc can help to spread your business’ reach. Pushing content to these sites can increase traffic back to your website.

5. If you go to an expert or a company, it is going to cost the average small business $300 to $600 per month if they go for an SEO package that is maintained. What does that give you? Well the IT geeks in the background will optimise your site with key words, build links, and set your site up well so google can crawl your site and select you in the top five for a particular statement. I found out that it is very expensive to rank for one or even two works and the most you can hope for is a phrase like small business marketing consultant.

6. I found out that pay per click which is google ad words is very expensive and perhaps Facebook is a better option depending on your target market but is getting better conversion for click through.

7. That most of this you can do yourself but you need to do it consistently so there is a cost associated to this. Tools include google analytics, google key words and google resources.

8. That there are some free tools out there to get you started. Hubspot has a web grader that is a good place to start. See below for tools and tips.

Blurb about Author Danielle MacInnis a small business marketing consultant:

Dan is a highly sought after strategic marketer. Her focus has always been on understanding customer needs and company insights to deliver marketing that works. With over 20 years marketing experience with some Australia’s leading corporate companies, Dan now running her successful consultancy business. She is recognised as a talented marketer by her peers and the Australian Marketing Institute and is now called on to submit articles for publication in a variety of mediums including Australian Women’s Mentoring Network, The Customer Collective, Australian Businesswomen’s Network and Flying Solo and present seminars for small businesses.

Website: http://www.macinnismarketing.com.au
Blog: http://www.daniellemacinnis.com