ElementsDaily

More often than not, people want to ‘buy local’ if they can find local. Customers might want to support their local stores just to keep money in their community, support businesses that help out the local community, get their hands on a product immediately and sometimes people just don’t want to pay for shipping. But in order for potential customers to ‘buy local’ they first need to know about your business and that’s where a strongly branded local website can work wonders.

Below you’ll find seven strategies that ELEMENTS has implemented to bring local traffic to local websites with great success. This list is a basic primer of best practices for local online strategies that both small and medium sized businesses can use to jump start their own local campaigns.

Build Your Website

Obviously you need a website. What’s not obvious to first time business owners is how to build a website that users will want to come back to once they have found your site the first time.

Simple is Ok. There’s no reason to create a mega-site with more pages than you have content. Start with just a handful of pages that include important information about your business like hours, location, types of services or products and be sure to include a bit of personality in your pages to give a potential customer a glimpse of your company’s culture. Get a good designer to make a website that is easy to navigate, has good typography and exhibits optimal image placement as all of these are vital to keeping web surfers on your site once they have found it.

Optimize for Your City

Search engines like Google are putting greater emphasis on local results. That means if a surfer types in the word “haircut” the search engine determines the surfer’s geographic location and then displays a result of businesses relatively close to where that surfer currently is that give haircuts. Those local results are your target so let’s make sure the search engines know where your site is located.

There are two ways to best optimize your website for local results. The first is something a lot of people do without even thinking of the benefits, which is including your physical location on each and every page of your website. Another very valuable way to achieve good local search engine results is to include the name of your city actually in the domain itself (i.e. denvercomfortinn.com).

Get Listed

Getting your physical address added to online directories is a step many local businesses tend to skip because they are worried about it being difficult. It’s not that bad. To get your site listed in Google Places just go to http://google.com/local/add/ and click the word “add”. See that wasn’t that bad. Now go do the same exact thing to Yahoo! Local & Yellowpages.com. Now, your phone number and address will appear on their maps and business listings.

Add a Google Map

One of the main goals behind your local online strategy is to get customers to your store. So why not make it easy for them to do so by adding a Google map with directions on how to get to your location right on your website. Your website designer should be able to integrate this into your existing website and as it’s really not that difficult it shouldn’t take them very long.

Interact With Your Customers

Social media is the latest buzz in online marketing, but there’s a reason for that, it works. Interactive tools like Facebook and company blogs allow you to interact directly with your customers to provide customer service, expose your company’s culture and offer up incentives to bring customers back in. Having a slow business day? Use Twitter to tweet out some immediate incentives to drive customers back to your door immediately. Keeping up with customers does take some effort, but your business will be better for it because people like to buy from businesses they trust.

Watch Your Stats

Even if you aren’t running a local campaign, watching your traffic statistics is critically important. From your stats you will get information on how visitors are finding your website and what they are doing once they get there which will allow you to make data driven decisions about your website. Is there a specific native dialect near your location and are you using it effectively? What keywords & phrases are working and which ones need to be pruned? These are questions that only your traffic statistics answer.

Go Offline

This is probably the best advice anyone can give you about your online local business strategy, get out there and be part of the community. Mingle with customers, join service organizations or support a local athletic team. These kinds of efforts don’t go unnoticed. You will gain contacts who can offer referrals to your website, turn contacts into followers of your social media campaigns and when you receive recognition for being a good citizen your website’s domain name can sit right there below your physical address.

These tips will drive more local customers to your website which is good because people want to ‘buy local’ if they can find local.

That space underneath your name in LinkIn is your “Professional Headline”. If you’re like most people who simply put their job title and company in that space, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to pitch yourself and the company you represent. Your “Professional Headline” is one of the most important pieces of information on your profile because it shows up whenever people search for you and after any discussion you participate in. Use this space to include a much abbreviated version of your elevator speech or to include your company’s tagline .

Retailers who are actively involved in marketing their products and/or services using Facebook may have a distinct advantage over their competitors, according to the latest Morpace Omnibus study.

Businesses are using Facebook as a means to offer and receive product recommendations. The study concentrates on three key areas: which consumer segments are most likely to use Facebook and how frequently; how often consumers search for or share product/company opinions or information, and which demographics are most likely to use the social media website.

“The results show us that Facebook is a tool for retailers to directly communicate with their target market,” said Morpace Retail Vice President Kirsten Denyes. “Retailers can offer consumers product information and exclusive coupons and discounts to create viral product buzz among Facebook consumers”, Denyes added.

Among the primary reasons consumers join a Facebook fan page are: “To let my friends know what products I support,” (41 percent) and “To receive

Ran across this phrase & thought it had a couple of different play on meanings that could apply to Elements.

SEF – “Search Engine Friendly”, User optimized.

The context might be a little different, but here is the statement.

“Whilst I do get the idea of SEO, I pretty much agree with what you say. I always try and build sites so they are ‘SEF’ – or Search Engine Friendly. I.e. proper mark-up, decent headings, browser titles, and structure. Apart from that, I think decent content will do just a good a job, if not better, than an SEO chap can do.”

SEF! I think that’s a great way of looking at it. “My site is search-engine-friendly but user-optimized.”

Here is a link to the full article if you are interested: (Jessica the author is writing from a marketing viewpoint)
http://boagworld.com/marketing/i-dont-get-seo

Have you wondered why some of your blogs get a lot of readers and some fall short? With all the information out there on the internet, your blog title and email subject line are more important than ever. Here are some tips that have been proven effective when it comes to titles: