Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

A successful local marketing campaign is designed not only to attract your targeted audience but to convert them to customers. At some point in the process all potential and existing customers will visit your website. It is the most powerful online representative of your business – your virtual sales force working for you 24/7/365 to provide information, answer questions, solve some problems, and sell. A professional website is designed to greet, inform, assist, educate and motivate targeted site visitors that:

  • You have what they need
  • You provide quality products, services, information, care
  • You are professional
  • You are a trusted provider
  • Your business is sound and going to still be there in a week, month, year, etc.
  • You are customer-centric and will serve them the way they expect and need
  • You can answer their questions/concerns to their satisfaction
  • You are their best choice

That is a lot to accomplish when you are not speaking directly with a person and responding to specific questions and concerns. But your website must accomplish these challenges to the satisfaction of every site visitor who is a potential customer.

In the simplest of terms, the goal of your website is two-fold:

  1. Help existing and potential customers to get what they need from you by fulfilling the above listed items
  2. Help the search engines to get their users what they need by making it easy for them to scan, index and serve your optimized web pages as the most relevant results corresponding to the terms searched (i.e.: help them to do what they do with the highest standard of quality)

An optimized website refers to more than just search engine optimization. Yes, you do need to ensure that your web pages have content highly focused on the terms for which you want them to be delivered in a search engine result. As I explained in Part 2: Search & Social Media, the search terms you select must be the result of your comprehensive keyword research and development because they will be the foundation upon which your online authority will be built across multiple online platforms. They must accurately correspond to your content as well as the language used by your targeted audience groups to search for what you offer.

To recap, search engines aggregate information about your company from a wide variety of online sources, including blogs, social media, web listings, and so forth, looking for a confirmation of your identity and authority for the terms represented by your content. The terms you use in your optimization campaign for your website will be the same ones you use to confirm your identity and authority elsewhere online. Why is this important? Consider the two-fold goal of your website. You are trying to help customers and the search engines get what they want from you. So you must optimize for both. It starts with keywords but it doesn’t end there. Keeping the expectations and needs of both targeted site visitors and the search engines in mind, you must also plan, develop, and implement:

  • Relevant, highly focused content including text, images, meta data, title tags, urls and hyperlinks (internal, external, anchor, inline, crosslinks with web pages on different sites, attachments)
  • Ease of access, ease of use including graphical interface, navigation structure, design and programming code
  • Intelligent architecture that allows for expansion and further optimization
  • Relationship with all relevant off-site content

Optimized web design may be the most important component of your local marketing campaign because it is your virtual office or showroom ultimately designed to convert your targeted site visitors.

Think of yor website as the house and your marketing efforts as invitations to the party you are having at your house.

It makes no sense to invite people until you are properly prepared.

Thank you for reading my Local Marketing Online series. My objective is to always provide you with practical, easy-to-follow business development tips.  Please feel free to share any comments, questions, or experiences. And please share the posts with your friends and colleagues.

Read the Series:

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro
Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings
Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Place
Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media
Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content
Local Marketing Online: Part 7: Email Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 8: Pay Per Click Integration
Local Marketing Online: Part 9: Mobile Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro

Local marketing has become one of the most powerful ways to reach and convert customers online.  With more than 2.5 billion local searches a month on Google alone, Google has taken notice of this fact and recently initiated a direct marketing campaign in targeted regions throughout the US to promote its local marketing opportunities. The company sent, by FEDEX, to select businesses a white box containing brochures and offers about the benefits of Google Places and the company’s online advertising programs.

Google is smart. They’re taking advantage of the trend and so should you.  Why? Because local searches are easier and less costly to convert as prospects are typically further along in the buying cycle. The key is making sure:

  • You can be easily found by your targeted audience groups
  • They can trust you because others have said so
  • You deliver the right message at the right time
  • They can easily contact you or visit your location
  • You’re easily identified online as an ‘authority’ for what you offer
  • You follow up in an appropriate manner with the appropriate communications
  • You deliver on what you promise, and maybe a little extra!

In this eight part series I will explain the multiple facets of local marketing online and how its various components are now cross-referenced by the search engines to determine an ‘authority score’ which affects web page rankings. This multi-part series will cover:

  1. Web & Map Listings
  2. Google Places
  3. Search & Social Media
  4. City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
  5. Share Your Content
  6. Email Marketing
  7. Pay Per Click Integration
  8. Mobile Marketing
  9. Optimized Web Design
  10. Tracking & Reporting

Look for Part 2: Web & Map Listings, where you will learn about Google Places, web directories, maps, and the importance of claiming your online listings.

Read the Series:

Local Marketing Online: Part 1: Intro
Local Marketing Online: Part 2: Web & Map Listings
Local Marketing Online: Part 3: Google Place
Local Marketing Online: Part 4: Search & Social Media
Local Marketing Online: Part 5: City Sites, Reviews & Recommendations
Local Marketing Online: Part 6: Share Content
Local Marketing Online: Part 7: Email Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 8: Pay Per Click Integration
Local Marketing Online: Part 9: Mobile Marketing
Local Marketing Online: Part 10: Optimized Web Design

Google Global Market Finder and Ads for Global Advertisers – Business Development Tip

With the consistently expanding online market currently serving over 1.9 billion consumers, Google offers a set of tools to help businesses expand and market globally.

Launched recently, the Global Market Finder is a free tool to help businesses identify foreign markets in which there appears to be “high demand for their products and services.” Familiar to those who have used the Keyword tools in AdWords, The Global Market Finder helps you to evaluate new markets by showing you the following information for each market:

  • Volume of local searches
  • Estimated price for keywords
  • Competition for each keyword

The numbers give you an idea of how competitive the market is, how demand is in one country compared to another, and the cost to start advertising in the new market(s).

Here’s how it works:

First you enter your country and principle language (US and English); then enter the keywords related to your products and services. From the drop-down menu, select the global market that interests you (Africa, Americas, Asia, Emerging Markets, Europe, European Union, G20, Middle East, or Oceania). The Geographic Distribution results identify the Location (country), a bar graph that indicates strength of Opportunity, total number of Local Monthly Searches (12 month average), a Suggested Bid Amount for your associated keywords, and a bar graph indicating level of Competition.

Next you can opt to make use of the Google Translator Toolkit that allows you to upload a document (your intended ad landing page, for example) or specify a url and select the language from which and to which you want it translated. Next you can create a “TM”, or translation memory file where the translated document will be stored.

All of the above tools are accessible from the newly launched website Google Ads for Global Advertisers, which “pulls together resources for businesses to find the right market for their products and services, translate their websites and ad text, find new customers with relevant online ads, and understand options for international payment, shipping and customer service.”

Social Media Counts Towards SEO

The rapid growth in popularity of social media has caught the attention of the major search engines like Google and Bing. In October 2009, Google Social Search was launched, which delivers results for the terms you searched from within your online social circle. By October, Bing implemented a new feature that delivers ‘Liked by Your Friends’ in Facebook information along with the search results. Many website owners interested in achieving page one rankings in the major search engines for the terms important to them wondered if their popularity on the social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others could or would influence their rankings.

Well as it turns out, it does to some degree. In a recent interview with search engine guru Danny Sullivan, quoted here at seomoz.org, a Bing representative stated the search engine does “look at the Social Authority of a user.

Tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.” Google uses what it terms ‘Author Authority’ for both organic and news rankings. Google also looks to see how many people share a news article, much the same way Twitter ranks the top re-tweeted Tweets and Tweet topics. Google’s Author Authority and Bing’s Social Authority rank content according to their proprietary ‘authority’ scores. Google points out, however, that Author Authority differs from and is separate from PageRank, which impacts where on the search results pages a web page may be listed.

I highly recommend you read the post at seomoz.org for the ideas the author presents. Concerning search engine optimizing the social media content you produce, as always you want to include the keywords around which you are building your authority. You’ll want to keep your titles brief, containing only one or two keywords, so that the search engines can easily find your content.

Build your Followers by providing important content that is interesting to them. Reach out to new Followers both online and offline. Build a community among other “authoritative authors” who also write about the same subjects as you. And by all means, keep your social media sites, as well as your website, updated regularly with fresh, relevant and interesting content that makes readers want to share it with others.

Ranking in Google: Understanding What Google Expects

Remember “Mayday”, the day a few months ago when Google released the results of algorithm changes that affect the way web page listings would be ranked for ‘long tail’ searches (phrases with 3 words or more)?

One of the most critical explanations Google provided about the change was actually quite simple and can be applied to any of the more than 400 adjustments to the algorithm the company makes throughout a given year.

Google’s Matt Cutts explains that the change is a way of “making sure things look good from a quality perspective.”

That’s it.

This is the explanation that should be your guiding principle behind the development, expansion and search engine optimization of each page of your website.  In their ‘Ranking in Google’ webmaster tutorial video on Youtube, Google states that among the many ranking factors ‘relevance’ and ‘importance’ are the two principle valuations.

To ensure the highest quality, Google aims to provide ‘relevant’ results that match the “query and interest of the user.” There are systems in place to help them achieve this including a degree of ‘personalization’ where the result is “customized to the individual’s search history.” Additionally, a degree of “importance” is attached to the web page through a system that evaluates the “quantity and quality of pages that link to it.” One of the more than 200 components of this valuation is something called “PageRank™”, which is a type of link analysis that determines the perceived value of a web page by the number and quality of “inbound links” from relevant, high quality sources that point to it.

Google recommends that the best way to increase your page’s PageRank™ “is to create good content, participate thoughtfully in relevant communities online and offline, and from this garner links naturally.” It is not acceptable to buy or sell pages with a high PageRank™. This includes the buying or selling of advertising where “you’ll want to make sure those links don’t pass PageRank by using the ‘no follow’ attribute.”

Google warns that that the web is changing at a frantic pace and that “constant content and link updates around the web” can affect your site’s presence in Google. It also cautions that web pages that violate the Google Webmaster Guidelines will “fall to a lower ranking.” The recommendation is to “carefully evaluate your site identifying and fixing any issues.”

For long term results, Google advises the following:

  • Think like your users
  • Provide content designed for users not search engines (no cloaking – sending different content to Googlebot than you are sending to users)
  • Consider how your users are likely to search for this content (use the language they use to search)
  • Don’t disappoint your users as they engage with content and links on your site (fulfill their expectations)
  • Regularly verify that all links on your site are still pointing to relevant resources that reflect well on you and your organization

To improve your ranking in Google you must first be honest with yourself about what is and isn’t working. Don’t confuse a sharp looking site with one that works to convert your target audience groups in addition to attracting them by ranking well in Google. Remember what Cutts said: “make sure things look good from a quality perspective.”

From Google’s standpoint, quality is measured by ‘relevance’ and ‘importance’. You are charged with proving that your web pages provide a frequented and valued resource to users whose search queries include your target keywords and phrases.