With yellow pages being out of date before they’re even off the printing press, it’s no surprise that Local Search on the Web has taken the place of dusty old “yellows” as the preferred method for finding local products and services.

Local Search allows you to generate search results by neighborhood, city, state, or zip code. It’s ideal for physicians, dentists, contractors, realtors, restaurants, retailers, or any businesses that serve customers/clients who come from a limited geographic region.

For example, if you’re a Northeast Ohio-based orthodontist, most likely your patients are also going to be from Northeast Ohio. Your primary objective should be gaining search engine rankings in the immediate region because that’s your “bread and butter”. A patient seeking orthodontic help in California isn’t going to do you much good, but one in Akron is a potential new customer.
Even if you need to have a national presence in the search engines, it still may be important for you to have a local presence. We’re a Canton Web Design and SEO firm. While we serve clients across the country, the majority of our clients come from a 50 mile radius. So while we don’t limit our Web Marketing to Local Search techniques, it’s critical that we have a strong presence in the local search results.
How Local Search Works

There are three ways to go about searching for local results. First, you can use a local search engine such as Google Local, Yahoo! Local, or http://www.local.com. Second, you can use an Internet yellow pages site such as yellowpages.com or superpages.com. Third, you can use a regular search engine like Google, but use geo-modifiers, such as “Canton, Ohio Web Design”.
Local Search Benefits

Local Search isn’t just convenient for users; it’s also loaded with benefits for the businesses being listed. Here are a few of the benefits:

* Free or inexpensive local visibility and awareness
* Additional links to the site
* More visibility in the search engines
* More targeted traffic to the website
* More traffic to the brick-and-mortar store

Popular local sites

We’ve listed a few popular sites where you’ll want to make sure you create a listing. Of course, there are many more in addition to these, and your own community will have its own sites you’ll want to consider. These, however, are a good starting place:

* superpages.com
* Yahoo! Local
* Google Local/Google Maps
* yellowpages.com
* local.com
* citysearch.com

(Note: some of these sites charge a fee for inclusion.)
Local Search Best Practices

Getting effective local search results doesn’t just happen by virtue of having a website. You need to ensure your own site is in tip-top shape by following a few best practices. Be sure to put your address on the Contact page of your website and any other appropriate pages. You’ll also want to explain on your site how your business relates to the community. If you serve on any local committees or board or have any local media mentions, you’ll want to be sure to mention this on your site. Finally, be sure to spell out state names (OH Web Design vs Ohio Web Design).
Social Media and Local Search

With Social Media sites absolutely exploding with new users, it’s no surprise that some Social Media sites are offering Local Search options to help people connect within their local communities:

* Facebook – network with others from your hometown
* Flickr – join one of Flickr’s photo-sharing groups, many of which are location-specific
* Twitter – use the advanced feature to do a geo-search for local members
* LinkedIn – look for and network with professionals in your area

Recap

With Local Search making up anywhere from 60-75% of all Internet searches, there’s no question that Local Search is crucial if you have a geo-specific business.

When it comes to Web Marketing, local businesses actually have certain advantages over businesses with a national presence. Instead of having to compete on a national scale, local businesses can focus their web marketing efforts on a more targeted geographic area and even find success a bit easier.

About the Author

Collyn Floyd is a marketing and public relations specialist with The Karcher Group, a web development and search engine marketing firm based in North Canton, OH. She is passionate about helping The Karcher Group’s clients achieve greater online traffic, leads and sales through search engine optimization and marketing.

When folks learn what I do for work they often ask me the same thing, “What’s the best way to obtain new clients?”

That’s not an easy question to answer. There’s no one answer. Whole books have been penned on that topic. It’s dependant on the type of practice you have, where you’re located, where you’re trying to take your firm, and of course, your character. Each firm needs to craft a marketing scheme appropriate to the talents of it’s people but I’ll give you a short, generic, abstract to kick-start you.

There’s almost no immediate benefit to networking, but get started on it right out of the gates anyway.

Networking may be the life’s blood of any successful firm, but it’s a long term strategy. Take the time to cultivate prospects. At first the time will feel wasted. It will likely seem to be frustrating and senseless at the start, but as the years pass and quality prospects start contacting you you’ll be glad you did it. The most thoughtful, wisest business people rely on networking to find their accountants. Period.

In the meantime there are a lot of rank and file clients to be had, but there are also a lot of accountants competing for them. When you first get started these people will form the bulk of your client base. These clients are what used to be called “walk-ins”.

Ten years ago direct marketing was very effective, but times have changed. Direct marketing is pretty much useless these days. You could track down recent business licenses in your area and try to contact the owners by phone. For many years I made a a good living out of this strategy. It just doesn’t work any more, though. I don’t recommend it.

Get yourself some business cards (with web address and tag line) and network your butt off. Give them to everyone. And don’t forget the tag line. Every time you hand someone your card give them a reason to visit your site. Don’t be shy. Get cards. Just ask for them. Get phone numbers and email addresses. Once you have them, cultivate them. Sign them up for your newsletter. Send them an Email wishing them a happy thanksgiving.

In my admittedly biased opinion the internet is one of the best sources of clients. Get a good website and a monthly email newsletter. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a lot of work and very slow and expensive, but it’s also an AWESOME prospect magnet. For the long term it’s worth investing in. For short term just buy ad space on Google using Google Adwords. Also, get your business on Google Maps and optimize your site for Google Places (Local search). This will probably also require some investment on your part, but local search is a let cheaper and easier to get a good ranking in than old-school SEO. Expect a one-time cost of about $500.

So how can websites help accountants network?

The basic strategy of networking is to identify a prospects need, then to offer a solution to fill that need. It’s all about demonstrating the benefit of your service to the prospect. As an accountant you’re in a unique position to offer solutions to problems that really matter to people. Perhaps they’re buying or selling a house. Maybe they’re saving for their children’s education, or retirement, or maybe they’re not certain if they should buy or lease an expensive piece of equipment for their business.

Don’t misunderstand the purpose of this kind of marketing. Prospects will almost never be so impressed with that value that they’ll fire their CPA and hire you right there on the spot. It won’t rack up billable hours for your firm. Networking is a long term marketing strategy. The goal of your networking efforts is to demonstrate your value to the prospect. You’re trying to put your brand in front of the prospect and keep it there so that in a year, or two, or five; when the prospect is ready to switch accountants; yours will be the first name they think of.

A well designed accountant’s website can significantly impact your networking power. Online financial calculators and a libraray of financial articles will bring visitors back to your website over and over. As we’ve already established, when networking your job is to figure out what that persons needs are and demonstrate your value by presenting a solution. Your website can help with that. Next time you hand a prospect your business card you can offer a solution that takes them to your website, complete with your brand at the top of the page and your phone number at the bottom.

Learn the art of the Tag Line. Nobody is going to call you or even visit your website unless you give them a compelling reason to.

These “walk-ins” will pretty much take care of themselves if you do a good job setting up your website. Just pop into your adwords account from time to time and make sure you’re not getting outbid by too many competitors.

It’s time to get busy networking again.

Learn to use online social networks too. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook…

Then network your butt off. Everyone is a potential prospect. Parents, friends, vendors, everyone. Be careful not to judge prospects. That’s a trap. Nobody is too poor for a business card. In 5 or 6 years they may well be standing someplace very different.

About the Author

Brian O’Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country’s leading web design companies dedicated entirely to websites for accountants. His firm presently provides websites for more than 4000 CPA, accounting, bookkeeping, and tax preparation firms.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is defined as the process of adjusting web sites and pages to gain higher placement in search engine results. However, ranking in itself does not guarantee profits, you need the search engine to send targeted prospective visitors to your website for that.. So why are the Search Engines so vital? Well, there are more than 162 million registered websites on the web. There are basically three ways that people can arrive at your site: using search engines, clicking on a link from another website, or by knowing your URL (uniform resource locator) and typing that in web browser. Almost half of all internet users use search engines on a typical day online. A site that does not appear on the first page of search results might as well be invisible. If your site is invisible, you will not get any visitors, nor make any sales.

There are three search engines that you need to be concerned about: Google accounts for about 62% of all searches, Yahoo about 21%, MSN (Bing) about 9%. That said, you would be wise to ignore any messages promising submission to hundreds or thousands of search engines. As you can see the big 3 account for over 90 percent of all searches. Likewise, you shouldn’t give any credence to any ads promising a #1 search engine rankings, because no legitimate company can promise you that. It has been said, that in offline marketing, there is no elevator to success, everyone must take the stairs. The same is true in online marketing. In order to achieve any significant success online, you will have to invest some time, or money, or both. But you will definitely invest something. Despite all of the promises to the contrary, there is no free lunch on the internet.

There are a couple of things you can do to gain higher placement in the search engines. One thing you can do is construct a search engine friendly site that allows the search engine to spider or crawl it easily. This includes having a search-engine friendly URLs constructed with different keywords on different pages. You can also create linkable footers on every page. Also creating a site index will make crawling the site easier for the search engines. But what is really going to matter to search engines is the content of your site.

Specifically, the search engines are concerned about relevancy, link popularity, and unique original content. Google, for one, pays a lot of attention to site relevance in its search results. Relevance is about making your site a useful resource for information instead of “keyword stuffing” and other tricks. So if someone entered a certain search phrase and landed on your site, would they be satisfied with what they found? So relevance tells us if your site does a good job meeting the user’s information needs. Sometimes how relevant a site is can be determined by its link popularity. That is the number of associated sites linking in to your website. And of course, one of the things that’s gonna affect your link popularity is the presence of unique, original content. Because of all of the competition on the web, you should be creating content for your site on a regular basis, some even say daily. If your site is not being updated, the search engines will assume that there is nothing new on your site, so why send somebody there?

There are quite a number of content marketing strategies, like article and video marketing, that you can employ. Likewise, there are severalInbound Link Campaigns that you can use to raise your link popularity. Still you will see a lot of short-cuts out there, like automatic content generators and others. Because people are always looking to beat the system, search engines like Google often change the rules. Sometimes, if Google feels like you are trying to cheat, or if your site lacks relevance they may reduce your Page Rank or take other punitive actions against you and your site. But if you just buckle down and do the work, create unique and relevant content on a consistent basis; then your relationship with the search engines should be a rewarding one.

About the Author

I hope that you enjoyed reading “How to Boost Your Search Engine Rankings“.

Reginald Liggins is an internet marketing trainer and coach. The automated marketing system that Reginald uses to explode his business opportunities as well as generate multiple income streams can be found at “MyLeadSystemPro”

Reginald can be reached at reggie@superbodymagic.com

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Getting your small, local business found on the world wide web can be a challenge, and most small business owners jut don’t have the time to research what works, or the money to pay someone else to figure it out for them.

To get you started, here are five techniques you can use today to start seeing results tomorrow.

Blogging. Simply buy a domain name, secure a hosting service, and install WordPress. For less than $20 and an hour of your time, you can get a blog up and running.

Why blogging works: Google (and other search engines) loves fresh content. If you’re choice is between a static catalog type page and a blog, go with a blog every time. The more you update, the more Google will crawl your site, and the more Google crawls your site, the easier it will be for potential customers to find your site and your business.

Pay Per Click advertising. If you want to guarantee search engine placement, pay per click is the way to go. Those results that show at the very top of the search results page in Google? Those are paid for by businesses just like yours who don’t want to wait for their rankings to rise naturally. By bidding on certain keywords, they essentially are buying placement in the search results.

Why pay per click works: The average Internet user doesn’t distinguish between paid results and natural results. If the link matches her inquiry, she will follow it, regardless of how it got there.

Forum posting. Forum posting is about helping your potential customers with their problems. Simply join the conversation on relevant forums and provide thoughtful advice, and you’ll find clients following you back to your site to see what else you have to say about the subject.

Why forum posting works: People like to do business with people, not corporations. By offering advice on forums, you are reminding customers that there is a real person behind your small business.

Article marketing. Article marketing is the placement of useful, relevant articles in article directories across the web. It’s another way of getting your business in front of potential customers, again by offering advice they are looking for.

Why article marketing works: The purpose of article marketing is twofold. First, article directories likely rank higher in search results than your company’s site, making it easier to get your name in front of potential customers. Second, article marketing produces valuable back links to your company’s site, which improves your own search engine ranking.

Banner advertisements. Banner advertisements are those graphic ads you see all over the web. They can be nearly any size, but most typical are 125 x 125 pixels, 468 x 60 pixels, or 160 x 600 pixels. Typically, merchants pay advertising networks to place banner ads on websites, rather than dealing directly with site owners.

Why banner advertising works: People rarely click banner ads, and when they do, they generally don’t buy. So why bother? Brand recognition. If you own a florist shop on a street full of florists, how do you get people to stop in your shop instead of your neighbor’s? By getting your brand in front of them. They might not click on your ad on the Internet, but they will recognize your shop if they’ve seen it on line, and they will choose the shop they recognize over the one they don’t every time.

Author Resource:-> Getting noticed on line doesn’t have to be expensive or time consuming. At http://InAreaCode.com, we take care of all the details of Small Business Internet Advertising so you can get on with the business of running your business.

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