When it comes to online marketing common sense, one of the SEO / Marketing strategies I employ is to ensure that my business is submitted to the primary search engines, directories, and review websites (where applicable). When my clients ask about directories and review websites I always tell them to do a general search for their services by their target market location and make a note of the top rated sites that you can add your website information to. For example, if your business provides house painting services in Sacramento I would suggest typing in “Sacramento house painting”, with variations such as “residential painters Sacramento”, etc. You will find your top rated competition of course, but you should also note the top-rated websites that index for this category, sites such as Google Plus Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Merchant Circle, Thumbtack, askjeeves.com, superpages.com, and YP.com (yellowpages.com). There will likely be additional ones that are relevant to your market as well since many of the smaller (yet still highly ranked) and review websites are industry specific.
The first question of course is should you create a “free” listing/Ad, or pay for premium listing? In most cases I would suggest a free listing unless your website is very new and you are certain that the premium fee is warranted. In this regard you do need to be careful with choosing the premium option. One of my clients recently noted that he was paying $2,000/mo. for a premium listing at YP.com. He went on to note that though he had been paying this for some time, and that his business was well established and had been online for a few years, he was not coming up in any search results for this site. Wow! My suggestion, cancel YP.com as a “pay for premium” marketing option. Clearly if a marketing strategy isn’t working for you then by all means, don’t continue to use them! On a related note, I have created a free listing at the aforementioned options (excluding AskJeeves) and I noted that my “free” listing at superpages.com had been removed? Clearly they decided that since I wasn’t going to upgrade to premium they would just delete the listing. Ok, so they are off my list! As for YP.com, yes, I have a listing, but being “free” it is very basic, … images can’t be uploaded, yet they do have my phone, address, and a link to my website so they remain on the list for now. On a side note, many of the smaller websites will list you so long as your provide a reciprocal link back to their website, and some require that this link be on the home page and some also require specific verbiage. I personally don’t like putting links on my home page since I feel that this detracts from the professionalism of it. I do think that having a “our partners”, “suggested links” or other type of page is fine though for such inclusions.
Ok, so this brings me to the next question I often get … if you do need to pay for marketing online, what is a good option. The only pay option I recommend at this time for all business types is Google AdWords. If you are unfamiliar with this I encourage you to visit https://www.google.com/ads/adwords2/ This page will provide you a good overview of the system.
In short, AdWords is a system wherein you will “bid” on words that you believe will be used to find your business. If you bid “5 cents” for a word and someone else bids “6 cents” then they will come up higher in the listing, and more often. Your Ad will be listed on the Google search pages, G-Mail, and website pages that are using Google AdSense.
As for the specifics, AdWords has a very nice keyword suggestion tool that will search for keyword popularity for your type of business; this will help you when choosing what to target. Once you’ve chosen the keywords to pay for you will link your credit card to your AdWords campaign. When someone clicks on your Ad you will pay an associated fee based upon the cost of the words you’ve chosen. Since AdWords only charges you for someone clicking on the AD, not a monthly usage fee, this is a much more sensible approach than a “pay a monthly fee for inclusion” as most other linking sites require.
Finally, my suggestion is to browse the different websites and directories you have a link on periodically and be sure to save the access information for these if applicable. This ensures that the link does still exist, and you will likely want to make edits over time to change contact information or edit services, add new images, etc. It is also a good idea to check to see where your business link’s placement is in their listing. As you can imagine, if you are included on a website yet no one ever finds your link since your information is buried so deep in the listing, it really serves no purpose. Remember that in some cases you will be required to link back to the site (so have a page ready for this as needed), and in many cases you can improve the position of your free listing by answering questions about your business, uploading photos/videos, or by just editing or resubmitting your information. Always read the FAQ or related submission information before you include your business link, and it is a good idea to have a listing “title” in mind and a brief description about your business services ready since this is commonly allowed.
Please contact me if you need help with online marketing.
