With the interest in hyper local, the internet community has recognized the value in domains that may get only 10-100 unique visitors each month. For a local professional, owning a hyper local domain is a low cost alternative to advertising on vertical directories. If 1 out of every 10 visitors converts to a lead (by filling out the contact us form) and 1 out of every 3 leads converts to a paying customer, a domain with 30 unique a month would mean 12 new customers each year. Not bad for a domain name with an annual cost of $10-$20.

In the past week, my company has gotten leads on the following domains:

BaltimoreReception.com
SyracusePhotographers.com
CincinnatiVideographer.com
ProvidenceDJs.com
OaklandDJs.com
AtlantaOfficiants.com
DenverOfficiants.com
CharlotteOfficiants.com

All these domains were available for registration by local photographers, videographers, djs, and wedding officiants. We regged the domains to generate leads from our local advertisers. They could have easily procured by local professionals that could have gotten the direct navigation traffic to new customers. All these domains, expect SyracusePhotographers.com, were available until last summer. There are still many other hyper local domains available for registration. Each day, internet users type hyper local domains into their browser only to be disappointed when it does not bring up a local businesses’ web site.

Spend 15 minutes of go daddy and see what hyper local domains in your specialty are available for registration. If you are an lawyer, you can procure new customers without owning Lawyers.com

Had this domain been purchased by a photographer in Syracuse, these leads would have gone to that business. Many professionals report booking 70-80% of leads generated by users filling out a contact form on their web site. Even assuming a conservative 10% conversion rate, with a average booking rate of $1,500 per event, a photographer could have easily paid for the SyracusePhotographers.com within 12 months timeframe.

A friend of mine, who is a photographer in Western NY has leveraged a network of geo domains to drive new clients for his business. Leveraging a network of 20-25 geo domains, my friend averages 2-3 bookings a months from these sites. At $10 annual cost per domain, his ROI is better than any other advertising medium.

This begs the question, why do many small businesses spend money on AdWords or SEO, while ignoring unregistered geodomains that are pertinent to their profession. The answer is that most small business owners don’t appreciate the SEO benefits and natural direct navigation that can be found on many geodomains. Even if the geodomains gets 3-5 unique a month, provided that one person buys from your business each year – then you geodomains represent a low cost alternative to many advertising solutuions. Geodomains represent an excellent source of new business and pay for themselves (sometimes in spades)

One thing I have noticed is that most small business owners keep tabs on their competitors. Even in large cities, the number of companies offering a similar service is manageable. Potential clients are a great source of Intel about competitors because most clients touch base with a handful of competitors, before making a final purchase decision. During a meeting with a prospective client, you might overhear a comment that one of your competitors is not accepting new clients because they are going retire.

If one of your competitors is going out of business, I would try to buy their domain name. While contacting a competitor and inquiring about a domain name can be awkward, there is a way of discretely procuring domains without picking up the phone. If a domain isn’t renewed, chances are that it will show up on sites like Snapnames.com and Namejet.com. These sites allow people to catch domains before they drop off the active roles and expire. Normally, you can pay between $50 and $100 and pick up your former competitor’s domain name.

Why it is important to acquire domains from former competitors? Well, there is a good chance that your competitor has spent significant resources trying to drive traffic to their site. If you own the domain, you can take advantage of their hard word. As long as an active site is maintained, the old back links will continue, providing a continual stream of traffic to your business.

Another advantage is that you can take advantage of their SEO placement. If the competitor has a higher rank on Google, Yahoo, or Bing for preferred hyper local keywords – then you can take over their position in the results by building a landing page that links users to your primary website. You can also use a request more information form to convert users into leads – enabling you to call the prospective client and introduce your product or service.

So next time you hear that a competitor is going out of business, check the expiration date on their domain names. After their domain expires, perform periodic searches on Snapnames.com and Namejet.com to see if you can get your hands on this valuable asset before it is lost forever in the vastness of cyberspace.

This concept could be visualized as a fisherman on a large lake dropping hooks on the far reaches of the lake hoping to hook a fish.  In my opinion wouldn’t it seem more important just to drop a line where the fish are? Of course that begs the question:  How do you know where the fish are?

The truth is the fish are all around you if you know where to look.  They are on Facebook, Twitter, they’re online looking in local search directories.  They’re typing in to their search engine “your city name” and “your business category “and if you’re not showing up in the search engine results, your being overlooked.

This is where thinking differently about your marketing, or  Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help.  If you have a catering business in Tucson AZ then being ranked for the term “Arizona Catering” in general is not that helpful.  For example if your business is in Tucson and someone from Flagstaff AZ finds you chances are you’re not going to get the call anyway as the customer is most likely looking for someone local anyway.   If however your website appears under the search term “Tucson Catering” and your business happens to do catering in Tucson you’re going to get a call.

In summary, rather than trying to set up your business’ website to attract hits based on non local search terms you should be thinking hyper-local.  You may even work to optimize your website to be found for a particular suburb of your city.    This does mean however that you want your business to be found in both the” city search” and a “suburb of your city search” too you just never know how targeted your next customer may be looking.

As a business the Internet is no longer an option, you must start going where your customers are looking. Online, in the search engines. Get found there and get the business back that print media can no longer send.

The thing we found was that there are well over one hundred people a month searching for variations of this companies name online yet before they had a website the company had no idea where they were going.

Think about this for a minute, there are people actively looking for your business and if your website is not optimized properly or if you do not have a web presence at all there is no way for your potential customers to find you.

The business I am talking about here was a very offline business, a drilling and blasting company, when we put the site together they really were just looking to have a small site setup online but we told them it would end up being their advertising online, their way of promoting their business. They were skeptical.

Not now, they indicated they are getting many calls from the site now, customers were looking before they just were not finding this company, who knows they may of been finding a competitor in local search listings. How much business does a business loose if someone is looking for them over and over again online but can never find them.

As search engine optimizers we tend to focus on keywords and search volume for certain search terms, in many cases a persons business is searched on enough that the value is in just being found.

Is your business being found online in all the places it should be? If not talk to us about local search optimization.

In the past it has always been about eyeballs, there was no targeting, at least not in the sense we talk about today. If you were to advertise in the newspaper or on the radio you were advertising across a large region and you bought the ad based on eyeballs or listeners even if those people had no interest in your product or even if they just happened to be passing through town.

This is the model most small business owners are typically most familiar with. The web changes all of this.

Now, with local search taking a larger role in online search queries making sure you are found when people search for a service or product in Bing, Google, or Yahoo is more important than any newspaper ad someone could run. And one statistic says a lot as well, 80 percent of people in one survey reported searching online to research a product or service then going locally to buy it.

If your business cannot be found online then it is likely they are not going to your business to buy it.

With local search and hyperlocal targeting you can make sure that when people search for your business online that they find your web presence. Making sure your business shows up in the Google local listings (or Bing and Yahoo) is very important, but with people becoming even more targeted in their search making sure you show up at a neighborhood level in major metros and even in rural areas can be very important if someone is looking for a local service or restaurant.

It is not about having hundreds of thousands of people reading the newspaper and possibly seeing your ad with the web, on the web when someone searches in the search engines they know exactly what they are looking for which means if your business can get that traffic to your website then the conversion ratio is much higher than you may be used to in legacy methods of advertising.

By building your website in a way that attracts the people searching in your local area you can make sure that the customers you are looking for find you and not your competitor. These customers convert, you want them to be yours.

Why?

Because people are understanding that with the penetration of GPS capabilities in mobile devices and people using the internet more frequently on their mobile devices it is possible to targeted advertising and other services on a more granular, or as we are saying, hyperlocal basis.

The initial hyperlocal talk was really focused on news and local bloggers writing about neighborhood level topics, true community level news rather than the more regional or city level  news that typically existed.

The web allowed for bloggers to become journalists on a hyperlocal level based on the cost of entry.

Well, from an advertising standpoint this works too, between geo targeted ads, hyperlocal content, and mobile apps taking advantage of all of the above we will see more targeted advertising than ever before. Location based services have arrived.

From a news standpoint even local news stations are starting to use the “hyperlocal” buzz term, just tonight I was listening to a local weather forecast when out of the blue I heard the weatherman say “Lets go hyperlocal and see what is happening in your neighborhood.”

Six months ago you would not of heard that, now the news stations understand that online you are getting more focused and targeted, they have to find away to catch that shift. Does using a buzz word make that happen?

Nope, it will be extremely tough to take the easy distribution the web offers to a broadcast level.

Enjoy the age of hyperlocal online.

In the past advertising solutions have been about one thing, eyeballs. That is how people determined what they charged for their advertising product. The more eyeballs the better, right?

Well, local search engine optimization has changed that and turned it on its head. With the ability to optimize a website to show up in the search engine listings when people search for specific items in your local area you can receive higher converting visitors to your ad or website at a lower cost.

Why pay a newspaper thousands of dollars for an ad that you are not sure that anyone even cares about when for much less you can optimize your real estate website to be in the first page of Google search results when someone searches for the exact subdivision you are selling a house in.

With the economy, and especially real estate in a very tough downturn finding more cost effective, high converting, marketing solutions is very important. Being able to use local search engine optimization to target people searching for the exact location you are selling a property in is the best way.

If you are not thinking about this it is likely that your competitor is. With more and more people becoming more web savvy people are understanding that the search engines are not a technical subject anymore, they are your marketing tool. They have taken over for the newspapers and billboards of the past.

I you are interested in marketing your real estate website to the people searching for exactly what you are trying to sell then contact us for local search engine optimization.

The most popular are by far Facebook and Twitter, to give an idea of the importance of Facebook they recently announced they have bypassed the 350 million user mark and independent data shows they bypassed Google for a short time in December for the most visitors. This means your customers are there, you should be too.

The value in social networking really comes from friends recommending products, services, or websites to their friends or family. This type of recommendation can be very valuable. How do you take advantage of this?

In the case of Facebook it could be the use of a fan page which you can promote and get people to “fan” you, then when you update your fan page it will show up in your fans accounts which means their friends could see it as well. This is a vote of trust and can be very useful.

This also means that you can put links to your website in the post you put on Facebook, this can be used to drive traffic to your website to get awareness to a promotion or other special event.

It is important though to make sure you have the opposite happening as well, you need to make sure that on your small business website you have links to your social media sites. This allows people that normally go to your website to find your Facebook or Twitter account easily and follow you, this means when you do updates there these users will automatically see them and be driven back to your online presence.

It is also important when you are promoting your Facebook or Twitter page that you attempt to find people local to your business, if you can have them follow you they are very targeted users in your geographic location, the best for customer conversions. Look for a follow up article on this in the near future.

Accounts are free, very easy to use, and a great way to connect with customers. If you need help contact Localtek for more info on small business marketing in the online world.

One of the keys to Google search results, is filtering legitimate web sites from sites that offer nothing to Google users. Most spammers register thousands of domain names and put up boilerplate content with little value added to the user’s knowledge. In their attempt to discern useful sites from copycat sites, Google relies on several factors including time a user spends on the site, bounce (does the user bail immediately after landing on the home page), and back links from other legitimate site owners.

In addition to usability metrics, Google also looks at the domain expiration date. Legitimate businesses tend to register their domains for 10 or more years, to prevent accidental deletion of the domain from their account. People who are trying to spam Google, typically register their domains for a single year. This allows those site operators to determine which domains get traffic and drop the domains that don’t make money.

If you are a small business owner, I would recommend you that your domain name is registered til at least 2013 (or beyond). This is an easy way to send a signal to Google that your company is real, provides value, and is not going away anytime in the near future.