First consider how much the advertising will cost you per click. This all comes down to how popular the search terms are and how many visitors a website receives. Search engines typically require bids for particular places in the ad spots on particular pages. If you bid too low, you’re outta luck. If you bid too high, then you’ve got the spot but you’ve out-priced yourself. You’ve got to find a happy median, which takes time and careful analysis.

Also consider the fact that with PPC advertising, you could be charged for multiple clicks by the same users. Software like Google Analytics will typically alert you if this happens and you will need to contact the search engine to get your money back. Make sure your marketing company monitors this so you won’t end up spending extra dollars for the same person over and over again.

Keep in mind that search engine optimization (SEO), which is cheaper to implement, also works just as well as PPC advertising. Many times simple SEO may generate the same, if not more, people to your website than a banner ad. It may be beneficial to implement SEO marketing first before starting a PPC campaign to see just how well you may be from keyword searches alone.

As with any traffic driving tool, PPC advertising just drives traffic to your website. It can be rather chaotic determining how much of the traffic is actually useful traffic (that is people who are consuming your product or service). If only a few of the ten thousand clicks you paid for actually bought into your product, then you may need to re-evaluate your SEM campaign.

Using analytic software such as Google Analytics is the best way to monitor how effective your SEM campaign is working. While some companies may have great success with PPC advertising, be sure to evaluate the real cost of the investment to determine if it is a necessary endeavor.

Creating a fan page on Facebook is relatively simple and it’s easy to copy and paste a web address onto the page for visitors to click on. People who are fans of your website can “like” it on Facebook and encourage other friends to like the service as well. Since people spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook, it’s a pretty easy way to get people to view your site and interact with your visitors by announcing news or promotions.

Twitter is another social media network that is gaining prominence on the web. Twitter simply allows users to post “tweets” to other users who are following them about news, activities, pictures, and other information (or in Lindsay Lohan’s case, too much information). An ever popular website with celebrities and news media alike, Twitter is an informal way for you to interact with people who utilize your website in 130 characters or less. It also a great way to promote news on your website.

Myspace is also another website that is utilized by many businesses and web promoters. As the grandfather to all social networking websites, Myspace was the former king of social media networks before Facebook exploded. Today, it’s popular with musicians and promoters who are targeting a younger market. Myspace tends to focus on the younger preteen market (Facebook traditionally catered to college kids and older), but it does have a feature that allows Twitter to update its feed automatically, but if you’re wanting to attract as many visitors to your site as you can, don’t discount the former king of social networks and create a Myspace page to promote your website.

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.

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.

But as you can imagine the usage of the white pages has dropped drastically as well, for a couple main reasons:

• Mobile phone growth and applications
• People searching online for people rather than picking up the book

Although the second one is obvious and the first one is as well for the most part, I think the part that many people miss is that since the majority of cell phone numbers are unlisted you will not find them anywhere, online or off.

Well, AT&T has figured this out and without much fanfare has killed the publishing of the White Pages sections in many phone books.

State commissions typically only make it a requirement for the phone companies to make the directory listings available NOT actually requiring the printing of them, unless required.

So what happened when they did this?

A couple quick points of reference, in Milwaukee, where this was first tested in September of last year there was a less than 2 percent request rate to actually get a copy, LESS THAN 2 PERCENT. If that is not a statistic to take note of I am not sure what is.

In Austin and Atlanta the request rate was 3 percent. Think about that a bit, the delivery rate before was 100 percent, but only 3 percent actually wanted them. Waste much????

To read a bit more about this check out Madison.com

In fact it is likely that if you live in an area with many small towns located around your  place of business you want to try to get customers from the surrounding towns as well.

Many small business make the mistake of optimizing focused purely on the town they are in, for instance they may have the title of their site be:

Smalltown Restaurants

But if you speak to the business owner for any amount of time you will find that they are also interested in growing their business by attracting customers from surrounding communities.

If that is the case there are multiple options, even if you have just one location. A couple quick tips:

Build multiple pages with unique content that is focused on that specific town, optimize the title keywords appropriately. This could be as simple as announcing a local community event you will be sponsoring or attending.

Another option for less competitive areas is to have multiple city/niche combinations in the site title, expanding on the example above:

Smalltown1 Restaurants, Smalltown2 BBQ | MyDinerRestaurant1.com

Although a very minor change it can make  a difference for your small business when attracting surrounding customers. We have had customers have immediate results from such minor changes such as this.

As someone who focuses strictly in those areas I understand that many of those areas still can be in the land of slow dial-up connections and internet usage patterns are much different than those of us that have broadband speeds on our mobile phones, in other words many of the changes that are happening in the metro areas have been slow to hit the rural communities.

In fact many people have said that the Yellow pages and print newspapers would continue to have the rural areas as a stronghold.

Well, more and more I am getting comments such as “I am dropping my ad budget with the Yellow pages this year” or “The newspaper keeps coming in dropping their price but even at that price it is not worth it.”

What this tells me is that even in the rural areas the conservative small businesses are starting to understand that they have options for more targeted advertising online at more cost effective pricing than they ever had in the offline and shotgun advertising world of print newspapers.

Many people are overlooking the rural broadband stimulus as a driver in pushing legacy media to the cliff faster than it is already happening, but if the rural areas were the strong hold those media companies are in trouble, we are seeing it from our customers more and more everyday.

Have you ever watched “The Amazing Race” on CBS? The reality show features two person teams racing around the world, performing a series of cultural tasks before they are given a clue to their next destination. During certain legs of the race, teams are given the option of pursuing a “Fast Forward” that will allow them to skip all tasks and go directly to the check-in station at the end of each leg. The “Fast Forward” doesn’t guarantee that the team will win the leg, but it gives the team who secures it a big advantage over the competition.

In Hyperlocal SEO, owning Geo Domains can give your business a significant leg up over the competition.

What are Geo Domains?

Geo Domains are domain names comprised of two subparts: A Geographic Name and either a Product, Service, or Piece of Content sought by internet users. Examples of Geo Domains include:

• WeddingsInBaltimore.com
• BaltimoreChiropractors.com
• MiamiPhotographer.me
• AtlantaNews.net
• TampaBayJobs.pro
• ChicagoRemodeling.TV

Why are Geo Domains Important?

Geo Domains are important because search engines, like Google and Bing, prefer legitimate businesses. Search engines recognize that domains, tied to high search terms, are valuable resources.  The more competitive the search term, the more valuable the geo domain. Owning a great Geo Domain implies that your business is legitimate and worthy of strong consideration.

In your market, there could be hundreds of competitors all vying for top placement. If you are a Chiropractor in Baltimore, and a user searches for “Baltimore chiropractors”, Google must decide which 10 Baltimore chiropractor sites to display to the user.   To determine which Chiropractor sites are more important than other Chiropractor sites, each search engine uses a proprietary set of rules to filter the results.

One rule common to all search engines, is that a well constructed site, built on top of a geo domain, will rank higher than the same site located at a non geo domain name. In our example, a site located at BaltimoreChiropractors.com will have an excellent chance of displaying at the top of the search results for “Baltimore chiropractors”.  Why?  The answer is that only one chiropractor in Baltimore can own BaltimoreChiropractors.com. Since you had the foresight or resources to acquire this valuable domain name, then your business is viewed as more legitimate than a competitor who is targeting the same local search term.

Dot Com domains are not the only domains preferred by the major search engines. While BaltimoreChiropractors.com and BaltimoreChiropractors.net see the greatest SEO benefit, over time, sites built on alternative extensions like BaltimoreChiropractors.pro, BaltimoreChiropractors.me, or BaltimoreChiropractors.TV can take advantage of Google and Bing‘s preference for geo domains.