LinkLocal Web Marketing

Mobile Commerce is Big Business for Small Business

Below are some current statistics about mobile web. If you are a local business owner that depends on getting any number of customers from the internet, you need to have amobile website!

• 65% of mobile users said they used their mobile device to find a business to make an in-store purchase (Source: Google, 2011)
• 43% of mobile shoppers have downloaded a retail app (Source: Retrevo, 2011)
• Approximately 52 % of smartphone users will use their device to research products, redeem coupons and use apps to assist in their holiday gift purchase (Source: Acquity Group, 2011)
• 67% of consumers plan to make a purchase via mobile this holiday season (Source: PayPal, 2011)
• In terms of the types of information mobile users will be looking for via their devices this holiday season, 31 % said they will look for updates on sales and promotions, 27% will look for local store hours and directions, 26 % will seek out product information and availability, 26 % will be interested in product photos, 18% will search for official retailer apps and 17 % will use mobile for customer support. (InMobi Holiday Mobile Shopping Study)
• Approximately 45 % of mobile users plan to compare prices via their handsets during their Thanksgiving weekend shopping, up from 22 percent in 2010 (InMobi Holiday Mobile Shopping Study)
• 67% of consumers will use their smartphones to find store locations, 59% to compare prices, 51% to obtain product information, 46% to check product availability, 45% to read reviews, 45% to shop online, 41% to find and use coupons, 40% to scan bar codes, and 35% to access social media (Source: Deloitte’s 2011 Annual Holiday Survey)
• More than 60 % of mobile buyers will make mobile purchases while at home (Source: Ipsos and PayPal Survey, 2011)
• 53% of the “on-the-go” U.S. audience is willing to exchange their location in exchange for more relevant content and better information, including mobile deals (Source: JiWire, 2011)
• 74 million consumers in the United States already shop from their mobile devices (Source: InMobi study, 2011)
• 78 percent of retailers plan to invest in mobile this year (Source: The E-tailing Group Inc, 2011)
• Within the 49% of mobile users who have made a mobile purchase in the last six months, 84% look for local retailer reputation, 82% find online retailers, 73% find a specific manufacturer or product website, 71% learn about a product or service after seeing an ad, 68% find the best price for a product or service, and 63% search before purchasing in a store or from a catalog (Source: Performics 2011 Mobile Search Insights Study, conducted by ROI Research)

Increase Your Local Business Using the Interent

Internet marketing is critical to any local business. Here are the five things every local business should do before considering spending a dime on Internet marketing:

1. Know what people actually search for to find your business: Search engines have far less to do with computers and more to do with language. Google provides a free tool for finding out what the most popular searches are for your type of business: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

   The tool allows you to enter the keywords you think are the best for your business and it will tell you the top 50 or so related terms along with statistics for ranking them. Using the 80/20 rule, make a list of the top 20 keywords related to your business.

   CRITICAL NOTE: Add the cities within your service area to the list. If you don’t know all of the cities within a county, search for the county name on wikipedia.org and they will provide you with a list of every incorporated city within the county.

2. Put the keywords into your site where the search engines can find them. If you want to be found for “purple people eaters” then the words better be in your site where the search engines can associate them with your business. Here are the short-cut methods for making sure the search engines know what your business is about:

   1. a. Create a unique title meta tag for each of your site’s main pages using a maximum of 60 characters. Includes your top cities as well.

      EXAMPLES: Lifetime Fence Company – Lewisville | Flower Mound | Denton – or – AC & Heat Solutions | Air Conditioning and Heating | Hurst

b. Create unique description meta tags for each of your site’s main pages using a maximum of 200 characters. Incorporate top keywords and cities so that between all of the pages each is used at least once.

EXAMPLE: JBC Custom Remodeling is your Real interior and exterior expert serving the DFW Metroplex including Dallas, Fort Worth, Richardson, Plano, Frisco, Highland Park, Irving, Lewisvile, Flower Mound.

c. Create two paragraphs. The first tells what you do and includes the top 20 keywords. The second tells where you do it. Length does not matter.

EXAMPLE: The best selection of durable home medical equipment in Denton County including: oxygen supplies, sleep therapy (CPAP & BiPAP), Wheelchairs, lifts and walkers, compression therapy systems, incontinent supplies, diabetic shoes and supplies, foot orthotics and custom orthopedic devices, hospital beds, physical therapy supplies, rehab mobility aids, breast prosthesis and bras, bathroom safety equipment and personal care items.

Over 30 years in Denton county and conveniently located near: Lewisville, Flower Mound, Corinth, Hickory Creek, Denton, Highland Village, Lake Dallas, Coppell, Corinth, Argyle, Aubrey, Bartonville, Carrollton, Copper Canyon, Dallas, Double Oak, Hebron, Justin, Plano, Ponder, Prosper, Shady Shores, Southlake, Trophy Club, and Westlake.

Add the paragraphs to EVERY page in very small text in the footer (the bottom where the copyright info typically is). This information is for the search engines and not designed to impress customers, so do not worry about making it sound consumer-friendly.

1. Add an interactive map to your Contact page using the code from either Google or Mapquest. Search engines look specifically for this code on a site to help determine whether it is addressed to local prospects or national. For instance, eBay, Amazon and Dell do not include maps on their site because they are national. Your site should, because you are local.

1. Take ownership of your local business listings in places like Google Maps, Yahoo! Local and Bing Local. According to SearchEngineWatch.com, up to 24% of a local business’s new customer contacts can come from a Google Maps listing alone. Make sure your listing accurately reflects your business. Claimed listings with a web address are known to show higher in ranking than unclaimed listings.

2. Make asking for online reviews a part of your everyday business. Nearly every online business directory allows consumers to leave reviews. Many even uses the quantity of reviews as a factor for ranking the listings. If you think about human nature, a significantly higher percentage of people who are upset with a business will leave a review than the percentage of satisfied customers. Protect yourself from a bad review by making sure you have multiple good reviews.

The top review sites are:

Google Maps

Yahoo! Local

Insiderpages

Citysearch

Yelp

Make the most of these 5 recommendations and you’ll start seeing results in often less than a month. Done properly, any business can be on the first page of localized search results – and stay there – within 4~6 months.

Lately my news feed has brought up a topic that has been in the news – search engine optimization. When I’m thinking of buying a vaporizer, I sometimes look at sites online to gain some knowledge about optimizing for Google. There’s been a lot of different thoughts in this arena at the moment. It’s been many months of up and downs for many sites. Lots of the standard old truths of SEO seem to no longer apply.

One thing in particular that appears less important lately is links from forum profiles. People used to believe you could fill the web with a plethora of these things. What they do is make a link with your desired anchor text on a website with decent Page Rank. Yet, the actual URL itself that contains the link would still be PR0. So people would put up many of these types of links. Yet, it is pretty safe to say that the Google search engine has figured out this strategy by this point. As a result they don’t help out your ranking very much.

Another type of backlink that is only moderately effective is sidebar links. Those are links located within the sidebar of the referring domain. They are nice to have, especially if they have some PR juice to pass. However, they are not the best type of link to have. The Google search engine can detect they are not part of an actual article, and the link is on every single page of the linking site. Thus Google puts less value on these. Don’t get me wrong, these links are not completely worthless. It’s good to have some as part of your overall strategy.

This brings us to the ideal type of backlink: contextual home page links. This means they are links that are found within some text that is actually about the same subject as your web page. Best case scenario, you’d like the anchor text of the backlink to be the keyword you are trying to rank. It’s important that this backlink be on a page that has high PR. Most often this will be the home page of the site. The main page should have the most link value of any page on the site. However if your backlinks are found on another inner page that has PageRank, that is almost as effective. If this appears tough to get, I recommend you check out a silver surfer vaporizer review.

Therefore, it’s no longer just about the number of backlinks going to your site. You have to look at the quality of the links that refer to your site. You definitely should have some high PR contextual links in your overall link profile.