Ads Next™ Local Internet Advertising, Annapolis, Maryland, Internet Advertising Solutions, Search Engine Optimization, Website Design and Integration, Social Media Marketing

When users are searching for a product or service they want to find a local company that provides that product or service.  However local companies aren’t anywhere to be found in the top of the search results.  Companies are not optimizing their websites locally.   When I do a search for “Annapolis pizza” I do not see any local restaurants in Google’s natural results.  I see only one in the local results that are listed on the top of the page.

Submitting your local business listing to the Google Business Center is a must.  Google now displays local listings in their search results.  It is a part of their “Universal Search”. Universal search is the process of integrating verticals into the search results.  Some of these include local listings, images, videos, news and many others.  This is a great way to give users options and also deliver the most relevant results.  A lot of local business are not taking advantage of this feature and are missing out on potential customers.

This will help your business rank in the top of the search results for local searches. Below are several tips that will help you get started.

• The title should be as descriptive as you can make it.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be the name of your business.  You can list a title that you think people may try to find you with.
• Make sure to enter your business web address.
• List all phone numbers that are associated with your business.  Make it easy for customers to reach you.
• Choose the categories that best fit your business
• Google allows you to upload 10 photos.  Add as many as you can.

Once you have completed the submission you will need to request a phone call or a postcard to verify your listing.  Once the verification process has been completed you listing will be active. 

Google maps now allow you to add business reviews.  People can add reviews to the professional ones already featured on the site by clicking the “Write a Review” link on a business listing.  I have noticed that the more reviews a business may have the higher they will appear in the local results.  However it is important to have real reviews that clients have stated about your products or services.  Ask you customers to write reviews for you so you can improve your search results.

Google Maps is a cheap, fast and effective way to start marketing your business locally online.

Ads Next™, providers of local internet advertising solutions with tracking and conversion tools, has signed a joint marketing partnership with What’s Up? Inc. Magazines, the Anne Arundel County and greater Chesapeake region leader for local information and events.  Both companies are based in Annapolis, Maryland.

The goal for this partnership is to offer a combined local print and internet advertising solution to local businesses.  “What’s Up?, Inc. has a long standing relationship with local businesses, now they can offer an online advertising component with their local print ads, says Brian Burns, President of Ads Next™”. 

Local Internet Advertising is growing, below are some facts:

• 63% of Internet Users use local search

• 20-25% of ALL monthly online searches (more than 1 billion searches) are local and commerce driven

• 46% of online users searched for local vendor in last 90 days.

As part of the partnership Ads Next™ will develop a new website for What’s Up?, Inc. using leading web 2.0 techniques.  The features include Blogs, polls, interactive events, a geography targeted business directory, advanced banner tracking, and more.  These new features will appeal better to What’s Up? Inc.’s audience and increase online revenue opportunities.

Danny Sullivan visited SEOmoz last Friday for a white board discussion on Facebook Revolution and Search 3.0. 

Danny Sullivan discussed Facebook Ads vs. Search Ads.  In his opinion Search Ads are the revolution.  He mentioned that traditional advertisers are always desperately looking for new ways to advertise, for example on Facebook even if they don’t understand the new concept. 

The idea behind Facebook’s model is that when you purchase a product or service online it will display on your page and catch your friend’s attention, hopefully creating a word of mouth buzz.  However there are still many improvements that need to be made to this advertising model.  One that was mentioned in the discussion is that when you try to target your ads by choosing keywords related to your business your reach decreases tremendously and you are only being seen by very few users.

Danny feels that there is still huge growth in Search and advertisers should be taking advantage of this.  Search is still a cheap way to advertise compared to traditional advertising and your ROI is usually much higher than other forms of advertising. With search advertising you aren’t interrupting users, they are searching for you. Danny also discusses that when advertisers do try search ads they realize the benefits of search and want to keep it their own little secret in order to prevent competition in that space.

I agree with Danny about search still being the revolution.  There are a lot of missed opportunities in this space especially for local advertisers. When users perform searches they typically want to see results from local businesses they trust. Most local businesses are missing out on potential revenue.  Another thing that these local advertisers do not realize is that in general search is a very cost efficient way to advertise your business and the more specific you get with a location the less money you will spend.  Education is the key to convince local businesses to use Search Ads.  I am anxious to see how long it takes advertisers to realize they must move some of their traditional ad spend over to search advertising.

Danny Sullivan also discussed the evolution of search and predicts where it is headed. First there was Search 1.0 and this was based strictly on content and location and frequency of keywords.  As you can imagine this was taken advantage of and led to Search 2.0. 

Search 2.0 or off page SEO was based on click through rate and link building.  This is still a huge part of SEO today. 

Search 3.0 is happening now.  It is the process of blending verticals into the search results.  A great example of this would be local search.  Instead of displaying your typical search results at the top of the page they are replaced by the first three local results for that search query. 

Eventually vertical data will take over the search results and lead to Search 4.0.  Search results in 4.0 will be based on personalization.  The query results will take into consideration your past query history, personal data, and social data.  The results will be rewritten based on you or people you know.

Danny’s predication of Search 5.0 will include live answers and human interaction.  If a user is having trouble finding what they are looking for there will be an option for them to get help from a human.  Yahoo Answers is an example of this.

Link building is the process of getting high quality websites to link to your website. This helps improve your website’s popularity and gain higher search rankings in the “natural” results.

When you start your link campaign it is important to first think of local link opportunities.  Before search engines and the internet how did you market your business in your local community?  The same holds true when you are trying to market your business on the internet. Start local and dominate you local market.  Once you have accomplished this goal then branch out to other geographically regions where you would like to do business.  It’s much easier to build a local presence in the search engines before trying to compete with the entire country. Building link recognition in your local market first will only help you gain prominence on the national level.

For example if you are trying to build a link campaign for your business in the Annapolis, Maryland area you should research local business organizations, DMOZ, Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and other local directories, newspapers, journals, and popular local sites.  Submitting your site and site description to these local websites will help improve your organic rankings and increase traffic and exposure of your business.

Some other examples of link building would be participating in online discussions that are related to your field.   Also consider commenting on related blogs, with a link back to your website.  Make sure the comments are related to the blog article.  Search engines frown upon unrelated content and it can hurt your search engine rankings.  It is important to build your local link campaign over several months. 

Acquiring too many low quality links in a short period of time is not always successful in the long run.  The search engines prefer to see links that appear to be natural link growth.

So you have a website, now what?

Just like a brick and mortar store your website needs to be promoted. On the web there are two main ways to accomplish this goal.

Paid Advertising: This includes pay-per-click text ads on the Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can also buy display banner ads on local newspaper and magazines sites. This form of advertising is very affordable and the results are tracked. Small Businesses are finding this form of advertising to be a great place to start when advertising a new business. More established small businesses use the Internet to highly target customers in a specific area

Organic Promotion: This form of website promotion is less common, but incredibly effective. This form involves Search Engine Optimization, the process of creating title tags, keyword density and site maps so your site ranks higher in the search engines. It is also very important to create a Blog for posting orginal content. The Blog is then linked to your website. The content can be posted on other community sites (ex. Digg.com) for additonal quality links to your website. In addition is very helpful to have the blog feed the posts into a defined space on your website. This is excellent spider food and really helps with organic rankings.

Website Features shoud Include:

• Creation of quality Inbound and outbound links
• Blogs with RSS Feeds
• Real-time Chat tools
• Search Engine Optimization

Why Local Internet Advertising?

The World Wide Web can be targeted down to the the local florist in Annapolis, Maryland. Internet users increasingly are turning away from the yellow pages and towards internet search to find restaurants, local events, and shops. This form of advertising is affordable, targeted and trackable.

Local Internet Advertising for small businesses can be targeted to people searching in a particular city, state or region. We can target local and regional areas and advertise to prospects that are most appropriate for your business.

Most businesses cannot afford to compete with national companies when it comes to advertising. So they reach out to local niche magazines, newspapers and radio stations to spread their message. Same logic holds true online. Local and regional businesses need to promote their website to local and regional Internet users. One simple way is to buy the keyword “Florist Annapolis Maryland” instead of Florist.

According to Emarketer, Local Search is the second most important online activity behind email. Local search is predicted to grow from estimate 2.9 Billion dollars in revenue in 2007 to 7.8 Billion in revenue by 2011!

Time to get started!

Social Media Marketing - How does it help your website?

First we had brochure websites, then the buzz was database driven websites and cool Flash animations. Today, the most important aspect of your website is relevance. To achieve this relevance or popularity a site needs to be promoted to and respected by the internet community.

What is Social Media Marketing? It is the practice of using Web 2.0 sites and methods to drive additional traffic to your website. It refers to a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services- technologies such as blogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. The term became popular following the first O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004**.

As Aaron Wall writes, “the best way for search engines to provide relevant results is to emulate a user and rank the page based on the same things the user see and do (Do users like this website? Do they quickly hit the back button?), and what other people are saying about the document (For example, does anybody link to this page or site? Who is linking at it? What is the link text? And so on.)

As the Internet continues to grow the Search Engine Companies will need to weed out non relevant websites. They will looks for well designed websites with useful content that are frequently updated. They will look for quality links from trusted websites and track visitor behavior. Just like traditional business you need a virtual store that has a good reputation.

How Quality Score Affects your Search Rankings. A landing page’s quality score plays an important factor in where your ad will be placed in the search engines. Google was the first search engine to release this new Quality Score rule. Yahoo followed shortly after. Before the quality score was introduced you could simply bid higher than your competitors and rank above your competition in the search engine results. However this is not the case anymore. Now search engines care more about the relevancy of your landing page, so a high quality landing page gets a better PPC ranking for less money.

To increase your landing page's quality score you should have your keywords, ad copy and landing page all relevant to each other. This will improve your quality score and move you higher on the search engine page. Even if your bid is lower than your competitors you may still rank above them if your landing page is more relevant and holds a higher quality score. Having a more relevant landing page gets your more conversions for less money.