May 11

One of the major keys to dominating your competition is to have as many listings as possible on a search engine result page.

 

For example, if you do a search on Google for my main keyword phrase: nc internet marketing you’ll likely find that out of the 9.5 MILLION results found, at least 5 of the Top 20 results are either my main company website (Cybermedia Marketing) or other business profile pages about my business. The top 2 are for my main website, and 3 are on other local website directories.

Having this many results for your core keywords creates a position of authority that is very difficult for your competitors to match:

1)      It positions you as the expert in your market and the most logical choice. If you own 25%-50% of the top 20 listings for your given keywords while your competitors only have one listing (if any) you’re surely going to dominate.

2)      It forces your competitors to have to spend money on Google Adwords in order to show up on Page 1 of the search results at all. That is, if they’re even smart enough to know what Google Adwords is – which we’ll cover in Secret Tactic #5.
(Note: you’ll see my paid ad listed as well which I buy just to dominate the page even further, but I obviously don’t have to.)

3)      The more websites you have ranked on the search engines and the more links you have pointing to your main website, the more likely it is people will find you elsewhere on the Internet as well.
This is why the internet is called the World Wide Web and that’s exactly how you should look at it from a marketing standpoint. You want as big a WEB of sites as you can create capturing visitors and leading them to your main website. Just like the image on the cover of this book.

There are too many different business profile websites to list here but we’ll give you one of our favorites that almost always gets a Page 1 organic ranking if setup properly…

MerchantCircle.com – Merchant Circle is a great website to list your business on not only for the direct traffic the site gets but also for the love that Google seems to give it’s business profile pages.

You’ll notice that it’s my 4th ranking in the image above and it even beats out the long established local business portal Citysearch.

MerchantCircle also has some great social networking features that allow you to meet other business owners in your area and nationwide. This creates a great opportunity to find and develop relationships with new potential business partners, vendors, and customers.

One word of caution though… a lot of these local business portals make their money be selling you ads, enhanced listings, or by offering to manage your search engine advertising for you on the major search engines.

We’ve typically found the enhanced listings to be of little value and the ads usually don’t get a whole lot of clicks. And you certainly don’t want them managing your paid search campaigns. Paid search is best left to experts who are paid based on their performance and know how to manage your campaign correctly in order to generate actual leads, not just clicks.

 

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Apr 4

The very first thing you need to do if you own a local offline business is to claim your Google Local Business listing.

If you haven’t already noticed, whenever you do a search on Google for a particular type of business AND a city name, you will often get what is known in the industry as the “Google Maps 10 Pack”.

 

What’s important to understand here is that these local business listings almost always appear at the top of the page, above the normal listings so they are more likely to get clicked. They are also much easier to get because they don’t rely on the same algorithm that’s used for the organic search results shown above, which are determined primarily by the number and quality of inbound links to your website.

In order to power these new map results, Google has licensed data from lots of 3rd party business data providers such as yellow page companies and other aggregators like Acxiom and Localeze. So if you’ve advertised in the yellow pages or have a local business phone number thru the phone company, chances are you’re already in their database and may even be listed already.

However, sometimes this 3rd party data is inaccurate and it’s almost certainly incomplete. Also, until you “claim” your business listing, Google doesn’t give it the importance it deserves because the data has not actually been verified by the business owner.

Luckily, claiming your Google local business listing is Free and easy to do:

1)      Visit the Google Local Business Center.

2)      If you already have a Google Account, sign in with your email and password otherwise create a free Google account.

3)      Follow the instructions to create a listing.

Please remember these points when creating your Google Local Business Listing:

·         Make sure your information is consistent across the Internet. You want to use the same business name, address, and most importantly phone number throughout the Internet.

·         The street address you enter will be shown in the Google Maps search results. If you work from home or have a physical street address you don’t want to display, I suggest getting a mail box at a UPS Store (Note: You want a real street address not a PO Box from the post office)

·         Once you’ve submitted your business information, you’ll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in the search results in about 48-72 hours.

·         Be sure to add as much information about your business as you can and use as many of your keywords from Secret #1 in your business description, products, services and coupons as you can.

·         Upload your logo and other images about your business.

You can (and should) create similar local listings on Yahoo! Local and MSN (Windows Live Local)  as well.

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