No matter how busy you are, here are three things you can do today to get more attention for your business. In all, it should take less than 30 minutes.
One, check the title tag on your website. Those are the words in the thin gray bar across the top of your page. Is your business name there? It should not be. That is the most important place where Google and Bing and other search engines look to see what your page is about. It is amazing how many people put the name of their business there, when they should be putting their keywords there.
Your keywords are what your customers are entering into Google—right now—to find you.
They are not entering Angelo’s Deli or Delaware Handyman. They are entering San Francisco Italian restaurant or Wilmington home repair. Your customers are trying to find you on Google or their smartphones by entering the name of their city and your type of business. Google, in turn, is relying on your title tag in good measure to supply them with that information.
You might want to sprinkle those keywords into the headline of your Web page and into the first few lines of the actual text of your site.
Next, join Google Places. Google it. You will start showing up in the cool map section with all the nice markers. Nice.
Finally, write a letter to a reporter. Make the letter from you, the business owner. Tell the reporter about some new trend at the deli. Brie Burritos? Cool. Energy audits expiring? Very nice. Solar panels on rice farms? Sounds like a story.
Don’t write a press release; press releases kill stories. All you are going to send is a three-paragraph note telling a reporter what your customers are getting excited about. And if the reporter wants to come by and check it out, that would be fine with you.
Do those three simple tasks right now and you will get more leads, close more sales, and make more money with less effort.
Colin Flaherty
Owner
Flaherty Communications
San Diego
Thanks for this article Colin. It reinforces the need for small local businesses to claim their Google Places page. After all, it's free and takes no time at all to create a Google account, claim and edit their business listing; write a description, select categories, add photos, videos, hours, check their reviews, and make sure their information is correct. Businesses can create an offer, which takes 5 minutes to setup in their Google Places Dashboard. So cool!
Those steps are a good start but only a start. Google Places is hugely powerful for local businesses but just joining won't get you listed, you have to do some SEO work in order to be listed in the top results and have customers find you. Your site is going to need back links from relevant sites, do some article marketing with links to your site, use a site like http://videomarketingvideo.net/ to run some quick and effective video campaigns, and so on. Getting a reporter to write a story like you mentioned is a great idea, especially if they will put a link to your site in their online story.
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