Marketing Tips

Is Your Local Brick -n- Mortar Business Online?

August 5, 2010 By Lapeer Website Marketing 5 Comments

Do you own a business that is offline, locally, nationally or internationally?

If so, is your business online?

Nowadays the internet is the number ONE place that people go to find products and/or services that they need or want. Therefore, if your business isn't online, it is missing out on an enormous share of the market which can be costing you a potentially substantial amount of money. To take your business online, all you need is a simple website with a homepage, some information about your business and what separates you from your competitors. Once you have a simple, but professional looking website up and running you will also need to promote it. There are several ways to promote your website and the most important and popular thing to focus on is your search engine rankings. What that means is how well your site ranks on the search engine results when people search for keywords that are related to your market. This process is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and it's one of the most important methods of advertising and exposing your business on the internet. You can also get involved with article marketing, social networking, link swapping, link building, on site optimization, pay per click advertising, or any one of the many internet marketing methods out there. By doing this your business will be exposed to hundreds if not THOUSANDS of new potential leads on a daily or monthly basis which can rocket launch your business into the next level of success. Is your business online?

Honor Michigan Sign Shop Listing High On Google Maps

February 2, 2010 By Lapeer Website Marketing Leave a Comment

How Google Maps Can Get Your Business On The Map

Back in December I contacted a man by the name of Dan Stutzmann who owns a sign shop in Honor, Michigan. With any business, you have to market it in order to build it and establish yourself.

So, in marketing my business I like to educate other businesses on how they can bring in more customers, reduce their costs and build a following. I offered to get Dan into the google local maps for his sign shop – and he agreed.

Preparing To Get Listed In Google Maps

What I did for Dan can be done for any business who wants to show up on google maps. What I did with Dan’s sign shop, was take a look at his site to determine what keyword phrases he was using to capture traffic from the search engines. The next step was to check if his competition was showing up in googles 7-pack, 3-pack or the proverbial 1-pack.

After the analysis is complete, then can you go in and setup a proper listing for your business. So, at this point I do exactly that. I took the data that I gathered and put together a listing that would help his sign shop to start showing up when a prospective customer enters one of the targeted “key phrases” I came up with.

Waiting For The Listing To Be Revealed

Once you have properly setup a google local listing for your business, you need to verify it with Google. The last piece of you completing your listing is giving Google an actual phone number and then clicking the verify your listing button. Google will then automatically phone you and give you a five digit PIN. This pin will then have to be entered into your google local listing for verification which will then make your listing active. After that you have to sit back and wait.

With Dan’s listing up and active, right away two of his “key phrases” were showing up. They were honor mi wood signs and honor mi carved signs. Those results were showing up around mid December. I checked the listings a couple of more times, but no other terms were showing up.

The Sign Shop Shock And Awe On Google Maps

Today, about a month later, I went to check his key phrases on google maps and to say I was surprised is an understatement. I’m not going to list all of Dan’s terms, but here is an image of a very competitive term in which he is showing up as a 1-pack (the 1-pack is where only your business is showing up in the maps with no other listings above or below you).

Honor Mi Signs – Google Local Map Listing

At the top you will see that there are 453,000 competing websites (broad search) for honor mi signs. That’s awesome! He is also showing up in the 1-pack for many other terms but I hope this gives you an idea of how we can also help your business to show up on Google local maps so YOU can get the calls for you product or service.

Feel free to comment below on your experience with google maps.

Filed Under: Case Studies, Marketing Tips Tagged With: google places listing, honor mi signs, local marketing

So What Is SEO Anyway?

December 8, 2009 By Lapeer Website Marketing 1 Comment

I could give you a fancy schmancy answer but the real deal is SEO helps you get customers from Google.com and other search engines.

To help you get a really clear non-techinical understanding I've made this video explaining SEO and what it can do for you.

If you can conquer SEO then you can get really really cheap customer acquisition costs! We'd like to become your marketing partner and we'll do all the SEO for you and for cheaper then you could hire it in-house.

If that sounds like a good deal to you then call us at 810-969-9247 today

Filed Under: Local Internet Marketing, Local Search Engine Marketing, Local Search Engine Optimization, Local SEO, Marketing Tips, Optimization, Web Design Tagged With: free website traffic, SEO

Use High Impact Video To Bring Customers In

October 27, 2009 By Lapeer Website Marketing Leave a Comment

They Laughed When Viewing My High Impact Video…Until I Showed Them How Much My Business Grew From It!

Video… it’s the rage online, but did you know that more and more offline businesses are using video to get their brand, products, services and more across to their customer base? It’s TRUE!

A large portion of Googles traffic is people watching video, on their video site YouTube. There is an estimated 60,000,000 unique viewers per month (not year, per month). Wow!

Would you like to grab just a small part of that traffic?

I’m sure your answer would be a resounding “YES”! But how do you do that, especially if you never even created a video, yet alone made a home video using your digital camera or camcorder. Don’t worry, you won’t have to take a college course or spend hours and hours figuring it out on your own.

Promote Your Business With Video!

Realizing that video is a great way to market your business to existing and prospective clients, we here at Lapeer Website Marketing are offering a FREE 15-20 second video to promote your business. If you are a local business it is imperative that you bring in customers from the local area into your business in order to increase your sales and grow your busines.

This is one of the benefits of using video – to bring in the local customers. The other benefit is to be found on Google when a local customer searches for your business’ product or service and you show up on the first page! It’s much easier to do this with local focused videos, matter of fact it’s 50 times more likely you’ll rank higher with video (google loves video, and YouTube is owned by google).

So, before you click onto another website or surf somewhere else, let us create a FREE video for your business that will help you market your business. What do you have to lose? It’s FREE!

Filed Under: Marketing Tips Tagged With: local video, local video marketing, video for your business