Local Search Marketing

Today we are going to be looking at videos, and we are not talking about watching 80’s action movies on VHS.

Our guest blogger – Perry Stevens of Blend Local Search Marketing is going to explain why every business should be using videos as part of their online marketing strategy.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the value of an online video?  Well, because of the low costs of production and the exposure your business can achieve online, I would say video is both inexpensive and invaluable.

Gone are the days when you needed to hire a producer, director, storyboard artist, actor, extras, sound, lighting, editors etc to make your company video.  Companies have spent small fortunes in the past on these show-reels that no one has ever seen.  Today you can get amazing results from Flipvideos, cameras and even smartphones.  It’s a case of keeping things simple and being a little creative.

Why Use Video Marketing for Business?

Videos can be used for your business to engage with your viewers about new products, services, offers, interviews and how to.  They are also very good for online SEO, you see, Google love video!  Google love video so much they bought the company – YouTube for $1.65 in 2006.

Now YouTube is the second largest search engine with over 2 billion views a day in 2011.

Over 3 million people are auto sharing their videos on YouTube with other social sites like Facebook and twitter.

Videos work for your business 24/7.

If you don’t like talking to the camera you can ask one of your employees to represent you online.  However, if you are a business owner, I would recommend that you get in front of the camera so your potential customers get to know, like and trust you through video.  By the time these prospects walk through the door of your shop or restaurant they will already have a rapport with you, such is the power of the moving image (you don’t have to watch yourself on the video if you don’t want too).

Most PCs and Macs have simple to use video making software built in. You can easily make eye-catching movies with a combination of PowerPoint Presentations and iMovies or Windows Movie Maker.  If you are feeling a little bit more creative then record yourself giving an introduction to your Powerpoint video and combine the two.

Keep your videos on focus and between 30 to 90 seconds long.  At the end of the video have a ‘call to action’, i.e. tell the viewer what to do next, e.g. ‘Click the link below’, ‘Join us at www.yourwebsite.com‘  or direct them to your social media pages, or ask them to write a review on your favourite business directory (yes, I mean Wampit)!

Now you have produced a video you need to host it online for the entire world to see.  YouTube is the best place to start but there are dozens of other video hosting sites too.  Try Vimeo, Daily Motion and Photobucket to name but three.

To allow your potential customers to find your video easily you will need to know what keywords they are using to find products and services in your area.  Use ‘Google Keyword Tool’ to shortlist 5 good keywords to use for your Video SEO.  Ideally they should have little competition and high search rates.

A Proven Local Business Video Marketing Strategy

If you follow my SEO and Video marketing strategy below, you’ll be 95% ahead of your competition with video marketing.  This is the same YouTube Video Marketing strategy we use to get our clients multiple listings in Google.

To get more views and to see your videos appearing in Google SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages) follow these 7 simple but very effective steps below:

1. Always use your best keyword in your title. Research the keywords your customers are using to find products and services in your area and add a geo modifier – city, town and/or post/zip code
2. The first and last thing appearing in your video description should be your website address as a clickable link. Ideally link it to the page the video refers to instead of your home page. This reduces the number of click throughs the prospect has to make to get more information, or take up your offer. It also avoids page bounce and ‘drop offs’.
1. Don’t forget to have the http:// in front of your website address as this makes your link live and clickable e.g. http:// mywebsite.com instead of www. mywebsite.com
2. It’s a good idea to use a URL shortening service to track the click through rates to ascertain what videos are performing best for you – try bit.ly
3. The very first thing after your clickable website link in the description should be the video title.
4. Post Panda updates, Google have stressed again how much they love relevancy and quality, so give it to them.  In your unique description write 250 – 500 words and include your keywords and phrases at a rate of 1-3%. This will give the search engines like Google lots of information to deliver in search queries.
5. End your description with a 2^nd clickable link to your blog or website. Again like at the end of your video have a ‘call to action’ e.g. ‘Click this link’.  It’s a case of telling your viewers what to do next.  Tell them and they will do it.  Don’t and that video of the cute kitten has just got an extra view and has now been seen by one million and one people, and you have lost a potential customer.
6. YouTube call keywords ‘tags’.  Use the five keywords (2 to 5 words phrases) that your customers would use to find you (remember the research you did with the Google Keyword Tool).  Separate each tag with a comma. e.g. Plumber in Bermondsey, South East London Plumber, Plumber SE1, Plumbers in SE1, Local Plumber South London.
7. This works great for Google Places: write your full company Name, Address, Telephone Number and website at the end of the description. Ensure wherever you enter you NAN’s online it is in the same format every single time. e.g. St. John Street not Saint John St. or St. John St.  Keep it consistent for all your directory listings and in every video.  This will ensure you get found online every time without duplicate listings.  Google use NAN’s information to qualify their Google Place listings and most people and SEO companies miss this trick.

So by now you should have produced a video, uploaded it to YouTube and optimized it for the search engines.  But I want to leave you with not 1 but 2 hot video marketing tips:

Video Marketing Tip #1 - Take the share code from your YouTube video and add it to your email signature.

Result: Every time your email recipients open your emails they will be able to view your video (think about the direct marketing opportunities you could have with this)!

Video Marketing Tip #2 - Upload your video for free to the fastest growing global business directory – Wampit!

Result: Get your business seen in front of millions of hungry prospects searching for your products and services online to get more customers and more profits.

About the Author

Perry Stevens is the founder and Chief Operations Director of Blend Local Search Marketing.  He’s passionate about helping businesses become more successful online by using proven Internet marketing strategies.  You can add your company profile to the Wampit® business directory today – one of the UK’s premier and trusted advertising services.

So specifically how has this impacted the Business Directory sector?

So what is a top quality Business Directory?

If a directory charges for links back to your site then these should have a ‘nofollow’ HTML attribute set against the link (this blocks any page rank from being flowed from the linking site).  This is in line with Google Webmaster policy because their algorithms use links as one of the key indicators when determining ranking – people paying for links compromises this process.

So does that mean links to my website from Business Directories are useless after Google Panda?

What’s a Good Strategy for Advertising on Panda Friendly Business Directories?

About the Author:

Choice is always positive as it enables you to spread your budget across different mediums, perhaps to either gain greater marketing coverage or attract different target markets.  However in the world of business advertising choice also creates a problem…

As a business owner and indeed as a general consumer, if you are looking at spending money on something and have many different options / choices available, ‘price’ starts to become the focus rather than what you are actually getting for your money.

We know this to be true through the explosion of comparison websites that have sprung up in the last few years giving the consumers the ability to compare prices across a whole range of sectors from insurance to utility rates, and even against an individual consumer product.

Whilst comparison sites like gocompare and moneysupermarket are incredibly useful for consumers, focusing on ‘price’ when it comes to business advertising can indeed have a negative impact on your return on investment (ROI).

Let’s put this in context – of course you can compare prices on a Sony Bravia 32” TV across many suppliers because it is what it is.  However, considering ‘price’ as your main focus when looking at online business directories for example may mean that you end up advertising your business somewhere that is just not effective.

Please don’t assume when we are talking about focusing on ‘price’ that we are talking about business owners looking for the cheapest advertising medium – in many cases the opposite is true.  There are still businesses that shy away from free online business directories as they (wrongly) feel that advertising can only be effective if it costs money – again focusing mainly on ‘price’.

For example, advertising on the Wampit® Business Directory is free.  All advertisers can write a description about their business, add photos and even upload a video or link to their twitter account – but more importantly Wampit® gets over 120,000 business searches per month.  So with statistics like these it’s difficult to find a reason why you wouldn’t want to list your business.

Why not have a look at the compare top 10 online business directories blog we have compiled and see what other business directories offer – like Wampit® they are trusted directories that operate a quality service.  A few hours invested in this will really kick-start your viral marketing campaign in the new year.

The key difference with smaller alternative online business directories compared to the larger players is that many offer their customers much more content for free.  The longer established companies tend to charge £100’s for an advert with similar content.

There are of course many reasons for this including the (publicised) fact that they have a lot of search traffic, through to the (not so publicised) fact that they invariably have a huge workforce to feed from back office staff to sales people, not to mention the funding of their ad campaigns.

There are a few fantastic “free” search engines/directories that are completely self serve i.e. no sales people, or call centers.  Businesses just register and create their own free advert.  These offer predominately Free Advertising for UK businesses, and also offer some optional paid enhancements which is how they fund themselves.

They can do this because the website/directory has been built to require minimal manual intervention, and therefore these companies overheads are very low.  This however does not stop them competing with the bigger players, and indeed offering a free service that is just as good as the paid entries in the larger websites.

Some are better than others of course, and only a few offer a lot of content for free.  As well as your free listing on their directory, the better ones also create a “landing page” behind the scenes that is effectively a web page just with your advert on it.  As part of the free service this “Landing Page” is submitted to major search engines such as Google. Yahoo, Bing, Ask etc so you not only have a listing on the directory you registered with, but also have a listing on these search engines that people can click on and view your advert.

When you consider all this, I would recommend that, even if you pay for an advert on the larger business directories previously mentioned, you also list your business with the top Free Advertising Directories (listed below) too, as every little helps, and these are generating sufficient traffic to make them a viable source of advertising.

On a final note on this, as I mentioned earlier most free directories offer paid enhancements such as a link to your website and some are as low as £9 a year.  I would strongly recommend you take up the website link if it is offered, as it is a much better experience for your potential customer to be given a link through to your website, rather than just a phone number.  Think about it, the customer likes looking online, that is how they found you.  Don’t make them then have to call you to find out information you can give them on your website.  Not only that but your website shows them everything about what you do/can offer, so by all means ignore all the other enhancements, but this is one you should never scrimp on!

The following comparison table shows you all the main players that I think are worth checking out when considering Free Online Advertising and what each offers you for free.

 

Please click on the links below to register your business with these directories:

  BT Tradespace   /  Free Index /  Wampit  /  UK Small Business Directory  /  Local Mole  /  Thomson Local  /  Touch Local  /  Streets Local  /  Yell  /  Scoot

NB:  This comparison table was created in October 2009 and has been compiled from reviewing free content available on each site, and calling those sites where this was not obvious.  If you feel any of the information in this article is inaccurate, please contact us and if necessary we will make immediate amendments.

This is such an important area for businesses to consider, and could impact greatly on the number of potential customers you gain through your online business advertising.  As this area is so important, I am going to get straight to the point:

If you had a shop, would you stop passersby from entering unless they called you first, or alternatively expect them to have to ask around to find out how to get in?  Of course you wouldn’t, however that is exactly what you will be doing if you do not place a link on your business advertising to your own website. 

If you think about it, if you do not place a link on your business advertising you are only leaving a prospective customer with two options: 

1.  Call you on the phone: 

Expecting someone to call you on the telephone immediately after viewing some key details on your advert is not only limiting the number of customers that will call you, but could also force your potential customers to your competitors, particularly if they have an advert in the same place as you but do have a link to their website. 

A potential customer that is browsing an online directory is, at that moment, in the mindset of being “online” – why “force” them to have to go “offline” and make a phone call just because you haven’t given them the option of quickly and easily viewing your website?

When you walk into a shop after looking in the window, you rarely walk straight up to the store manager and demand to buy something.  You usually like to take your time and browse the store looking at prices, dimensions, colours etc before you ask for help.   Well – it is no different in the online world.  Due to the limited content available on most adverts, a customer is likely to want to explore your business offerings further in their own time by easily clicking on a link to your website. 

Your advert in effect is your shop window as it contains the key information / images etc that you feel will entice a potential customer to use you.  You need a “door” on that advert that enables someone to go directly into your “online shop” so you can keep the customers journey focused, and hopefully from there, once they have had all the information you can offer, they will either purchase/book online or call you, or visit your premises.

2.  Try to find your website on an alternative search engine: 

This one amazes me!  You would be surprised by the number of advertisers that waste valuable text space on an advert by putting things like “Google us to find our website”.  Think about it from a prospective customers point of view… can we really expect a customer to leave the site they’re on, remember the company name they have just viewed, launch Google and search for that company, find the link in the results and then click on the right one to launch your website?  Would you do that?  Especially when the their competitors advert may be just below them, with a link to their website.

Or the other one we see from time to time is “visit A7aerialsdotcom”.  Again this is expecting the potential customer to have to copy and paste or manually retype the text (correctly) into the browser and hit go.  Again, will customers be bothered to do this, particularly when some of your competitor adverts will have a nice simple link button on their advert directly to their web site?

I hope this blog has made you look again at the importance of linking your advertising to your website.  There are many online business search engines / directories out there, and they all offer a link to your website  (free or paid), however the price business directories charge is usually very low due to the importance and commonality of web links.  For example BT Tradespace offer a free web link, and here at Wampit we only charge £19 a year.  However, other directories are still charging anyting up to £300 so be careful and spend your money wisely.

For the reasons mentioned above, a web link is a vital part of your online business UK advertising, and if you have a business website your business advertising should always link to it from as many online directories as you can….

 I’ve read a lot recently about the keyword tag. Does it matter, should I use it even if it doesn’t, will I get penalised for neglecting it (or abusing it)?

Well MattCuttsrecently announced on his blog that Google pays no attention to the keyword tag. So even if you left it out it wouldn’t matter.

But what about Bing and Yahoo? I’ve checked and there’s allot of conflicting reports out there. Well this one is from the official Bing blog and they state:

It [The Keyword Tag] was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But there’s no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low. Fill in this tag’s text with relevant keywords and phrases that describe that page’s content.

 When creating keyword text, remember the following:

1. Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the <title> and <meta> description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
2. Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
3. Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list.

My advice is to carry on using the keyword tag because there are other search engines out there aside from Google that still use it. Every little helps after all. Personally I use it as a quick reference of key terms i need to optimise a page for and the best anchor text to use in a link.

You should also use it for secondary keywords and mis-spellings.