10 Steps to Free Website TrafficThe No-Cost Way to Help Local Prospects Find You Fast

How many referrals are you getting each week from Google and Yahoo searches?

If you are not using the web as a new way to attract new customers to your business,

you are missing out on a huge opportunity.

There are many resources available now to help you create a presence online that

shows up when people search for local services on Google and Yahoo. Any in many

cases they are more effective than the print Yellow Pages at a fraction of the cost.

Hello, my name is Don Campbell, and I’m the president of

Expand2Web. Thank you for visiting my website and

downloading this online marketing playbook for small

business websites.

I’ve worked with hundreds of small businesses and have learned many

important techniques for getting their websites to rank highly and produce

a steady stream of new customers.

And I’d like to share some of the most interesting ones with you here.

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Local Business Search Results in Google

The image above is a screen shot of a Google 10-Pack search result. These are not

paid search results - they are free, and if you have a business with a physical location/

storefront, getting your business to rank in them is crucial.

But how?

Here is my list of the things you should be doing to promote your business:

1) Get a website with your own domain nameIf you already have your own domain name and a website that you control, great. I only

bring this up because many small business owners I talk to don’t have a website or their

own domain name.

Some of them sign up with one of the online directories like Yelp or Merchant Circle or

Yellow Book to get a profile in those directories and leave it at that.

The problem with these profiles is that you do not control them, and they typically show

advertisements - sometimes for your competitors - right along side your profile. Let me

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ask you, if you have a website, do you advertise your competitor down the street on it?

Here’s an example for a Chiropractor in the LA area:

Search result pointing to a directory

A search in Google for this chiropractor yields a result, but the link is to the South Bay

Business Register domain, linking to an awful looking page full of advertisements to his

competition:

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Directory Listing with competitive Ads

A Merchant Circle directory listing also shows up in the the Google Search results for

this business. A click on that link brings you to a page with some very basic information

about the business, and no less than 25 Ads on the page, over half of them for competitors!

These online directories are valuable as “citations” or validations of your business,

supporting your own website and your Google and Yahoo local profiles (as we’ll see in

#4 below), but do not use them as a replacement for your website and domain name.

Besides, when a good hosting plan that gives you a free domain name, and one-click

WordPress installs is $6.95/month there is no excuse not to get your own website

going!

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2) Optimize Your Website for Local Search

Once you have your own website, there are some basic “on-page” search engine

optimization (SEO) techniques that you should use. First, determine the basic

“keywords” that you are looking to rank for. For example, if you are a chiropractor in

[cityname] you’ll want to rank for phrases like “chiropractor [cityname]“, “chiropractic

[cityname]“, and other areas that you want to draw customers from.

And you should include your business name, and two or three of those keywords in the

Title tag <title> of your web pages.

Your home page should also include keywords in your Header tags <h1, h2, h3>. You

don’t want to stuff keywords in here - these titles should be written in natural language

that your visitors understand. For example, if my practice is located in Portland, I might

have a title tag something like:

Chiropractic Care in Portland | Gentler Chiropractic

Example Title Tag

And add header tags that emphasize those keywords but do not exactly copy them.

You’ll also want to add your physical business address to every page on your site. This

is helpful for your local search rankings, as Google and Yahoo can determine that the

pages on your site are related to your business listing.

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There are many other on-page optimizations you can do, but these are a few of the

most important ones to start with.

WordPress is an excellent tool for building a website because it has many Search

Engine Optimization benefits built in. Check out the Expand2Web SmallBiz

WordPressTheme for an optimized template designed specifically for small business

websites.

3) Set up your Google and Yahoo Local business profiles

Google and Yahoo both offer free business profiles to small business owners. I’m

surprised at how many business owners don’t know about them or take advantage of

this free resource.

What’s more, bad things can happen if you don’t claim your Google Local Profile! Local

search expert Mike Blumenthal has written about the “map spam” issue, which primarily

affects unclaimed Google Local listings.

But the real reason you should claim these business profiles is that they can help you

rank very highly in the search results on Google and Yahoo when people perform

searches for local goods and services. In case you are wondering, here’s a great

definition of Local Search.

4) Get links and “citations” from other sites and directoriesA key part of how you will rank in the search engine results is how many other

respected sites link to your site with your keywords in the anchor text. The anchor text is

the text that you click on that links to your website.

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For local search results in Google, their algorithm also counts “citations” of your

business in other directories.

Do a search on your keywords (e.g. chiropractic in San Antonio) and see who ranks

highly in the local search results 10-box (shown in #1 above.) Now click on the More

link to see their Google Local profile. Click on the Web Pages tab to see all of the

citations for their business. You’ll want to be listed in those directories too.

Example of web “citations”

5) Publish original content to your website (aka “spider food”)

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The key to great search results is increasingly determined by unique, original content.

This is one of the reasons why I recommend WordPress for your website - WordPress is

designed as a content management system and makes it easy to publish new content

and it automatically pings the search engines for you.

You’ll want to publish some content to your website regularly to give the Google and Yahoo crawlers a reason to come back to your site and add more pages to their

indexes.

This isn’t as difficult or time consuming as you may think. For example, I’ve had several

of my chiropractic customers go back through some of their print newsletters and take

short tips and articles they’ve already written, and then publish those to an articles

section on their website.

Another cool thing about WordPress is that you can queue up 10 or 20 of these articles,

and then schedule them to be released every few days, or once per week, depending

on how much content you have.

6) Track your website visitsYou’ll want a way to measure the effectiveness of you Internet marketing efforts, and

one great way to do that is to set up the free Google Analytics tool to measure your website visits.

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You can use Google Analytics to tell you how many visitors come to your website each

day, which keywords they are using to find you when they search in Google, and which

websites they are coming from if they clicked on a link to get to your site

You can also set up Google Analytics to email you a nice report of all this data weekly,

so that you can watch for trends.

Another thing you should track is the number of phone calls your website is generating. To do this, you can set up something called “call tracking” on your website.

Probably the easiest way to do this is with a virtual phone system like RingCentral. You

can establish a unique phone number for your website, and add a Click-To-Call button

to it as well.

All calls from your website will be logged and you can set it up to give you a daily or

weekly report. This way you’ll be able to track how many calls are generated from your

website.

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Other important ways of tracking the effectiveness of your website are setting up

coupons (in your Google Local profile, for example) and having your receptionist ask

every new caller how they found out about you.

7) Create a video and publish it on YouTubeDon’t be intimidated by this. You can create a great video by simply having a friend or

co-worker do a 5-minute interview with you about your business and why you started it

with a consumer grade video camera. All you want is a basic introduction to your

business so that potential customers can get to know you a little better.

Once you have this video, you can publish it to YouTube, and link to it from your

website. This is a great technique for building an additional “citation” for your Google

Local profile, as Steve Espinosa described at at recent SMX Local event. Andrew

Shotland has more local search tips here.

It also allows allows you to have an entry in the Universal Search results, and research

shows that if you have a natural search result and a video search result on the same

page people are over 3x more likely to click on your result!

8 ) Take control of your online reviewsEvery business gets the occasional bad review. Maybe someone was having a bad day,

and they took it out on you. And the reality is, people can leave reviews about your

business on Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Citysearch and other sites without your

permission.

So you need to take control of your online review process up front. The best way to do

this is to ask your best customers if they will leave an online review for you. When

the are in your office, explain to them that online reviews are important to your business,

and ask them if they would be willing to spend 5 minutes to leave you a review.

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Most of them will say yes, and at that time give them a letter that has a link to your

online profiles in Google, Yahoo and Yelp (or whatever site you want to emphasize for

reviews.) I’ve got a sample letter template for requesting online reviews here.

Online reviews help you stand out!

Set a goal to get 20 or 30 reviews of your business. Having these reviews will help your

business in the search rankings, and make it visually stand out from all the other results.

Imagine the reaction of the person who did the search in Google, when she sees a list

of 10 results - and yours has 20+ reviews and the other results have 1 or none!

9) Add a Map and Directions page to your websiteGoogle has made it very easy to create a map to your business with driving directions.

You want to make it as easy as possible for a visitor to take action when they come to

your website. The primary actions that you want them to take are:

1. Call you to set up an appointment, or

2. Visit your office

So make it easy for them. Provide a map and driving directions in an clearly marked

section of your website. Go to Google Web Elements to create the map, and it will give

you the HTML to embed on your page.

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Google map embedded on website

You should also include written driving directions along with the map on your site. If you are feeling really adventurous, follow this KML tutorial to take it a step further.

10) Set up an email newsletter to increase your repeat businessOne of the most important things you can do to increase your repeat business is follow

up. A proven way to stay top of mind with your customers is by communicating with them regularly with an email newsletter.

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Explain to your customers that you are moving to a “green” practice and your

newsletters will be delivered via email instead of paper now. Ask them for their email

addresses when they are in the office and tell them you’d like to send them your

newsletter.

Aweber email newsletter service

You can sign up with a service like AWeber for $19/month to manage your email list.

They have nice looking templates pre-made, so it’s easy to put the newsletter together.

A great way to do this is to create a series of emails that will go out every 3-4 weeks.

Each email should be brief, and contain something valuable to your customers.

Give them tips related to the products and services in your field. Set up the series for 20

weeks in advance and AWeber will handle the delivery right on schedule.

Using the AWeber Blog Broadcast capability and WordPress, you can even set it up to

automatically create emails using the articles you publish on your website!

What’s Next?These tips can be applied to almost any type of small business with a physical

storefront to rank highly in the local search results for your area.

For most service based businesses, you should be getting several new customer referrals every week from your website and Google and Yahoo searches. I know

because I’ve done this for my clients and it works. And we haven’t even talked about

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising yet.

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Everything I’ve listed above helps you rank in the organic search results (read: Free

Search Results!) Once you’ve established a powerful online presence like this, you can

then start thinking about Pay-Per-Click marketing like Google AdWords to boost your

traffic even more.

Getting StartedHere are a few resources to get you started:

WordPress Hosting - Get a hosting account with 1-Click WordPress installs, a free

domain name, email addresses, and everything you’ll need to host your site for

$6.95/month.

Call Tracking - Get RingCentral to help manage your call routing, and track calls

generated from your website. You can get plans starting at $9.95/month.

Email Newsletter Service - Get AWeber to manage your customer follow-ups via

email. This is a very inexpensive way to increase your repeat business.

WordPress Theme for Small Business websites - This is a WordPress theme

designed for small business websites, including a custom options panel that enables

you to change and update your business information at any time.

An InvitationI want to extend a personal invitation to you. I would like Expand2Web to be a place

where small business owners, and consultants who help small business owners, can

come to share ideas and stay on the cutting edge of Local Search tips and techniques.

I do my best to stay in front of the changes in local search by visiting the Google

Campus several times per month, attending SEO/SEM conference like SMX Local and

Mobile, SEM PDX, The System Seminar, PubCon and many others.

I share this information on my website. But what makes it truly great is your

participation. When you are visiting, make sure to say hi by leaving comments on blog

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posts, or visiting the Expand2Web Discussion Forums and joining the conversation

there.

Thank you for visiting my website and I hope you will come back to visit often!

Don Campbell

Publisher, Expand2Web

P.S. Feel free to drop me a line or connect with me to share ideas, or if you need help with your web strategy for your business. Here are a few ways you can reach me:

Phone: 1-408-335-4089

Email: don@expand2web.com

Twitter: @doncampbell

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/doncampbell

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/doncampbell

YouTube: http://youtube.com/expand2web

About the AuthorDon Campbell is the publisher of Expand2Web and Chiropractor2Web. He works

primarily with Chiropractic practices helping them establish an effective online presence.

Formerly from Interwoven and Microsoft, Don lives in Silicon Valley with his lovely wife

and two beautiful daughters.

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