Its a big world out there. Your competition is fierce, and even if your business only caters to local clients, there tends to be a log jam of competition for you on the internet. Depending on the nature of your product or service, that competition can get even steeper. The problem you face is that Google and the other search engines are global machines, spitting results to searchers from websites culled from all over the known universe. So how can you compete? Pay per click ads is one way, but not necessarily the best way. What you should consider is marketing to savvy searchers, and to do that by geographically grounding your website. In order to show you what Im describing above, were going to create a fictitious lawn owing business. Lets call it Scottsville Grass and Landscape. The owner of Scottsville Grass and Landscape decides he wants to advertise his business on the internet via a small informational and sales portal. So he pens down some notes for the person thats building the website for him. He includes a list of his services, some prices, previous work experience, etc. Services: * Lawn Mowing * Edging * Fertilization * Spring and Fall Clean Ups * Landscaping His web designer asks him to flesh out the services with 200 word descriptions, etc, so that each service can have its own page on the site. So far so good. So Scottsville Grass Trimmers ends up with a pretty standard 10 page website. Lets look at his services as if they were keywords, as in the terms that the company wants to show up in Google for when people go searching. Landscaping: Daily Searches Competition 1 landscaping 3,883 35900000 2 cyprus landscaping 469 442000 3 landscaping products 410 18600000 4 landscaping services on cape cod 399 934000 5 cape cod ma landscaping 392 586000 So according to our tools best estimate, landscaping gets looked up 3,883 times a day in the search engines. Those results are tough to verify, and probably a little low. There are also 35 MILLION competing pages for the term landscaping in the search engines. What do you suppose are the chances of our companies website ranking in the Top 100, much less Top 10 where we want to be for that search term? Ill tell you: Not very good, unless we can get several thousand links back to our landscaping page from qualified, related websites. Thats tough to do. So what if we geo-targeted the landscaping page? Since Scottsville is in Rochester, NY, it makes sense that our business owner really only wants clients in that area. So if the keyword Rochester (or even a smaller geographic keyword) appeared 3 or 4 times on the landscaping page, we would be grounding that page. Lets look at some results for that. Google search for Rochester Landscaping 691,000 results. According to my keyword tool, Rochester ny landscaping gets searched 65 times a day. And its being searched for by the actual customers that our pretend customer wants. So lesson learned. Keyword your small business website pages to your geographic area, and you should see improved results |
