Step 1 – Basic Market and Keyword Research

The first step to optimizing your local listings is discovering your targeted keywords.  This process will give you insight to your marketplace and your competition as well as uncover very laser targeted keywords to your business

Get a handle on the marketplace and competition. Basic market and keyword research are key to the business description and the directory categories. I never cease to be amazed at the gap between my common sense assumptions and actual results – results will often contradict how a business has merchandized itself if they have not advertised online and researched their market.

First, some basic questions: Am I a new or established business? Do I have a website? Do I advertise online? Have I done previous market and keyword research? Do I have any useful data? Whether the answers to these questions, I do basic keyword research testing variations based on geography, to get a big picture based on search terms and number of queries.

With or without prior keyword research or experience, I like to imagine myself as an online customer of my business’s products or services (and my competitors), walking in their shoes as an online mystery shopper. What search terms or phrases (keywords) would someone enter into Google or other search engine to find your business?

I use basic keyword research tools to see the number of searches my business categories generate – nothing too sophisticated at this point.

• Google’s Keyword Tool
• Wordtracker

As a local business I add location to my keywords. For example, if I am a seafood and waterfront restaurant in Miami I will check the number of searches for ‘seafood restaurant‘ and ‘waterfront restaurant‘, then ‘Miami restaurant‘, ‘Miami seafood restaurant‘, ‘Miami waterfront restaurant‘, and ‘Miami-Dade restaurant‘. It also pays to test for zip codes, state or county combinations.

Local keyword tools: GeoMake. This freeware creates location-targeted lists combining a keyword with a state, city, county only, both cities and counties, city before keyword, etc.

Need inspiration for creative keyword research? Read Aaron Wall’s ‘Keyword Inspiration’

Based on my research I can then move on to what is the most challenging task of all – a 200 character (200 being the most common limit) business description.

Local Search is the new Yellow Pages.  Not only is this great news for our trees but also for local businesses.  Why???  Because, if done right, it becomes an incredible opportunity for small and medium sized businesses to set up a recurring advertising marketing campaign.

The fact is the internet is now the primary source of local business information. According to a study conducted by TMP Directional Media, more users utilize online search engines to find local business information than the number of users actually using a print yellow pages directory.

Our local search optimization service will increase your company’s internet presence by improving your visibility and footprint on the internet.  This results in an affordable, cost effective, local search marketing and advertising solution.

• Search Engines - We design your business profile to optimize your search engine optimization.  This involves determining a keyword strategy based on your competition and industry, picture submission, category choices and much more.   We then submit to all major search engines including Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local.
• Directories & Local Listings - Our team will submit your website and or profile to a carefully selected list of directories that are geographically relevant to your business.  These are sites like Yellowpages.com,  Super Pages and 411.com.
• Customer Review Sites - Yelp, Insider Pages and Kudzu are a few.
• Submission To Smaller Search Engines – Additional submissions are continuously added to smaller search engines, directories and/or review sites.  About 10 to 20 of these submission a month will continue to increase the visits and provide more inbound links to help your search engine optimization.    This will help your websites position in the natural organic search rankings.
• We submit all listings manually.  We do not use a script of submission tool.
• Exclusivity – Our policy is to work exclusively with one company per industry per municipality.  Unlike our competitors you won’t find us working for your competition.

For all you folks who use Firefox, I’ve found a great little extension that you can download for free.  It’s called Twitterbar.  It allows you to post your comments to your Twitter Account directly from your Address URL without having to log into your Twitter Account!  Pretty Cool.  FYI – the picture below is the only change you’ll notice on your screen, so you won’t have to re-learn where your stuff is at.

You can also search the entire land of Twitter, and all social media, with the TwitterBar as well!  Just type in what you are looking for and add –search and it will bring up what you are looking for.

Click Here to go to the Download Site –> TwitterBar

I just upgraded my Thesis Theme from the version 1.4.2 to version 1.5.  and can’t believe my eyes. 

I purchased the Thesis Theme a few months ago as I was starting this blog.  My decision to buy was based on all the positive reviews I read about the Thesis Theme and I felt that if I was going to be a serious blogger, I needed a serious theme. 

This certainly is not the first theme I have worked with.  I have extensive experience with a number of free themes that I  retooled to perform the way I needed them to, but this is the first purchased theme I have used.   Since my purchase of Thesis I have purchased a few other themes for other sites I am working on but none compares to the brilliance of this workhorse.

One of the best things about this theme is lifetime upgrades – FREE.  Now I have been around the internet for a while and I have upgraded different software packages before.  Some of them have new features but many times the upgrades are a bigger pain than they are an improvement.  

Well, I have to admit that is what I was thinking about this upgrade.  I bought the theme and as soon as I had purchased it and got everything the way I wanted it, the new version starts to be offered in Beta form.  I thought, “why bother, its not going to give me that many new features, if any”. 

In fact, I forgot there was an upgrade until I was looking at another blog that was talking about their recent conversion to Thesis .  As I was looking at the layout I noticed something that I didn’t think was possible, one of their columns was larger than the other column.  That was not possible in my version.  I investigated it to make sure and when I could not figure out how they did it, I asked.  The answer came in the form of a necessary upgrade.  They were using version 1.5.  Oh No.  What an idiot I am.  How could I have missed that one.  You mean you actually got some cool new features with the upgrade – and it’s free. 

I immediately upgraded.  Everything went very smooth.  The upgrade was easy to find, the instructions were to the “T” and the uploading and activation worked exactly as described.

You can see the results on my blog.  You see how the right column is larger than the left.  This is significant because it just widened the playing field of content and layout. 

All of this to say, the Thesis theme is a quality deal.  The ease of usage is amazing and with a little plugin called Thesis Open Hook the whole process of customizing your theme is too easy.   You can add affiliate links at will, change the layout of your theme instantly and really make it hum in very little time.  

I highly recommend the Thesis Theme, especially if you are serious about blogging.  It takes all of the coding hassle out of the picture and lets you work on your business and content, instead of working in the code. 

Let me know your thoughts.