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.

I had the pleasure of meeting Kristina Evey at a conference earlier this year.  We connected on a topic she excels in – Customer Service.  In fact she is the Customer Experience Queen and works with many companies on a coaching basis to help them implement solid customer service programs to retain the customers we work so hard to get.  You can check out her services and information here -  KristinaEvey.com

It is much easier and less expensive to keep the business you already have then it keep trying to get new business if you have a solid customer service program in place. 

Kristina was kind enough to give us 3 great nuggets of a quality customer service program and why it is important to focus on this aspect of business. 

Please leave any feedback you have at the bottom of this page.  Thanks for watching. 

The process of getting ranked well in Google can seem like a daunting task.  There is work involved there is no doubt about that but once you get a few tricks under your belt and understand some of the strategies it becomes less of a monster.  Here is a great interview about some of those strategies directly from Gooooogle so you know it must be true. 

In the world of Internet Searching it is important to know a few tricks to help you find what you are looking for.  One of the best ways to do this is to know how to present the search string to Google using the filters they have provided us with.  Many of us know two ways to present a search but most don’t know a third. 

Here is a quick tutorial on helping you zero in on your searches.

1. [baseball bat] bracketed with these particular brackets represents searchers who searched specifically for the keyword baseball bat with no other modifiers in it.
2. "baseball bat" with parentheses represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for a keyword that contained baseball bat in it, including people who search for keywords like best baseball bat.
3. baseball bat without any brackets or parentheses represents all searchers in the above group, and searchers who searched for any keyword that contained the words baseball and bat somewhere in their search string, including people who search for obscure keywords like baseballs that come with a bat.

Give these different techniques a try as you search on for whatever you might be looking for.  Good Luck and Good Googling.

1. Connecting With Your Customers With Twitter

Hands down this is the Number 1 reason – why you should use Twitter for your business. This is a fantastic way to stay in touch with your customers and it takes seconds to do.  There are plenty of apps for your Smart Phones to use Twitter directly from your phone so you don’t even need a computer.  The idea is to send a message or two throughout the day about what might be happening at your store or restaurant or hair salon or whatever business you have.  The customers that are on your Twitter list will receive the message, think about your store and it that is all that happens it is a positive.  You can certainly prompt them to do more with coupons or notices of upcoming events, etc.  We will talk more about that later.  The point here is staying in the front of your customers mind is a key ingredient to getting more business, period.  

2. Customer Feedback From Twitter

Your customers will be able to interact as well and good news is always great but if someone responds negatively you will have a chance to rectify the situation and solve the problem and Tweet about it.  This will not only help the disgruntled customer, who might normally have just retained the unhappiness, and given yourself a real chance at keeping that customer long term but also attracting more customers because they see how attentive you are.

3. Increase Sales With Twitter

In many cases you will see a direct increase in sales once your account is up and running and you are posting to it regularly.  Other cases may be a more indirect sales result, i.e. retaining customers – like the example above.  The fact is by communicating with your customers only good things will come from it – usually in the form of an increase in sales