Local Business Internet Marketing - More than Just a Website

If your business is having trouble driving traffic through your doors using the internet, you need to consider spreading your internet presence and making use of a range of internet marketing strategies. Below are the 5 most important ways you can improve your online presence and ensure your customers can find you.

1. Your local business website needs to be well optimised and well planned. It should be easy to navigate and free from coding errors and problems that might stop search engine robots crawling your site successfully.

For a business operating in a local market, possibly the most important part of search engine optimisation (SEO) is choosing the correct keywords. It is beyond the scope of this article to give you advice on keyword research but my main advice is to never assume that other people are searching using the terms you use!

2. Your local business internet marketing will benefit greatly from a mobile website that provides an easy way for customers to order and contact you. A properly optimised mobile site is the only way your customers will find you easily and have a simple and fast way to connect with your business.

Social Media for Local Business Internet Marketing

3. Australians are now the highest users of social media on the internet and increasing numbers are using it for brand and product reviews. If a social media presence is not part of your business' internet marketing strategy, then you are being left behind.

At the very least, a Facebook business page is a vital part of your online arsenal. The Australian Sensis Social Media report found that of the 62% of Australian internet users who use social media, 97% have a Facebook profile.

Twitter is also increasingly being used for branding and product placement. However, it continues to lag behind Facebook with 8% of Australians having a Twitter profile.

Local business internet marketing needs a Google Places page.

4. While this can be an incredibly frustrating experience (with all the glitches with incorrect place markers, directions & failed image uploads), the Google local places section is becoming increasingly important for local businesses.

For this to be successful and for you to have a chance of making it into the "Big 7" above the fold and on page 1, you need to be extremely thorough in creating your Places page. Upload all the images and videos allowed and ask your customers to review your business on Google.

These factors can greatly influence the success of your local business internet marketing campaign when it comes to your Google Places page rank. It is worth doing a course and finding out about the best ways to create and optimise a Google Place page.

Google Places page ranking also benefits from your being listed in a number of online local directories. These are free listings but they are crawled by Google's bots and make your business have more authority when it is seen in a number of different internet locations.

It is most important to stay completely consistent when adding your company information to your business listings. A tiny change can mislead the search engine bots into skipping a listing.

Video for Local Business Internet Marketing

5. In 2011 any business can greatly benefit from the opportunities that video presents for local business internet marketing. Video promotions, product placement and information and instructional videos can all give your company a high rank in the search results and encourage more people to view your website.

The popularity of YouTube and other video sharing sites demonstrates the benefits of using video in your local business marketing campaigns.

No matter what you do, a static website that remains unchanged and without fresh content will very likely lag in the search engine rankings.

To your success & growth with your local business website, mobile site & Facebook page. If you need a 3 pack, contact Go Viral Now.

Tess Robinson
http://goviralnow.net/3-pack