We Love Local All the Time (Even When You Don’t Have Time)

The majority of small business owners know Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO) brings in business by making their company easy to find on the major search engines. They also know that the many of their local customers look at their business’ online descriptions (aka listings) and online reviews before they decide to walk in their door and spend money. Yet about half of those who initially list their businesses on local business listing sites (like Patch and Yelp) never update their listings. And roughly 100% don’t have time to think about it.

Analytics Don’t Lie…

…but that last stat is a total guess. We think it’s pretty accurate, anyway.

What about you? Are you one of those too-busy-to-update-your-listing types? We understand; we hear that from most of our customers. Even medium-sized companies with full time marketing or public relations staff positions rarely have time to manage social media campaigns, create meaningful content, and close on sales leads.

That’s why our unique JointSourcing model appeals to many medium-sized and larger businesses. Their marketing and PR staff members are usually – and necessarily – experts in their respective markets, whether it’s manufacturing, sign fabrication, electronic test equipment, or investment real estate.

We’re experts in sales and marketing – with a decided advantage when it comes to local marketing via social media, search, newsletters and so on. Working together with our clients, we help them shorten their sales cycles and decrease their cost of sales.

Go Local or Go Big

In addition to a recent, small-but-mighty local event we sponsored, we have a good bit of experience utilizing local marketing to drive prospects to your business and increase sales. If you’d like to see what you can do – or what we can do for you – we invite you to review these articles. Or just contact us to see if we should be working together to get you found, more often, in your local market.

Three Ways to Be Prepared for Google’s Penguin 2.0 Search Update

Nothing gets those in the business of SEO talking like rumors of a Google algorithm change, and it seems that this time around (yes, another change is on the way), Google is trying to preempt some of these rumors by clarifying, in advance, what businesses can expect. Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s web spam team, recently published a video explaining what businesses can expect in the next couple of months, including the algorithmic change called “Penguin 2.0, ” which is targeted to black hat web spam (watch the interview).

In the video, Cutts outlines several areas that businesses should pay attention to.

1. Stay away from link spamming

We believe that Sales Renewal clients can confidently disregard this warning, as we take a “natural” approach to linkbuilding – requests for links on relevant or complementary websites, guest blogging, participation in forums that are appropriate for our clients.

2. Set up Google Authority

While Google Authorship and Google+ may not have the visibility or popularity of sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, rest assured that behind the scenes, Google is working to connect these two aspects of a personal and business profile with search results. Whether a business is highly active in the Google+ realm or not, we recommend at a minimum maintaining your listing, posting regular status updates, and working to increase your followers. Likewise, any blog post that can be linked to Google Authorship can only help your website, as Google looks for these connections as signals of your authority in your field. (Learn how to set up Google Authorship.)

3. Use Webmaster Tools on a regular basis

I know webmasters who are reluctant to use Google’s Webmaster Tools because of frustrating experiences when using it in the past. But Google has made periodic improvements to the tool, and it now has a more useful, more intuitive, easier-to-navigate interface. This is part of Google’s attempt to better communicate with webmasters, providing information about how to deal with a hacked site and more concrete details about ways to handle other technical issues as they arise.

In conclusion, Cutts repeats Google’s message that if you “create a great site that users love, tell their friends about, bookmark, and come back to over and over again, ” you have nothing to worry about.

– Audrey Trieschman

Searching for Love, Locally

Is it possible we scooped The New York Times? Well, not exactly. However, we must point out we’ve broached this subject before – and we also know from personal experience – when you’re searching for a local florist, you want a local florist. Unfortunately, a quick search online may not deliver what you’re after.

Times readers dished up a few tricks for getting a local florist – not a floral wire service – in an article last week. But we’ve got an even better idea, for florists, and it is: get found!

When you want to get found, by folks looking to find you locally, we humbly suggest you look to us. Why?

Ask The Concord Flower Shop. The locally-owned business ended its contract with Teleflora in 2009 and hasn’t looked back. In fact, same-month sales have been up for each of the past 34 consecutive months! Up how much? Concord Flower Shop is seeing an average increase of 45% each month.

How can an independent business afford the services of a sales and marketing technology firm that gets results like that? That’s the beauty of JointSourcing and its shared risk/reward model. And we’ll save that for another time.

If you’re in a hurry to find out more, we’d love to hear from you.

Until then, we’d like to remind you that if you didn’t pick up flowers for Valentine’s Day, you probably should. Which means it’s time for you to find a local florist.

Going Big by Going Local

At Sales Renewal, we work with a number of clients who have a national presence and others who are strictly interested in the local market. Each requires a different set of online marketing strategies, services, and tools.

Local business can be tough to promote, as they need to stand out from the crowd in order to gain traction with their online presence. And there are so many listings options to keep track of. For this reason, we use Yext to manage much of our local efforts, as it provides single-entry access to over 45 listings, along with an easy-to-use, consolidated interface for updating and promoting the business across all the listings.

Earlier this month, I (reluctantly) agreed to attend a seminar that Yext was holding to demonstrate a new feature called Content Lists. Despite my reluctance, it turned out to be great. The premise behind Content Lists is that Yext customers can make their business listings stand out by taking advantage of any “extras” available – not only answering the basic “where”, but also the who, what and when of their business.

After the seminar, I immediately launched in to gathering the information, falling into four different categories, that I needed for our local clients and updating their listings. Here are just a few examples of what we can now do for our clients:

Products/Services – I was able to create a portfolio of a local business sign company’s work, showcasing some of the company’s specialties, which will now be displayed. What better way to show the quality of work they do than with photos of their products?
Bios – We can now display full bios of the dentists and other staff for our dental office clients – very useful since it will help them stand out when people do a search for dentists in their area.

Menus – Yum! Now we can tempt customers with (virtual) samples of your delicious fare!

Calendar – When our florist clients hold floral arranging workshops, I’m able to set up a “clickable” event to bring prospects directly to the sign up page on the businesses’ respective websites.

Now, almost all the “new” information I used for the enhanced local listings is also included on our clients’ websites, so it was very simple to gather. And we expect the benefits to be exponential – being able to also display the bios, portfolio, and calendar events in their local listings is sure to increase visibility and traffic, and it adds value to prospects and current customers. Stay tuned for the results!

Quick Tip: Google Offers

Google is far more than just a search engine and when it comes to special offers, discounts or deals Google is an untapped resource for far too many businesses. Sales Renewal, for example, has long leveraged Google Places (now Google + Local) as a high traffic, free promotional platform, and more recently began similarly taking advantage of Google Wallet.

Now, Google is beta-testing a new promotion option that we’re considering adding into the mix (and so should you if we’re not doing this for you). Google Offers makes it easy to set up a special offer to reach existing customers and prospects who view your listing via Google Maps, Google Offers app, Google Wallet app (or through your Google + Local listing, if it’s connected to Google Maps). Businesses can choose from the three types of offers to provide:

• Money off – used to specify a dollar discount, such as “$20 off package”
• Percent off – used to specify a percentage discount, such as “25% off warranty plan”
• Free product – used to provide a free product or gift with purchase, such as “free flower bouquet with purchase of club membership”

As the Google listings are often at the top of organic search results, utilizing the Offers feature is an excellent way to draw visitors to your listing and set you apart from the competition. While the Google Offers for Businesses is currently only available in a select number of cities, you will soon be able to create an offer that will sync across Google Offers, Google Maps and Google Wallet.

Stay tuned!