When I sold advertising for the Yellow Pages, I found that many local small businesses were reluctant to advertise because they had no way of knowing if local Yellow Pages was worth the cost.
I explained the concept of Advertising Return On Investment to my prospects and showed them how to track any advertising campaign.
Once a small business owner gets serious about ad tracking they immediately begin to see how effective or ineffective their advertising components.
Within a month of tracking they are able to determine if their advertising is beginning to succeed or fail.
Write articles that can be relevant to your website.
Write and submit articles with your website URL to as many directories as you can.
You can also post your articles on your website and encourage other locally based webmasters to publish your articles as long as they include your resource box and website URL.
Local articles help to create local links to your website, which helps to increase your ranking on search engines.
Google and Yahoo are very interested in filling local content.
If you are fulling that void, your website will quickly reach the top of the list.
Articles that home in on your local keywords are excellent SEO tools.
Articles are an affordable SEO tool.
Writing and submitting articles is not expensive.
You can write your own articles or you can hire a ghostwriter.
You can manually submit your articles or you can use some software to automatically submit your article to many directories.
Generally, use of articles to improve your position on search engines is not expensive and anyone can afford it.
Structure your articles for effective local back links.
Articles create many back links to your website, which improves your website popularity rank and ultimately drives large volume of traffic to your website.
If you write high quality locally based articles, your articles will get published by many local websites and e-zines, hence increasing back links to your website.
Having many links pointing back to your website is important as it improves the position of your website on search engines.
Localize your PPC campaigns for greater search effectiveness.
Why not put yourself in the place of your local search engine user and tailor your website and their use? If you are a chiropractor and you serve patients in several cities, you can tailor your website to your prominent keywords and establish pages on your site with articles geared to those keywords.
People who want to search for a solution to a problem usually state the problem in their search request.
Your keywords list should also include the problems of your market.
Always include the city, town or community in your keywords list.
Writing and submitting articles is now the best strategy for back links and SEO.
Articles create many back links to your website, which improves your website popularity rank and ultimately drives large volume of traffic to your website.
If you write high quality articles, your articles will get published by many websites and e-zines, hence increasing back links to your website.
Having many links pointing back to your website is important as it improves the position of your website on search engines.
Using local networks to create a strong Internet presence.
Once you've established your Internet presence, created your SEO pages, installed your local PPC ad program, you're now ready to reach out to as many local top ranking websites as you can.
You want to create as many local links as you can by manually inviting other local businesses.
Start with high profile businesses and sell them on reciprocal links.
If you are good at writing, offer to include review articles with their names and links on your website.
Track your SEO and PPC results for maximum performance.
Now the tough part for many business owners is the consistent auditing of the ad results.
Each week I go through the reports to see how my money is being spent.
I check the Google Analytics statistics; each day when I get up, I check my auto-responder stats and pay-per-click ad results once a week.
That process will show you over 30 to 90 days if you should make changes or stick with what is working.
You can reduce your advertising costs and gain better performance from your ad campaigns if you are working locally.
So when you're ready to develop a strong local presence on the web, start localizing your pay per click advertising, structure your keywords for local identification, write articles that emphasizes local information and references and link to other local business websites.
You'll begin to see more local prospects coming your way from your website within a short period of time.