Inbound Marketing Blog

Local Internet Marketing Is A Powerful Marketing Solution But Still Somewhat Unrecognized or Simply Ignored!

If you have a built in advantage... USE IT!

One observation I continue to make about local (geographically targeted) Internet marketing strategies, is the significant gap between the possibilities (advantages) and the recognition of those possibilities by local business. I believe it is mostly an education issue and the sooner a given business realizes the opportunity, the sooner that business will also realize a real boost in visibility.

If you own or operate a local (geographically targeted) business and have considered marketing your product or service online, you may have come to conclusion that it doesn't fit into your marketing budget. This is a common conclusion that in my  professional opinion, should no longer be as easily accepted as a final conclusion.

Marketing is as important as it ever was and because of the Internet, it is more available that it ever was. There has been (and will continue to be) a major shift in Internet usage with more and more consumers and businesses turning to the search engines (and social media) to find products and services. This simple fact requires local or small business to adjust their marketing budget accordingly. Ignoring this shift, or not including your business in this shift can become a death sentence. 

As an Internet marketing (Inbound Marketing) professional (includes local Internet marketing), I would like to offer the following information and encourage that you as a small business owner to reconsider the powerful local Internet marketing tools available.

1. Businesses that have a specific geographic target market do have an advantage.
2. Local Internet marketing eliminates a certain element of national competition.
3. Local Internet marketing eliminates a certain element of regional competition.
4. Using a local Internet marketing focus provides faster traction and visibility.
5. Many business prospects prefer to do business with local companies.
6. Local Internet marketing is designed to take advantage of the "lower hanging fruit" that exsists in virtually all markets.
7. Local Internet marketing doesn't require the same marketing budget as a national marketing campaign. It's even more affordable.
   
8. Even national or regionally based products and services can benefit greatly from a geographically targeted messages or local Internet marketing activities.

The significant advantages available to business through local Internet marketing will not last forever. Not only will your local competitors enter the world of Inbound (Internet) marketing, but as you might already recognize, bigger business is also starting to focus efforts on local markets.

Another advantage local small business needs to recognize is that many competitors are still behind the technology curve. Those that become the first local Internet marketing players will get a significant head start. Those that don't will be passed by their direct local competitors.

Although Internet marketing budgets are much more manageable than traditional marketing budgets, local Internet marketing budgets offer even more benefit and message delivery power.

As a small business owner myself, I encourage all other small business to change they way they think about marketing in general and learn as much as possible about using local Internet marketing to:

• Get Found
• Convert Visitors To Leads
• Convert Leads To Customers

It's important to know where you (your website) are, before you plan a great SEO or inbound marketing strategy. A great way to know your condition is to execute an accurate SEO analysis or SEO report.

There are many ways to secure an accurate SEO analysis and SEO report for little or even zero money. The important consideration before you hire or pay for an SEO or Inbound Marketing professional is to be sure the SEO analysis or SEO report is accurate and comprehensive.

Below is an example of an SEO Analysis and SEO report generated on my own web site. It has all the search engine report details that I believe are critical to get a clear picture of the condition of any web site. Please understand that this SEO analysis is quite long and contains a lot of detail. You may want to come back to this report a few times and absorb all of this SEO report data in segments.

Report for www.virtualsupportsystems.com
March 09, 2010 at 08:37 AM

The website www.virtualsupportsystems.com ranks 40,314 of the 2,159,542 websites that have been ranked so far.

A website grade of 98.1/100 for www.virtualsupportsystems.com means that of the millions of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 98.1% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

I. Create Content
This SEO analysis and SEO report shows that every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it's optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do "ok" and contribute to the cause, so it's both a quality and a quantity game.

A. Blog Analysis
Blogging is a great way to reach your target audience with your thoughts, opinions, and offerings on relevant topics and should be part of each SEO analysis and SEO report.
Blog Found
Blog URL: http://www.virtualsupportsystems.com/our-blog/ (Last Post: March 05, 2010)

B. Blog Grade : 15.27
Your Blog Grade of 15.27 is based on a measurement of the traffic levels to your blog and the number and quality of links pointing at it.

C. Recent Blog Articles

Targeted Website Traffic (con't)
Targeted Website Traffic
Marketing Revolution & Online Marketing Strategy

D. Google Indexed Pages : 144
This SEO report shows approximate number of pages on www.virtualsupportsystems.com that have been stored in the Google index. The Google web crawler will visit the website periodically and look for new content for its index. Generally, the more pages your site has within the Google cache, the better.

E. Readability Level : College Undergraduate
This score measures the approximate level of education necessary to read and understand the web page content. In most cases, the content should be made to be simple so that a majority of the target audience can understand it.

II. Optimize
Optimizing that content is a key step, however, to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web. In essence, this SEO analysis section is about maximizing your ROC - return on content.

A. Metadata
Metadata tags allow you to tell the search engines what your web page is about.
Page Title: Inbound Marketing & Inbound Marketing Consultants
Meta Description: Inbound Marketing Information & Search Engine Optimization consulting firm specializing in SEO, Social Media, Blog Management and Lead Generation and Development
Font Tags Found in HTML: We found some HTML <font> font tags on this page. While this is not a critical issue, you should use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to separate your website's content from its appearance.

B. Heading Summary
Similar to how newspapers and magazines use headings and sub-headings to help readers, websites can use special tags in their HTML. This SEO analysis and SEO report shows that tags not only help human readers read the content, they also help search engine spiders better understand the content on a page and what is most important. It is generally a good idea to use heading tags to help signal to the search engines, what the web page is about.
Total headings found: 10. See details.

Heading Type
Text
First-Level (H1): Inbound Marketing and Search Engine Optimization
Third-Level (H3): Certifed Inbound Marketing Consultants
Third-Level (H3): Inbound Marketing Consulting Client
Third-Level (H3): Free Inbound Marketing Analysis
Second-Level (H2): Inbound Marketing Consulting Application
Second-Level (H2): Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Second-Level (H2): Social Media Optimization
Second-Level (H2): Blog Development
Second-Level (H2): SEO Lead Generation Software
Second-Level (H2): Other Services:

C. Image Summary
Images are a great way to enhance a website from a user's perspective. However, it is important to note that search engine crawlers cannot really "see" images. So, if you have lots of images that contain textual content within the image itself, this content will not be seen by the crawlers. Make sure all SEO analysis and SEO reports provide this information.

HTML helps address this issue by providing a way to specify the textual content for an image using the "alt" attribute. The alt attribute allows web pages to assign specific text as the "alternative" content for images for those that cannot view the images themselves. This can be search engine crawlers or text-only web browsers.
Total images found: 13 , 2 image(s) don't have ALT text.

Too Many Images Found.
Having many images on the web page means the user has to wait longer to view your page. This web page has 13 images.
It's usually better to have fewer or smaller images. Sometimes simply resizing your images will make them smaller in size, and your web page will load faster.

D. Interior Page Analysis : 3 Pages Processed
This SEO analysis and SEO report looked at a few other pages on this website to see how well they are optimized. This sort of interior page analysis can reveal exciting opportunities for you to target specific keywords or visitors. You can then create landing pages optimized towards converting those visitors into customers.

Page Titles & Description:
About Search Engine Optimization | Best Website Marketing
Learn about search engine optimization and best website marketing practices.

Search Engine Marketing Blog | Inbound Marketing Blog
Search engine marketing blog offering insight into the new Inbound Marketing explosion, SEO, PPC ...

Lead Generation Software | Marketing Software | Search Engine Optimization Software
Lead generation software & search engine optimization software makes your SEO and complete inboun...

E. Domain Info
Most experts agree that you should register your domain for a long time, because search engines factor domain "stability" when looking at your pages.
Domain Age
8 years, 7 months, 2 days
Time To Expiration
2 years, 4 months, 29 days
This domain is registered for more than one year.
Google and other search engines like to see domains that have been registered for extended periods of time as this shows a commitment to the domain name. It also is an indicator that this website is not a temporary spam site.

F. MOZ Rank : 5
MozRank is SEOmoz's general, logarithmically scaled 10-point measure of global link authority or popularity. and is very similar in purpose to the measures of link importance used by the search engines (e.g., GOOGLE's PageRank).

G. Last Google Crawl Date : March 05, 2010 @ 12:31 PM (GMT)
Google will periodically crawl websites looking for new and updated content. In general, you want Google to crawl your site as often as possible, so your new content shows up in Google search results immediately.

H. Inbound Links : 229
One of the most important measures for a website is how many other sites link to it. The more links the better. Having links to your website from authoritative resources on the Internet helps you rank higher in search engines since these links are an indication that your website is trustworthy and contains good content.

J. Yahoo! Directory : No Entry Found
virtualsupportsystems is not listed in the Yahoo! Directory.
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory which rivals the DMOZ Open Directory Project in size. We recommend that every business have a listing in the Yahoo! Directory.

III. Promote
Now that you are producing remarkable content and optimizing it for search engines and other channels, you are ready to start promoting your content.

A. del.icio.us bookmarks : 2
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. Users can save links they wish to keep for later reference on the site, and pages that have been saved many times are displayed in a special "hot" section which can drive thousands of visits.

B. Link Tweet Summary
TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweets and retweets help drive traffic to the content that you have created.
Could not find tweets referring to your site via TweetMeme. Quick, go create some interesting content that will get people talking!

C. Twitter Grade : 59.89
We found the account @semseo1 tied to your website, below is our Twitter Grader analysis of the influence and usefulness of that account for your marketing efforts.
@semseo1
Followers 30
Following 42
Updates 20

IV. Convert
Getting found sure is fun. You're writing articles and producing videos (creating remarkable content), you're an SEO ninja by now (Optimize), and you're using all the social media sites and running email and ppc campaigns (Promote). At the end of the day, however, we aren't in this for fun. We're also not in this for traffic. The goal is quality sales leads and customers, so let's focus now on converting as much of your traffic as possible to leads and customers.

A. RSS Feed : Found
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard way to easily deliver content to visitors after they've left your website but they're still interested in your subject. RSS is commonly used with blogs, news feeds, and other formatted news or other sources of information.
An RSS feed was detected in this web page. The feed link was correctly setup so that it can be auto-detected by feed readers and contemporary browsers. The feed URL for this site is http://www.virtualsupportsystems.com/CMS/UI/Mod....

B. Conversion Form : Found
Conversion forms are the primary way to get leads from your website. Collect contact information from your visitors so that you can follow up with them later and be in touch. Without forms, you can't convert your website traffic into customers.
We found at least one web form on your website.

V. Analyze
Check out how you compare to other similar websites. You need to monitor your traffic rank as well and see if your optimizations and new content are showing benefits. You will be able to draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business.

A. Traffic Rank : Top 3.362 %
Alexa is an online service that measures traffic for millions of sites on the Internet in a similar way to Nielsen television show ratings.
Your website has an Alexa rank of 1,045,553 which is in the top 3.362 % of all websites.