I was approached to do a speaking gig to a group of local small business owners who owned brick and mortar businesses and wanted to launch websites to use for local and online marketing purposes. I figured since I was writing a presentation up for that, I would condense it into a shorter version and throw it up here.
This post is not for experienced search marketers or professional webmasters. This is aimed at the small mom and pop that doesn’t make their living online, but rather would like to gain a few leads here and there from generally non-competitive geographical + keyword combo terms by putting up a website consisting of a handful of pages – in addition to providing useful information to all visitors to their sites – whether they come from search engines or local offline marketing efforts.
Believe it or not, not everyone who reads my blog is big into search engine optimization – I get a lot of emails from small business owners asking about what may seem like “remedial topics” to those of us who make our living in the industry. So, this post is for them. ;-)
Getting started:
1. Get your own domain name and register it for several years. With a successful business, spending 50 dollars to register your domain for the next five years is a no-brainer.
2. Get a decent host – for a local small business website that doesn’t envision mounds of traffic or a complicated website setup, you can find a ton of affordable and reliable hosting options for less than 10 dollars per month. Pay the 1-2 dollars extra per month for a unique IP address (your host will know what that means).
3. Set up an email address using your domain. Your hosting plan will come with a minimum of one free email address and your host should have instructions on how to setup and configure your mail client to check that email. me@mybusiness.com looks much more professional than me432@yourisp.net.
4. If you don’t know how to make a “great website” either hire a web designer (for a small site spanning only a few pages, the cost should be quite nominal) or keep it simple with a basic background color, fonts and real life pictures (if applicable). I’d recommend the web designer for a nominal fee. Remember, the website will be the first impression of your business to online users.
What to put on your homepage:
1. Make sure your business name, what you do, where you do it, who you do it for and why you’re the best at it all appear on the homepage in text. Be short and sweet (they can visit other pages of the site for in depth information on those topics) but also be descriptive.
2. Your address, phone number and email address should appear on every page in text. Be sure to list this information in full, including street address, city, state and zip code. List the phone number with area code.
3. Hours of operation.
4. Cities you serve in your local area.
Other pages you should have at a minimum:
1. About page – This is where you go in depth on your company. Give a detailed, but not too long (think essay, not thesis), explanation on what you do, how long you’ve been doing it, what makes you the best at it and why customers should choose you above the competition.
2. Services or Products page(s) – Tell them what you do and what you can provide to them. Add pricing information if you feel it is appropriate. If you do something that has a “finished result” such as landscaping, pool construction, paint jobs, room additions, etc. consider adding pictures of past work – as they say, pictures (that are resized properly using a graphics or photo editing program) can be worth 1000 words (but be sure to add descriptions of what the pictures show in text).
3. Contact page – Tell visitors how to get a hold of you. This includes your full address, phone number, email address, fax number, additional locations (if applicable with all of their pertinent information as well), hours of operation, a map (you can easily get one online via major mapping sites) and directions from one or two major roads in the vicinity. Be sure you list a privacy policy on the site if you have any forms for users to fill out telling them what you will and won’t do with their information. Make sure you check emails often and are timely in responses to inquiries.
4. Coupon page (optional) – If you want to know when new referrals are coming from your website, tell people to mention that they found you via your website for a nominal discount.
Making your new website search engine friendly:
1. Make sure the titles tags on each page are unique and include some keywords you think people would type into a search engine while trying to find your site. I.e. if you do landscaping in Clearwater, Florida your homepage title tag might be: be: “Professional Landscaping Services in Clearwater, Florida – Your Company” (no quotes). Every page on your site should have a title tag that reflects the content specific to that page.
2. Make sure the meta description tag on each page contains a sentence that serves as a mini-advertisement for your company that makes people want to find out more as it may appear at times under the title of your website in Google and other search engines. Be sure the description is not only promotional, but informational about your company and website.
3. Make sure the designer doesn’t use flash (for the entire website) or JavaScript links to navigate your site. For a myriad of reasons you don’t care about, I assure you this is very bad if you have any hopes of people finding your website in the search engines.
4. Add some links to your website that are useful to people looking for information about your services. I.e. if you belong to an association (like an attorney would to the bar), if you have a partnership with a related business (you build pools, so you list a few recommended pool maintenance companies), if you can refer people to sources of additional information (such as an accountant pointing to various documents on the IRS website that may be helpful to consumers) – these are all great links to add to your site. You can work these links into your regular pages or create an additional page for resource links.
Online promotion of your new website:
1. Get your business listed with Google maps (free):
https://www.google.com/local/add/login2. Get your business listed with SuperPages.com (free and fee options):
https://my.superpages.com/spweb/products/business-listing3. Update your business listings with infoUSA.com and Acxiom (find out why you should here):
http://list.infousa.com/dbupdate.htm
and
http://bcb.acxiom.com/start.pl4. Get a listing in Best of the Web in their regional section (fee):
http://botw.org/top/Regional/United_States/ (click submit site at the top right of the page once you find your proper category)5. Get a listing with Yahoo Local (free and fee options):
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/local/business.php6. Find the category that matches your business and get listed with Dmoz.org (free):
http://www.dmoz.org7. Get listed in MSN local via localeze.com:
http://www.localeze.com/manage/8. Get listed with citysearch.com (also powers the Ask local search) for a fee:
https://selfenroll.citysearch.com/9. Get listed with local.com (free and fee options):
http://www.local.com/advertise.aspx10. Get listed with yellowpages.com (free and fee options):
http://www.yellowpages.com/sp/advertise/11. You might be able to save yourself some time with RegisterLocal.com:
http://www.registerlocal.com which offers to keep your business profile information up to date with various yellow page, local search providers and data companies who provide information to various local outlets.12. Register yourself with the local search engine over at BOTW: http://local.botw.org (free for basic profile, upgrade enhancements available for a fee)
13. Talk with friends, family, businesses you have partnerships with that have websites and any associations you may belong to (such as a chamber of commerce) to see if they would be willing to link to your website to help promote your business.
Remember to promote your site offline as well by mentioning it on all your marketing materials and to current customers. And then get back to doing business. Your website should be positioned well in the coming weeks on specific search terms to your local market and service as well as being visited from local people following your offline marketing efforts and finding the information they’re looking for on your website.
Note: This post has been edited to add RegisterLocal.com, a service offered by LocalLaunch, as I stumbled upon it after this post was published and it seems like a great way to save some time.
Second Note: Post was edited again to add in the information for the new BOTW Local Search.
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{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
Great overview. Welcome back.
GREAT POST, I’ve bookmarked it as “Local SEO 101″.
Yeah Rae, nice post.
I may be a bit biased, but it has been my experience that a regional listing or two in some of the top human-edited web directories can also assist your local marketing presence and help the major search engines (non-local specific) geo-target your site.
Excellent post Rae – thanks for the refresher!
I just scanned the thread so forgive me if I’m redundant but I think local businesses would do well to think in terms of geotargeted domain names for their websites (plural). Make one the brand site and make the second more of a community site. BobsPlumbing.com AND BostonPlumbing.com. We covered this issue/idea in some death in the recent “Domain Challenge†in the WmW Domain Forum.
P.S. Nice to see you still whacking away at the blog.
“We covered this issue in some ‘death’ . . “ ?
Argh! Death by typing blunder . . . ;)
Thanks for the great information. As someone who works with local indie business people a lot, I was particularly impressed with the list of directories, complete with urls, that are available to list in. I’ll be pointing some of our Biznik business networking group’s members to this list.
Those were great tips. How nice of you to give such in-depth advice :)
Many of these local listing sites offer comments and reviews about the listed business.
If a business is listed in 6-8 different local sites, how does the business owner determine which of them to send the next happy client to to add a comment?
Assume all listings are 4 weeks old and none have brought a visitor yet.
Thnaks for the information. I have just added our site to the sites that you have suggested.
Rich Johnson
Great resource! I hope I can encourage you to take a look at what we’re doing at Zvents (in particular for your section headed “Online promotion of your new website”). Marketers are increasingly taking advantage of the local search platform we’ve developed at Zvents because it allows business to truly promote themselves with their in-store event, sales, and attractions that draw footfall through the door.
With free business listings, web links, and promotion of associated events on Zvents and syndication of our index to most of the major newspapers, we’re building the future of local search and helping business reach customers with engaging opportunities to patron.
Paul O’Brien – Director of Market @ Zvents
Great article for anyone with a new, local small business website
Nice post for the small business site and budding SEO guru. I notice you run ads for Aaron Wall’s SEO Book. I have thought about purchasing this book numerous times in the past, but so far have not.
If you have read this book, would it be possible for you to give a personal review of it on your site? Thanks.
Great Post I found through “Top 50 SEO Posts of the Year” on Sphinn. I just started working on a site and it is hard for me to explain in none tech terms exactly what I am doing. Your article is a great addition for the explanation.
Thanks Rae, I just stumbled on this and it’s a great resource for small business SEO clients. I’m wondering what your experience was with RegisterLocal.com and was it worth it?
Thanks so much Rae!
If you don’t mind, I would love it if could include LittleEngine.com under Online Promotion. I’m one of the designers behind LittleEngine and we’re trying to get the word out about our small business social network; btw listings are free for all small businesses (see if you’re already on there, we have 12 million listings already!)
Great post, Rae. And a good starting point for everyone who has a small business and want’s to do a bit of SEO work. Lot’s of people think they HAVE to hire a company to improve their site but there’s actually loads of stuff that they can do to improve the quality of their site.
Thanks Rae for nice post, its great for website startup to avoid basic SEO mistakes from site owners.
I picked up so many additional tips I hadn’t learned of. Hopefully your time writing is paying off the same for u.
ty much,
Priceless information – real good of you to give such detailed advice. Thank you!
Lauren
That was a great beginners guide, thanks.
Great tips for those small business owners in the States and to a somewhat lesser extent for those outside.
I’ve bookmarked this post on my wall. (my own little offline version of Deli.ciou.s)
I created a blog, using WP, for my father-in-laws restaurant, which is located in a tiny town. I am looking to make it as SEO friendly as possible, to leverage any traveling folks to the town.
Thanxs much for your tips! Good stuff.
Missy.
After one of my colleagues, Joy posted her local SEO piece, I thought it was great, until I found how detailed you were with the search engines and directories. What I find amazing is this was still in 2006. I feel I am way behind in the local search scene.
I tried the acxiom.com link and it does not seem to work. I know I am outdated but does this acxiom still accept submissions or it is a discontinued service?
Great post regarding search engine optimisation. I agree with Benj, it is amazing that this was written in 2006, is their anything else new to help get your website to the top of google? Do different search engines crawl website differently than each other, for example could you be on page one of yahoo and page five of google? Even though this is an old post I would like to get an answer. Is there any new ways of boosting search engine position?
Good post. I would have also mentioned that there is no harm in manually submitting to as many directories as possible.
Thanks for sharing your SEO tips for small businesses.
I’ve had pretty good success getting good rankings for my website which is a small niche business, hard money lending, but there is always room for improvement. I’m also interested in expanding my niche to be more of a full service real estate investment company (not so small a niche), so will need to really understand SEO and internet marketing to drive traffic to several new real estate investor websites that I’m planning to launch.
Thanks again!
Great advice Rae. I have forwarded this blog post on to a few small business owners. There’s enough marketing advice to keep people busy for a long time.
Rae advice like this makes me want to say….”Will you marry me?”
Hey Rae,
Just thought you should know that the self-enroll link for Citysearch does not link properly. If anyone wishes to learn how to enroll, I can help with the process of choosing a budget and signup.
There have been a lot of nice new improvements to Citysearch, our new site and local partnerships have made us stronger than ever. Compete measured nearly 29.8 million monthly uniques in May and we are only growing from there. Recent partnerships include YellowPages, SuperPages, MySpace Local, Facebook, InsiderPages, UrbanSpoon, and more.
Please feel free to contact me at (908-347-5438) if you have any questions.
-Michael Demby
Great post. I think what a lot of small business owners don’t realise is the importance of a domain name and decent hosting as opposed to using some ad-filled free host (eg. Freewebs or Angelfire). Having your own domain name and ad-free hosting is so important to appear professional, and it isn’t like small businesses need to worry about a dedicated server – most can easily get away with an inexpensive shared host + pay no more than $10 or so a year for a domain name.
I came across this post today and I didn’t even know when it was created until I saw the Register Local/LocalLaunch reference at the end. Still valuable advice and worth reading 3 years later for small business owners looking to get a head start.
Rae, trust me if a person is aspiring to start a web based business and needs to kick start a website, i would redirect him to this page. You have amazingly explained complex terms in simple manner so that the newbie moms and pops can reap benefits from this. Outstanding article and I would suggest this as a definite reading for any entrepreneur in the online arena. Most of us forget the benefits of local listings. Most of the leads i get through my website for my business is from local listings. A look into my analytics pages would easily explain this. I am so grateful and thankful to you for spending your valuable time in writing this. Hats off!!!! :)
Regards,
Mack!