If you haven’t noticed, local Internet Marketing service providers are on the rise. A new trend in the Internet Marketing world is coming to your town as online marketers are offering their global skills to local businesses. Marketers are helping businesses succeed online by bringing new customers through the door and showing business owners how to develop better relationships with the customers they already have using online tools and social networks.
The fact is, for years local businesses have been held hostage by their webmasters. Many businesses paid large sums of money to have a website built because that’s what everyone else was doing. Since then, businesses have been paying their webmasters for every little change and update to the website. And, I’m finding that a lot of businesses have nearly given up on maintaining their website because of these accumulating costs and with probably very little return on their investment. Marketers have realized the vast majority of websites are stagnant, poorly optimized, and horribly under utilized.
What webmasters don’t always tell you is that building a website is just the first step in leveraging the Internet for your business. Internet Marketers know this and they’re providing services that help local businesses get their website back on it’s feet. These services may include setting up opt-in forms for your email list, optimizing your site for local search, giving your website a facelift, or making it mobile phone compatible.
There is one other reason for this local Internet Marketing trend and that’s related to the recent changes in the popular search engines like Google and Bing. These search engines are increasingly delivering search suggestions and results based on your location. For example, go to Google.com and start typing the word “hotel”. As you type, the suggestions you’ll begin to see are most likely going to include cities and towns near you.
What does this mean for local businesses? You’d be surprised how many local businesses have very little on their website that suggests to the search engines their location or the region they serve. That means these business websites barely show up in the search results or not at all. These are relatively easy things to fix on the website. And, there are other websites that can be leveraged to help make your website more locally relevant and ultimately more trafficked.
I would like to offer some caution. Many of these people are new to Internet Marketing and may not have the experience necessary to provide these services correctly. Or, they’re only familiar with a small subset of services. And, they’d like to convince you their narrow service selection is a perfect fit for your business. That’s not to say all these providers are bad. My recommendation, find out how long they’ve been in business doing exactly these types of services.
I’ve been an Internet developer and consultant since 1995. If you think your business website could use a set of fresh eyes, please feel free to contact me. I’d be happy to evaluate your website and make some suggestions that will put you on the right path. I will not hard sell you something you don’t need or want.
