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Replacing the Yellow Pages with Google Local

google local listing for business

For decades, the go-to advertising platform for local businesses wasn’t Facebook or Google, but the Yellow Pages. With millions of customers in every major metropolis and the ultimate ‘buying mode’ audience, the Yellow Pages was, for a long time, the only way for local businesses to reach people that were interested in buying.

Today, it’s a little different. With Google and Facebook offering ultra-targeted local advertising at very reasonable rates, what reason is there to spend your ad budget on the Yellow Pages?

For many businesses, Yellow Pages advertising is becoming obsolete.
For many businesses, Yellow Pages advertising is becoming obsolete. Image

The answer is fairly obvious: very little. With a declining audience and fees that are massively expensive when compared to online marketing, the choice is clear: move your Yellow Pages budget online and reap the benefits of advertising that’s easier to track, cheaper to implement, and far greater in scale. Check the Cost of SEO Services

Yellow Pages to Google: How to Market to a Local Audience Using Adwords

Adwords is an incredible source of local customers, especially in ‘problem solving’ industries such as construction, plumbing, or dry cleaning. If your business offers a service for consumers, it can reap incredible benefits from Adwords search ads.

Thanks to Google’s new pay-per-call ad metrics, which allow you to pay for calls as well as clicks, it’s easy to make the transition from Yellow Pages to Google. The only difference is the pricing – instead of paying a flat monthly fee regardless of results, you only pay for the results that your ads generate.

Optimizing for local search keywords requires a slightly different strategy from the typical product or service-driven keywords. Instead of competing with corporations and large companies, you’re primarily competing with other small, local businesses.

This means your success is determined far more by smart keyword selection than it is by your budget. Create content that’s targeted to local keywords – even districts in your city – and you’ll be able to capitalize on lucrative, low-competition keywords.

The same is true of SEO – you’ll be competing not with the large corporations of big-traffic search keywords, but small, local competitors. This levels the playing field and makes local SEO more about relevance and trust than the size of your budget. See more : SEO Package Prices

Google Local: The Ultimate SEO Replacement for the Yellow Pages

In a way, the Yellow Pages was a printed precursor to SEO. Instead of vying for the top search position using links and on-site content, businesses fought for the most prominent Yellow Pages position using their marketing budgets.

Optimizing for Google Local is a great way to reach the same audience that used to read the Yellow Pages without paying a cent. Links and content replace what was once a marketing budget, giving you even greater results without the costs.

If you’re beginning to notice declining results from your Yellow Pages ads, consider making the transition today. Your local SEO company can help you optimize your website for local maps and begin attracting customers from Google within weeks. Check about the SEO consultant in Los Angeles.

When Should Your Business Call it Quits on the Yellow Pages?

The readership of directories is rapidly declining, and more customers are turning to search every single day. This makes Yellow Pages advertising the ultimate poor marketing investment for businesses – while the cost stays constant, the audience continues to grow smaller.

It’s time to call quits on offline directory marketing. Take your marketing budget to the Internet and you’ll generate more traffic, attract more customers, and make far more sales. Check out Orange County digital marketing services.

We can help your business replace its offline directory campaigns with a scalable and effective online PPC campaign. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC marketing services and local SEO campaigns for businesses. Learn about the Performance Based SEO Pricing

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Location-Based Advertising: The Future of Mobile Ads

Imagine you’re walking down the street beside a pet store. Your phone vibrates. On the screen, there’s no text message, no email, no social notification, but a promotion for the pet store you’re walking past offering you a lucrative discount on pet food.

We’ve seen keyword-based ads, interest-based ads, and device-based ads. What we are just beginning to see is location-based advertising. With over 700 million GPS-enabled phones in use, location-based advertising is truly the way of the future.

The irony, however, is that the advertising of the future has been in use, albeit on a much less precise scale, for over a decade. Geographic targeting has been a mainstay of the display and search advertising world since the early days of Google Adwords.

Thanks to geo-IP databases, almost every online advertising platform offers some form of location-based advertising. The results, which are overwhelmingly positive for businesses that implement it properly, say good things about the future.

Studies show that consumers respond more favorably to advertising that’s for local businesses. Clickthrough rates, conversion rates, and other metrics that indicate ad success all increase when an advertisement is local to the audience it’s targeting.

At the same time, there’s a downturn in interest when consumers get too close to the source of their advertising. BI Intelligence recently found that ad CTR is lower when a business is within a mile of its target than it is when a business is further away.

Part of this can no doubt be attributed to intent – after all, when prospects are very close to your business, they may not need advertising to buy something. But another part could be precision, or a distinct, industry-wide lack of it.

One of the biggest problems location-based advertisers currently face is a lack of precise location data. Despite over 75 percent of smartphones using GPS, just 10 percent of mobile ad network impressions can be delivered based on GPS data.

Because of this, many location-based advertisers currently use IP and zip code data to calculate the location of their audience – data that, on most platforms, has been a targeting option since the early 2000s.

Despite this, the precision of location-based advertising is constantly increasing as GPS latitude and longitude data becomes more available. As such, location-based advertisers are no longer being held back by the traditional ‘rules’ of advertising.

With clickthrough rates of three to four percent very possible – figures that are as much as four times the industry average for display advertising – location-based advertising looks very promising indeed.

Given the fact that the smartphone industry is rapidly expanding, with more users than ever before purchasing GPS-enabled smartphones, location-based advertisers are poised for a dual opportunity: better targeting and a bigger audience.

If that’s not an appealing prospect, it’s hard to think of what could be. With location targeting growing more precise, mobile audiences growing larger than ever before, and mobile CPMs remaining steady, the advantages of a location-based advertising campaign are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

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Promote Your Company through Craigslist

Craigslist has proved to be a great avenue for Internet marketing in Los Angeles or any place in the US.  Today businesses of all sizes use it to increase their web driven revenue. If Craigslist is used properly and effectively, it could be a great help for most businesses, large or small to enhance their profit potential. If you are not using Craigslist you are missing a great opportunity for your business growth. Check out Los Angeles SEO online marketing.

Craigslist is an online market place that features classified ads, personal ads and help wanted ads from people in every major metropolitan cities of the world. Craigslist has about 4 million visitors every month.  The two main components which have made Craigslist a successful business promoting option are:

  • It reaches your target audience.

  • It runs a marketing campaign that will appeal to your target audience.

Promote Aggressively

Aggressive promotion on Craigslist can be a great help if yours is a startup company. It can help you make your presence felt in an already crowded market place. A company can be successful only when it is able to build a loyal customer base. The job becomes tougher if there is already a monopoly of big and established player. Offer quality services or products at a much lower cost and back them up with a good ad campaign.

Effective Marketing

Marketing on Craigslist is not different from marketing on other forms of media. For an effective marketing campaign on Craigslist, the first thing that you need to do is to get a professionally written content that can appeals to the target audience. Hire a freelance writer who can write very effectively about your business. You may have all the knowledge about your company but you may not have the skills to present your business most effectively to your prospective clients. Posting your business ads in appropriate category is also very important as it will help you get the target audience. Learn more about SEO services in Orange County.

Interact

Craigslist is not just a place to promote and advertise your products; it is also a place to interact with people. Engage yourself in conversations with people of your community and know about the latest industry trend. Interact with your customers and win their trust. Respond to their postings. Visit the relevant forums in the discussion forum of Craigslist and communicate with your potential buyers and other sellers to make your business presence visible to others.

Promote yourself in the best way through Craigslist by target marketing and aggressive promotion. If you need help on Local Search Engine Marketing, contact Bliss Drive 949-229-3454.

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How Google Maps Work

Google Maps is one of the most popular map services on the Internet. It is a wealth of resources, information and map planning guides. It gives you elaborate directions from point A to point B along with, multiple stops and sight-seeing details on the way.

Google Maps is indeed a wonderful tool for Local SEO in Orange County, CA businesses. Setting up such a service and making continuous improvements is not an easy task. It will be interesting to see how Google Maps works.

Multiple Features

It allows you to view a variety of maps with different mapping options for any area. You can see basic terrain maps, street maps and satellite images. You can also have a hybrid view in the map if you want. The hybrid view is basically a combination of satellite images and the street maps. A variety of latlong (Latitude, Longitude) options is also available, and has click-and-drag features that allow you to view adjacent maps.

For SEO Purposes, Google Maps gives you the edge over other businesses making your online presence more visible.  You can actually optimize your listing with the services you wish found for.

Source of the Maps

The source of the map imagery of Google Maps is Tele Atlas. It is a private company, which is a leader in navigation as well as location-based services. The maps that this company creates are incredibly accurate, and they are quite extensive. If you have seen some other map servers, you may have noticed that they have the details about only the main roads or at the best a few smaller roads. But, Tele Atlas offers a sophisticated mapping service that can take you down to the street level and in many cases, even to the block level. See more about SEO company orange county CA

How It Works

Google Maps is most ideal for planning trips, determining distance, figuring out which route to take, picking nearby restaurants and hotels, as well as for viewing a property and its adjacent area. All you have to do is to type your street address along with the city and the state and press enter. Google Maps will take you to a detailed map exactly pinpointing the desired address. Don’t be surprised if you suddenly find your own house in the map, as in some cases the map takes you to the level of individual building in an area.

How to Submit Listing or Business Information

If you want to get your business included in the Google Maps database, you can do this by creating the listing and verifying through phone or by postcard. This gets your business listed on Google Maps, but of course, you’ll need to have a Gmail account at least or register via Google Places. If someone is looking for a place to eat in a local area, the name of your restaurant will pop up if the search is focused on the area served by your business.

If you need help on Orange County internet marketing to maximize your local business using Google Maps, call Bliss Drive today at (949) 229-3454.

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Value of Foursquare Marketing for Your Business

Foursquare is a social networking website. It is available to GPS-enabled mobile phone users. By running a device specific application or using a mobile, website users let their friends know their location at any point of time. These locations could be a bar, restaurant, or a store registered with Foursquare. Foursquare application uses the GPS to know where you are and you can let this information go either in a public or private domain to let others know about your whereabouts. This is the next best thing using social media marke in Orange County, CA for local businesses, but of course you still need further help. But how do you get started with Foursquare?

It’s a Hot Social Networking Tool

You can post updates about your location to Foursquare user-friends and also leave short comments about your experience. It also has a game like feature by which a user earns badges by doing certain things. A user frequenting a location the most is declared the mayor of that location. If somebody becomes a mayor, you can reward him or her appropriately.

Opportunities for Your Business

Foursquare connects a close-knit group of friends who are all Foursquare users. Anyone visiting your business location and leaving some comments about the good experience can spread very fast. The Foursquare network is increasing really fast. Up from just one million users a year ago, it has now more than 8 million users. And tapping this network could really mean a lot to your business.

Make Your Business Listed

First thing you need to do for your business is to make sure that it is listed on the map of your area. For this, just sign up as a user on Foursquare and try the check-in option for your business location. See whether your business location shows up on the map or not. If it does not, you can add it manually. If it is already there, check if it has the right information about your business.

Reward Mayors

The person who has checked in at your business location the most, deserves a reward. He is the Foursquare mayor of your business and you can offer him or her some free rewards, gift coupons or discount coupons. It has a built-in application to send messages to users who are currently checked in at location close to your business and you can make some special offers to any of them if they happen to be your frequent customer.

It is a Fun Tool

Foursquare is indeed a fun social tool. You can think of variety of different ways to attract users to come and visit your business. You can offer discount to those who check in using Foursquare. If you have a bunch of Foursquare users at your business location, you can arrange a party for them and invite others also to join in.

People are most influenced by their friends when it comes to buying certain things or visiting certain places. Make your marketing mix include tapping these Foursquare user-friends. Their short messages sharing their experiences with their friends could indeed make your business take a leap.

If you need help on Orange County internet marketing to maximize your local business using Foursquare, call Bliss Drive today at (949) 229-3454.