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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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Social Signals: How Facebook and Twitter Are Now Essential for SEO Success

If there’s one great truth of SEO, it’s that the process of ranking websites has grown increasingly more complicated over the past decade. What was once a basic process with just three key currencies – content, keywords, and links – is now a complicated industry demanding long-term planning skills and incredible creativity.

Those three currencies have been complemented by several new additions to the SEO world: social signals. Social signals include Facebook likes, Twitter followers, and a variety of other signals of influence that are now a major part of building a long-term, stable SEO asset.

Leading SEO software company SEOmoz has covered social signals before in great detail, demonstrating a real correlation between social influence – likes, followers, and such – and rankings. Even Matt Cutts, Google’s head of SEO, has remarked on the importance of social signals for SEO.

The simple truth is this: having an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks will reward you with a more powerful brand and a better presence in the search engine results pages.

Let’s look at the key benefits of building social signals for your website, from both an SEO standpoint and a general marketing standpoint:

  • Social signals build inbound links to your website. Every Twitter profile that follows your own, for example, builds PageRank to your company’s Twitter profile, which in turn builds PageRank to your website. As such, a modest investment in social media can drastically help with your SEO efforts.

  • Social signals give you a powerful advantage if your website is ever subject to a manual search quality review. Google has invested heavily in technology to remove anonymous, low quality websites from its index. Having a genuine social profile shows that you’re a real company, not an anonymous face.

  • Social signals give your website influence and social proof. If a new customer stumbles upon your website, they’re far more likely to order if they can see that you have hundreds of Twitter followers and happy Facebook fans. In a lot of ways, social followers are the new web’s version of the testimonial.

  • Social signals inspire SEO activity. If your company is a superstar on Twitter or Facebook, it has a great promotional avenue for generating links to blog posts, white papers, and other important promotional content.

Now, some businesses have seen the advantages that social signals offer and tried to spam their way to success. This typically takes the form of buying Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and other key social currencies.

Here’s why it won’t be a successful strategy: real social followers market for you, and a fake social presence gains you all of the worthless aspects of a social following, but none of the beneficial ones. Sure, you have the numbers, but you don’t have the huge promotional power than those numbers can do for you.

When it comes to social signals, the best way to build your company’s influence is to tackle the issue organically. Prepare great content, market it naturally, and enjoy an incredible boost to your SEO efforts and your company’s public brand.

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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.