SEO Consulting Services by Downright Media

Local SEO... What's That About?

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:25:00 -0400

If you have a brick and mortar business, then without a second thought… you need to focus on your local SEO marketing.

Especially if you depend on walk-in traffic.

You’ve probably heard the term SEO. It stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Basically it’s a strategy to make the search engines aware of your website… specifically using the keywords that best describe your business and website.

But it’s so much more than that… and it can get very difficult.

Let’s say that you are a Dentist in Midtown Manhattan.

It would be silly for a person who is looking for a Dentist in California to visit your website.

This is where local SEO comes in… you would want to tell the search engines that you are a dentist in Midtown Manhattan.

Local SEO… Why

You’ll want to focus on optimizing your local SEO for many reasons. In fact if you only service customers locally, you should only need to focus on you local SEO efforts.

The number one reason being… you are not wasting your efforts targeting unqualified leads. Also your competition is drastically reduced, because you are not competing against the global keyword “dentist”.

In fact, even in a crowded place like Midtown Manhattan your competition is very low. Most small business owners don’t understand what local SEO is… and they wouldn’t hire a large ad agency to consult them.

Also most small business owners are getting advice from their local “Computer Tech Service Provider”, “IT Guy” or their so-called “computer whiz” teenage nephew.

Hardly the experts that I would want to trust… despite their good intentions.

How Local SEO Works For You

People more often then not are researching online before they buy, as a local business if you can control the handful of local keywords you’ll be positioning yourself for success.

So what are these local keywords? Well, “Midtown Dentist” is one, so is “Midtown Cosmetic Teeth Surgery”.

In essence it’s a keyword that describes your services, with your location. But not all of these local keywords would be effective.

You’ll need to research what keywords are worth the effort. Some of the Local SEO keywords have almost no competition, however they get thousands of searches per month.

Imagine how much your business would grow if you received a few thousand extra qualified leads per month.

Think about this… customers are researching online more and more, and it’s only going to increase. So take advantage of the little local SEO competition that you have today. Most of the local SEO traffic is going to the large directories… customers are much more likely to trust you vs a faceless list.

Customers already know that the people at the top of these directory listings, are the business that paid the most… it’s an easy win for you.

How did you like this post?

If you liked it… feel free to share it via Facebook or Twitter and especially with your friends who own small local business.

Are you looking for a Local SEO Consultant or Agency… Talk to us.

Guerilla Online Reputation Management: Low Budget, No Budget, No Clue? No Problem

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:42:00 -0400

Guest Post by Jill Rowen

Everyone who has ever been to high school, or had a friend enter into sorority/fraternity life in college, knows the importance of a reputation. Reputations could make or break your social life; Remember that time at that party when Doug dressed up as a monkey, shoved Richard, fought Mike and then up chucked in the living room? You never knew Doug, that is, until yesterday. However, you have known of Doug for several years since the incident at that party. How are you reacting to meeting him, are you able to overlook what you know about his potential alcoholism and emotional instability? Are you willing to let your friends, family and colleagues know you associate with Doug? Are you able to believe that he has changed over the last few years?

Online Reputation is everything as we grow older and enter into business. The internet acts as a bathroom wall where anything and everything can be written about you, whether true or not, and erasing (managing) your negative feedback is even harder than taking a sharpie and scribbling over the words, hoping not that many people had read it yet. How do we manage our Online Reputation?

You Are Your Brand

For starters, NO ONE, knows YOU or YOUR PRODUCT better than YOU do. Tell people what you do. Tell people how great YOU are. Set the stage for everyone to know exactly who you are before someone else can define you.

Whoever Strikes First Wins

Make sure when someone wants to post disparagingly about you there will be a debate about the post and posters validity. Whoever strikes first wins – and like Charlie Sheen, make sure to wake up winning.

Your Online Reputation Needs Some Work… Now What?

On the off chance you have managed to anger someone out in the world and they decided to bring down your reputation… online. There are few steps that you can take.

Contact the person directly and see if you can smooth this situation over and possibly have them remove or revise their post.
You can always post a reply apology which may smooth things over with a third party viewer, but make sure to not admit fault or guilt. This tactic is only for extreme situations and only meant to make the poster of the bad press look emotionally unstable so no one values their opinion.
If this doesn’t work, recruit your friends to write good things about you/your company/your services so the one bad review seems like an anomaly.
Make sure to not do this all at once so it’s an obvious tactic to dilute your bad press. Ask one or two friends per week to post good posts about you for a month or so, or ask all of your friends at once but do two to three friends per website.
Blog for and about other people/companies. Make friends on the internet who will link to you and say great things about you. Start by blogging about how great someone else is, then send them a link to your post. You will surely get some link love if not a corresponding blog back.
Comment on other blogs related to you/your interests/your company or industry. This will not only make you an expert in your field (and who cares if an expert is criticized, it happens all the time) but it will allow people to form their own opinions of you meaning the bad press will not phase your public as much, if at all.
Use your social media to build a fan base around you to protect you against Internet attacks. Even if every review you had was bad, potential clients have to ask what it is you are doing so right that everyone still loves you.
Having a Facebook page with many likes or a twitter account with 1,000 followers doesn’t mean anything if you’re not active in your community. Post topically, post frequently, and when in doubt, just repost other people’s stuff – they’ll love it.
Reposting is a must and is the ultimate online hype man move. It adds immediate credibility to the original post; everyone who has a hype man is going to return the favor if for no other reason than to ensure that hype mans value for their ultimate, continuing gain.
If your online persona/professional persona is nothing like the way you behave at home, make your personal social media extremely private. If you don’t know someone personally, don’t friend them on Facebook, and keep your tweets locked. If you know them professionally and want to have an online relationship, that’s what LinkedIn is for.

Remember:

Always take the high road. Try not to engage in negativity. If you feel there is no other way to do this, you have one of two options: ask someone else to be negative for you, or commit fully to your new, jerky persona. At least with a jerky persona, people will know you for something rather than nothing, and know what to expect. I highly recommend only using this tactic if your product is in fact, the best, or just that hard to find.

Jill Rowen

Sales and Marketing Coordinator

Apple Visual Graphics

718.361.2000 (phone)

718.433.4587 (fax)

jill@applevisualgraphics.com

www.applevisualgraphics.com

Reputation Management, Online

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 15:33:42 -0400

Online Reputation Management is a topic of growing concern for businesses of all sizes. One of the good things is that you can automate some of this process. The bare minimum that a company should be doing is setting up Google Alerts, and maybe setting up services like TagBulb & BlogPulse.

But what can you do after that? So we sourced the advice to two Titans.

Ann Smarty & Barry Schwartz

Ann Smarty is:

The founder of SeoSmarty and MyBlogGuest and is an Editor and Blogger at Search Engine Journal

Ann says that:

The first thing that a business should do is to embrace and understand Social Media Search.

Filter out Clutter and Find Real Brand-Related Discussions:

Filter out links in Twitter search with [-filter:links] operator
Play with emotional coloring (using the smile emoticons) as well as search for tweeted questions
Use | operator in Facebook to find more relevant conversations

Ann expands on the topic on a post that she wrote on Mashable, Advanced Social Media Search.

Ann also shares a few more advanced tips on using various tools to monitor your brand online:

You can follow Ann Smarty on:

SEOSmarty and be sure to follow her on Twitter @SEOSmarty

Barry Schwartz is:

CEO at RustyBrick, Executive Editor of Search Engine Roundtable and News Editor at Search Engine Land

Barry says that:

“Google Alerts are the bare minimum a brand (company, product, personal name) should be using to track what blogs, writers and their customers are saying about them. Google Alerts works very well, I personally like the RSS subscription option, but they all work well.

Aside from your own rep management, track your partners, to see where they stand financially or competitively. I once wrote about tracking my bank, during the time of the banks were having issues because of mortgages. I rather be early to read if a partner is having issues or their CEO gets booted than finding out from that partner directly.”

You can follow Barry on RustyBrick and on Twitter at @RustyBrick

It’s all very clear

If you are not monitoring your reputation online… then you need to do so. As I said earlier, most of this will be automated for you. It just takes a moment to set things up. Feel free to share your thoughts and comments with us on this topic of Online Reputation Management.

Hello My name is William Perez. I was wondering what made you reblog my picture? Im trying to get into the Advertising industry and I was wondering if you could help me get a head start into the advertising industry,

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 17:04:48 -0400

William…

Thanks for the question.

- That photo had a strong message… It was a great Ad.

- Checkout the Power 150, and add some of these sites to your daily read.

- Join LinkedIn and use it daily… join groups and engage with others

- The easiest way to get a job in the Online, Marketing World is in sales. It’s also the best way to become a known name in your industry as you move into Business Development. From that you can move into just about any position.

- Join a local Toast Master Club, this will teach you how to speak to a group and to present your ideas clearly.

- Take an active role in face to face networking

I hope that this helps.

What a strong message elitefreshness: Good Campaign, Good...

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 01:31:16 -0400

What a strong message

elitefreshness:

Good Campaign, Good Cause.

The Keys to Building Influencer Status on Twitter

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 18:15:00 -0400

We at Downright Media love Social Media. As a business owner, Twitter gives you the opportunity to interact with your industry and customers in a way that has never existed before in history. However, It can have a downside. Especially if you are the type of person that can get distracted easily. So we’ve gone ahead and created this executable action plan for you.

Get Clicky

Go to GetClicky.com and create an account for your site. Get Clicky will let you monitor and analyze your web traffic. You can also use Google Analytics if you like. The important thing is have this website traffic data. Without it, you are wasting your time and effort.

Growing Your Twitter Following

Twitter usage has been exploding over the last year years. In fact Google and other search engines think so highly of Twitter that they have started to include realtime tweets into search results. The problem is that Twitter can seem like a huge conversation about nothing. This is why most people don’t understand nor get Twitter. They say things like “Why do I care about what so and so had for lunch?” and that’s true.

The opportunity with Twitter is knowing how to read the signal from the noise. Meaning, you should be able to find the conversations that matter to you. So if you love Indie Rock Bands from Brooklyn, you should find that conversation, listen in or contribute to it. It’s that simple. Twitter is brilliant finding real-time conversations on whatever matters to you.

Okay so let’s move into growing your Twitter Following.

Use the “Advanced Search” on Search.Twitter.com for Your Research
Follow Influencers in Your Chosen Field
Add friends ( find like minded people)
Remove Friends ( 36 hours if they haven’t friended you)
Interact & Engage
Rinse & Repeat

Follow all the influencers in your field. Start adding people that follow these Twitter influencers and are like minded, remember Twitter has many automated account or Twitter Bots that just ReTweet things and don’t add anything to the conversation. Stay away from these guys, you only want real people.

Don’t go crazy and add too many, Twitter will ban your account. Remove friends that haven’t followed you back, give them about a 36 hour window. Again don’t go crazy here, Twitter will ban you if you unfollow too fast. Interact and engage this new audience, you have to be genuine. Whatever topic you pick should be your passion, so this should be easy for you. Lastly Rinse & Repeat.

Following this game-plan will increase your Twitter following and with time will make you an influencer. The best thing about become an influencer is that your Twitter following will start to grow organically. People will start to follow you automatically, which makes you even more of an influencer in the eyes of others.

Now make sure that your Twitter page leads to your site. You basically want your Twitter traffic to generate leads into your sales funnel. It’s okay if you don’t have a product or service to sell. Just have the ability to send your Twitter followers to something. It could be your blog, your resume or anything else that you want to promote and use to solidify your influencer status.

By continually working on this action plan, you will increase your Twitter friends, followers, fans, influencer status and your bottom-line.

Let us know what you think? Continue the conversation in our comments section.

jaymug: Hard Rock Cafe Advertising - Rockin Fork

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:06:06 -0400

jaymug:

Hard Rock Cafe Advertising - Rockin Fork

How Small Businesses Can Compete Against National Brands Using Google Maps

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 16:01:42 -0400

Most people think that Google Maps is just for finding directions. Today smart local business owners worldwide are using Google Maps as part of their internet marketing campaign. Google Maps has the ability to increase sales. Every business should take advantage of this powerful business generating tool. There is no reason for you to be left behind. It is free, it is easy, and it literally puts you on the map against your competitors.

When someone on the internet searches for a term that is relevant to your business. You want your company name to come up within the search results. Preferably as one of the first results. A business can optimize certain things to increase the likelihood of being among these first top results. This is called Search Engine Optimization. Typically it can be very costly and time consuming, but with large rewards. Right now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be applied to Google Maps. For example, if you type the word ‘Plumber’ followed by your local area in Google. You will see that Google Maps will display a lists of plumbing companies in that specific area.

You can do some very simple things to attract more business from this Google Maps listing. This is huge, it levels the playing field for the small business. The obvious benefit here is that it gives the small local business a fighting chance against bigger national companies that also service your local area. If you are a small company, you may not have the budget to optimized your website in order to rank higher in the Google search results. However, with Google Maps SEO you get to be on this precious piece of digital real estate without having to come out with a huge budget. In fact your best strategy here is offering a discount to customers who review your business. You’ll notice that most businesses don’t have any reviews. You can actually dominate your local market by just filling out all your business information in Google Maps and having real customers review your service.

As a small business who uses Google Maps, you are targeting local customers. Believe it or not, most customers prefer supporting smaller local businesses. So if you have a handful of great reviews, you should be able to easily compete with the larger national brands.

However, if you want to start to include Google Maps into your marketing campaign, it is best to consult an SEO specialist. This would save you a lot of money and avoid having to go through trial and error experience as they would set up everything for you seamlessly. If not, be sure to do proper study and research on effectively using Google Maps for your small local business.

Why Social Marketing Benefits Your Small Business

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 23:30:54 -0400

So we know that we have many social networks that you can sign up your small business for. This phenomenon of Social Marketing is here to stay, and if used right you have a huge opportunity to really grow your business. Let’s look at the two networks that everyone needs to use right now. The current heavy weight king of social networks is Facebook. This is the biggest, that baddest, and most established website in the social scene. You can pretty much do everything that you need to do on Facebook to grow your business, without any cost to you.

The key with Social Marketing is engagement, and it’s no different with Facebook. If you want your fans to keep coming back to your fan page, you need to have an open line of communication with them.

You can easily do this by:

Asking Questions
Answer Questions
Posting Photos, Videos
Individually Thanking Your Fans
Offering Facebook Only Specials

You also don’t want to overwhelm your fans. If your Facebook fans don’t think that your status updates are useful, they can just as easily un-fan your page. So be sure to keep this in mind before blindly posting every few minutes. Ask yourself this question before updating your status, “Does this information benefit my customers?” If it doesn’t, don’t post it.

The next big player in the social network landscape that all small business owners should use, is Twitter. I really like Twitter for the small business. Mainly because they train you to be brief and concise. Since you only have 140 characters to use, you better use them wisely. This allows you to think like a Newspaper Editor. Think about this for a moment. If you read news paper and magazine headlines, you pretty much have an idea of what the article is about. But if you need more information, or you find the headline interesting you’ll read the entire article.

You should use your Twitter status exactly like this. Give a short, very to the point headline, with a link back to a page on your site with all the information that they need to know. Twitter is very powerful to the small business owner. You can search for people that have questions and problems in your field, and help them just by answering a question. How amazing is that?

The benefits of social marketing are many, however you shouldn’t see this activity as a task. You should see this as a genuine way to interactive with your audience. As we all know, people like doing business with people that they like.

What a great message from Amnesty...

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:26:53 -0400

What a great message from Amnesty International.

jaymug:

Amnesty International: Fight with signatures - Signatures can be as powerful as bullets. Join Amnesty International in the fight against death penalty.

oliphillips: Skittles Advertising

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 02:12:53 -0400

oliphillips:

Skittles Advertising