Google Local Searches – Article Marketing

A well structured article is the key to generate more leads to your website. We all know that writing articles can be a time consuming process. You need to pick a topic, get everything you know down on paper, research supporting statistics, structure the article and then send it. Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with new topics to write about.

Here are simple guides to make it easier for you next time:

1. Make a schedule for writing articles. It is very important that you do this so that you won’t get lost. How many articles can you write per day? Think on a number, and commit to yourself to write a few articles every single day.
2. Keep writing articles, that’s the only way to get better. By doing this not only you will get better, but you will also have more posted articles which will return as more traffic. The more you write the better leads you get.
3. Look for ideas. This happens to everyone sometimes. Even the best authors can’t come up with all the ideas. If you don’t know what to write about, look for authors that write about the same topics as you and see what they are writing about, take some key ideas and write your own article.

Great sources of ideas for topics are your old blog posts. However you can not just copy and paste these old blog posts directly into article directories. To do so you risk content duplication penalties and thus web traffic to your article will be negatively impacted. Refrain from re-working the article line by line. Google bots have become very sophisticated at recognizing patterns and changing words here and there is not sufficient to fool them anymore.

Also give your article a catchy title, that’s what people see first. It is crucial that you have a good one, or they won’t read your article. Those who have compelling articles got the most views. Some examples of good titles are:

“How to…”
“Top 5…”
“10 Ways to…”
“Learn About…”
“The Best…”
“Most Common Mistakes…”

These are titles that attract people because they know they will learn something from it.

But what if your business is a local, non-internet based business? Article marketing can definitely work for you. Article marketing attracts targeted customers. It is an excellent way to draw targeted traffic to your website. It also helps your customers find you. If a customer tries to look for something like your business, he/she will Google it. The objective of article marketing is to get more leads coming from popular searches of Google Local.

Just write articles on your niche and submit them. Include your location in your resource box. Keep on doing this regularly as a part of your marketing plan.

Google Local Searches – Rank High

Most local small business owners probably do some marketing offline to gain customers. These small business owners will probably just hire someone to make a website and thinks they will be in business online and gain instant customers. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen.

Having a website online isn’t going to help your business unless it shows up in the first two pages of Google. When a user looks for information online through Google local searches, the top ten most relevant web search results will come up. Putting yourself on the shoes of your customer, do you look at further pages of Google when making your local search? In online business marketing, you need to rank at the top of internet searches.

Since the average small business website is after customers online you need to get on the first page, the odds are extremely high that if someone looks up for something like dry cleaners in Austin and your business doesn’t pop up on the first page then they are not going to click on your website to see what you have to offer.

So, not only do you need a website, you need a website that will be listed in the top page of Google when someone searches for your type of business. Otherwise your just wasting your time and money hiring someone to get you a website developed.

If you are operating a business in your local area, you would want it to appear in popular searches on Google so that you can work towards gaining more and more reputation and customers from your area, so that you can beat the competition. You can use several ways to make sure that you are on the top in your local area. One way could be advertising. You need to learn how to list your local business online because it’s a medium that will be around for a long time and it is growing rapidly today.

Here are various methods of advertising you could use, as well as methods to list your local business online:

If you are operating a local business, it is most likely that you have a small advertising budget, and you would look to find out the methods by which you can advertise without going over your limits. You would also want your advertisement to be effective in the sense that it would reach out to all of your targeted consumers. Well, the first and most commonly used method you could use is newspapers advertising.

Printing ads in the newspapers can be reasonably easy and cheap. You would just have to go at the newspaper agency and give them the details of the advertisement that you want to place in their newspaper. Another option that you could utilize would be through the flyers. However, you should take care with them because if their circulation is not in the right area, you wouldn’t benefit from them at all.

You could also benefit from the yellow pages directory in this regard, but the thing is that not many people pay attention to yellow pages or the newspaper ads or the flyers these days. More and more customers are starting to use the internet to initially check things out online before going to a local business, which gives you even more of a reason to start listing your local business online and getting the potential customer leads from there. In this way, you would be spending less amount of money on the advertisements and will gain more because the internet has a lot of target public.

The internet can be the most affordable deal for you, and also the wisest choice, which is due to the fact that a lot of people search on the internet for the products or services that they want to acquire, and they would go around buying from the dealer available nearest from their house. In this way, if you list your local business online, you would get a lot of hits per day because there would be a lot of people in your area that don’t even know that you are running this local business, and just because they searched on the internet for it, they would come to you and buy the stuff that you are selling.

You don’t need your website to be too fancy. The simpler and functional, the better. And make sure that it is SEO-friendly so that your website appears on the top of the list among the others in your competition.