Posts Tagged ‘local small business’

Yahoo! Is Hyping Local: Should We Care?

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

Yahoo! has always been big on small business. Now, with AT&Ts help, they’re getting even more serious. The question is, should we care?

There are a few reasons to be skeptical about this move by Yahoo! First among them is the brand new search engine Bing. While far from being the savior of search technology, Bing has proven that it has the mojo to be competitive and to keep the search market interesting. They’ve even managed to take a little bit of the search market from Yahoo!

But that’s not the only reason to be skeptical of Yahoo!s interest in small business. Here are a few others:

  • Display advertising is the least effective form of online advertising
  • Yahoo! doesn’t really care about search
  • As Yahoo! continues to lose search market share, there will be fewer reasons to advertise there
  • PPC advertising, dominated by Google, is far more effective

I’m sure we could think of a few more. Bottom line, if Yahoo! isn’t going to get serious about search then there won’t be many reasons for people to go there. Games and e-mail just won’t cut it. Am I the only one who is skeptical here, or am I off base?

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Posted in Local Internet Marketing | 7 Comments »

Is Small Business SEO Really About Keywords And Links?

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

You hear it all the time: Keywords and links, keywords and links, keywords and links. Is that really what it’s all about?

Well, let’s just say that managing your keywords is just a part of the territory. Building and managing links, too, is a part of running an online business, but there are some links that you have no control over. You can’t always manage the anchor text people use to link to you, or what page they link to either. But you can guide your link building efforts in some ways.

For local small businesses, the game is a little different than it is Internet-only businesses. If you sell widgets online then you need to show up in the SERPs for widget as much as you can and try to capture those long-term phrases as well. Locally, it may not be as important to rank well for the generic and long-term keyword phrases. You just need to rank well for them along with your geographic place names and search terms. And that’s easier to do.

Let’s say that “widget” returns 1 million results. Most of those results will be for website that represent businesses based all over the world. But if you narrow your search to “widget Minnesota” then you’ll cut down on the number of results. Let’s say it comes to 350,000. Narrow it further still to “widget st. paul minnesota” and you could narrow those results to less than 100,000. But what do you do with that.

In most cases, you not only should pay attention to the keyword phrases you use, but try to capture each phrase for all the relevant variations of your geographic search terms (i.e. st. paul minnesota, st. paul minn, etc.). You even want to try to capture zip codes, counties, townships, and even individual neighborhoods if possible.

So you can see how local SEO is a bit different than typical SEO. The principles are the same, but going about how to achieve them a little different.

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Posted in SEO for Small Business | No Comments »

Briz.com Offers Local Networking For Small Businesses

Friday, July 11th, 2008

A new website has entered the social networking space for small businesses. The name is Briz.com.

After playing around with this website for a little bit I’ve discovered that there is much more to it than one might expect simply by the brief description above. There are some unique features to Briz.com that make it stand out above other social networking sites. The obvious comparisons are MySpace, Facebook, and LinkIn. But Briz.com is nothing like any of these, but it does provide some of the same features as each.

For instance, like Facebook, you can open a profile and network with other local businesses, but unlike Facebook, Briz.com is organized so that consumers can have an account and save their favorite local businesses into a group called My Briz while the business owners themselves can establish a profile that gives a complete description of their business and allows them to network with consumers, other businesses, and suppliers.

One unique feature that I like about Briz.com is that you add other businesses to your profile. If you own a chain of stores, for instance, you can add a profile for each location and choose to put them under the same profile heading or create a separate profile page for each business. You can do this all through one account. Briz.com also allows marketing companies to create a marketing account and manage the business profiles of their clients, another feature that I find to be extremely helpful (wink wink).

Briz.com is not intuitive until you start setting up your business account. I did have a little difficulty figuring out how to navigate from setting up a personal account to getting the business profile started. But once I figured that out, setting up the business profile was easy.

If you are a local business and you are looking for a way to network with other local businesses and consumers in your area then Briz.com looks like a good resource.

As a consumer, you can send messages to businesses, add them as favorites and friends, visit websites, vote on your favorite businesses, and post feedback about businesses. Briz.com offers businesses an opportunity to connect to consumers, suppliers and other businesses and provides consumers a way to rate their favorite businesses. Not a bad system at all.

Would you like Small Business Mavericks to set you up a business profile at Briz.com? We can.

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Posted in Branding, Social Media | 2 Comments »