Many of our clients have web site's which are very successful - they generate a lot of new business and are a vital asset to the companies that own them. They all offer their services in London, Nationwide, or Worldwide.
We also have a handful of smaller businesses whose businesses have a local customer base. They are looking for business within a few miles radius of their premises - they do not want enquiries from Newcastle or Dundee. These clients do not have successful web sites because very few people in their areas are searching for their services. e.g. Florists in Hampshire.
When selling a web site to a local business it's got to the point where I am perhaps being a bit too honest about the amount of business they can expect it to generate - to the point where I am starting to think that it's not really a good use of an advertising budget to pay for web design and seo if a company has a relatively small target market - maybe the money would be better spent in the local paper?
Any thoughts on this?
Just a thought.
Its a good idea. We run a local one, and there is a steady trickle of interest from it
There are also some other local portals which send traffic.
We may start a local portal for our area too, just a cae of how it prioritises against other projects.
Next thing you know, the initially skeptical national parent company (who told them not to bother with online ordering) opened a nationwide directory with online order forms for all their franchises. (Not that I explicitly know of a connection between the two, but...)
Of course, that meant the local store threw away my site design. :(
If you have enough clients in your area, those on the outside may begin to develop the impression that they are left out and missing on an opportunity.
It also creates a centre that local residents can be sure of, i.e. they know who you are and they know you have them in mind
May I ask what area you work in shuffler? I think I might be close to you
I agree that the local directory/portal is a good idea. However, we are currently getting business from all over the UK which means that this isn't possible for all clients
brotherhood_of_LAN, I'm based in London. If you go back 2 generations my ancestors might have been near yours :)
London based clients are easy to get decent traffic for - it's ones outside that seem more difficult
OK, so the web site is still a good idea. What about SE positioning? Is it viable for local businesses? Or is it robbery to try and charge them £xxx for a service that may not bring them much business?
Other than that, print up flyers to hang around town, and get some radio or TV ads with the website info in them. You'll probably do better with word of mouth. If there's a local ISP with some kind of area business directory on their site, that would be worth listing with, perhaps.
some local web designer made this, it isnt ranked in the main search engines, it uses frames and some of the buttons do not work. Last month the site got 26 visitors and the w/master charged £30 for taking digital photos of the cars
IMO, if you think you can do a better job, charge for your services. Be it SEO, design, attracting people to link to the site or whatever.
The way I see it, if you can give them a ROI then they will see you as value of money for yours service
elementary you say watson :)
He gets approximately 50 visitors per day.
He also maintains meticulous records of where his new customers come from and provides me with excellent ROI figures. Last year his internet generated customers provided a ROI of over 500%
He is a very happy customer.
do the key words that he gets his 50 hits from include the location or area as one of the words?
how cheap is it to get your site listed in 100000copies of the local rag! :)
There was a great thread a while back about your average searcher.
Just look at the sort of things people search on using Overture search tool.
The site actually has a very low conversion rate < 0.1% but they key thing is that the value is high on a conversion, especially if they do a good enough job to get the repeat business from the customer coming back.
example: a local garage
on site info on light maintenance, such as how to check tire pressure, importance of keeping fluid levels up, safer winter driving (if you have winter) what to keep in an emergency kit (or buy one on site, or at the shop)
capture email, send emails when running special on tuneups, reminders for inspection time, rotate tires, sale on batteries, discount on car wash, how to pack your car for a trip (and come in for tuneup/ checkup before driving a long distance)
If you really wanted to get sophisticated, you could let drivers keep individual records of when to come in for oil changes, set up a maintenance calendar etc. .(alternately, the shop could keep the records, and mail reminders)
Too many people think web sites stand alone. When used in a local campaign, this is short sighted. The possibilities are limited only by the combined creativity of the developer and the client. As with any marketing /advertising method, tracking ROI is the key, and you cannot really do that, until you implement the strategy, and track it. Costs of doing this via the web are low enough to experiment, IMHO.
The local portal is also a fabulous idea which is often overlooked. With surprisingly little offline branding, you can capture the interest of the local audience. Major SE's and portals are not known for their depth of information on local and regional areas.
Most importantly though is I educate them on how to promote their online business offline and their offline business online (if that makes sense). I have seen so many customers build the tackiest of web sites when their bricks and mortar premises are breath-taking.
At the end of the day 50 unique targetted visitors a day to a niche product site where say 10% turn into customers will be better than one that has 50,000 uniques who want to get hold of a free ringtone or something like that. But if by good SEO you can turn that 50 uniques into say 75 then you would expect a 50% increase in revenue, but I always try to manage the expectations in advance and if the expectations don't match up with the budget they have then it's best to walk away before you begin, my customers respect me more for being honest with them.
Elementary, Im going to submit to the likes of Google, Yahoo, ODP etc to ensure that the site is found in the "mainstream"
However, I appreciate the fact that local visitors are much more valuable. How did you go about targetting these local people.
Living in the UK, Im going to be submitting to the likes of Yell.com, local business directories etc, but perhaps you have particular methods in getting your desired local traffic
Id love to know ..... ;)
Richard
The secret ingredient though is hard graft, lots of link pop work on behalf of clients, lots of surfing to find new sites, reading lots of magazines (no not that sort!), lots of reading newspapers seeing who is advertising (where I get a lot of my prospects from actually, no web site listed = web development prospect, web site listed = visit to site and if not very good = web re-development prospect. The good news is that the worst that happens is they might say no to me, I don't die or break out in a rash, SME's are desperate for help, especially online help. SEO (when you call it that confuses them, they understand the terms adverts, marketing so I talk in their language.
Not sure if that helps at all.
Do you have a systematic approach after completing a site for a local company?
i.e. submit to big boys
2. Lesser directories
3. local directories
4. local sites
When approaching people about making them a site, I have the same attitude as you. It wont break my heart if they're not interested, but part of me knows half the people who say no do so only because they are not open to the advantages of having a site. This is particularly the case in my area, where local businesses tend to stick to a one page site, which is a subdomain of a larger regional site.
Link pop for these sites is usually non-existant too. All in all, I think their are opportunities in this area, and a whole lot of enlightenment to come ;)
I'd love to see some of your sites webdiv, and any other info about how you go about promoting your local businesses too. I love info ;) Feel free to sticky me to compare notes or whatever, but definetely feel free to post me some URL's of the sites you have made.
Thanks for the info to date
Richard
Systematic approach depends on the objectives of the clients.
To be honest I get involved in very few fresh builds, normally I get called by companies who have a site and it's doing poorly.
I've built up a network of complimentary business associates who offer different things (database developers, flash animators, SEO, usability, training companies) that all enhance the experience of having a web site.
The other thing I do which may be different (not sure if it is), is that I tend to take very little money upfront but charge a "retainer" on a monthly basis, to provide rankings reports, alterations, spider visits, consultancy. That way the figures quoted don't sound so much and you have an ongoing residual income stream for as long as you keep someone happy.
No direspect to people that offer it but I have picked up lots of unhappy people who have paid for a "one hit" solution and been very unhappy but because the fee was all upfront the company providing it had no buy in to the project.
Confession time here, I do not work with companies that are looking for rankings, I'm not interested in them, what I care about is the traffic a site generates. Give me a couple of months and I'd get any company top 5 rankings on lots of search engines for obscure search terms that a handful of people search for, have I done well? Nah. If someone is number 25 for a generic term that translates into good traffic and sales for the company, have I done well ? Customers think so.
I said it in a previous posting, no magic formula, hard graft, assertiveness with clients (i.e. you do what I know to work or we don't do business), and everything done on a bespoke basis because every businesses objectives are different.
I started off selling a purely SEO solution, which I found didn't work too well. Now we are selling a much broader solution to get traffic to sites, we no longer talk search engine rankings as our measure but number of unique visitors.
The client isn't interested (well not that interested) in where these visitors are coming from, he just wants to know that people are visiting the site and making enquiries.
That's exactly my philosophy on the subject.
I even offer the hosting for companies because so many hosts don't provide the access to data needed to do the analysis properly. It's another revenue stream to the model. Dedicated servers are not that expensive to buy and bandwidth is really cheap now.
Getting lots of hits for a generic term seems likely to deliver more "tyre kickers".
Brett's Search Engine Theme Pyramids [searchengineworld.com] article describes the idea well.
If the site offers very specialist services (eg. a particular kind of music or accommodation in a specific area) then you're likely to be listed top quickly under the most niche terms, then get some broader terms later on. I tend to find that the extra traffic from "better" listings that come along don't deliver a corresponding increase in sales. eg. Each "hotel in mytown" referal is worth many "hotel in mycountry" referals.
Calum
I am assuming that many small businesses will not be able to gain legitimate incoming links from sites who are also deemed as 'important' or adjudged as 'highly visited' by Google (excluding directories such as Yahoo etc.)
Am I mistaken in this assumption?
On the other hand Google is very good at finding very on topic sites so where a major site goes to much into generalisation and marketing speak they often lose out to a smaller more focused site for specific keywords.
On most topics now a site with page rank below 3 will be lost in the search results. Page rank 3-5 is not that hard to achieve through free listing and good directory placement.
On competitive keywords you really need a PR of 6+ to be in with a shout, this is much harder - though not impossible - to achieve.
If a client is in a highly competitive market and are determined to use even slightly 'generalist' keyphrases you will be buried by the likes of syndicated LS directory listings or Pay Per Click results. I am starting to think that there are more effective ways to bring your company/products/services to the attention of your audiences than search engines per se -
