It’s time for small businesses to face it. Google Places is the new high ground when it comes to Internet advertising. Owning it is crucial to winning the overall small business advertising war. Your website is still important as it ever was, but now there’s a new dimension at play and small business owners are waking up to it fast.

When I talk to people about the internet and ranking highly for a given search term I use the phrase “All things being equal” quite frequently. There are no winners when all things are equal, and that’s not the way real life is.

I want you to be the winner!

Be Sure to Cover the Basics

In the spirit of not beating a dead horse I’m not going to over state the obvious basics of setting up a Google Places ad. In order to get to the top of Google Places in your city you must be accurate when filling out your local ad with the (N.A.P.) of your company listing. NAP is name, address, and phone# of your business. And beyond Google Places, it should be the exact same on your yahoo and bing local ads, also any and all online directories (yelp, merchant circle, hotfrog) you list your site with. Consistency is crucial. (more…)

The other day I was with a potential client here in the Louisville area, and it went the way it usually does. I generally ask the standard how did you hear about us type of questions to see how my own Internet advertising efforts are doing. And I got the same type of response I usually get: “I found you online”.

After I get that out of the way we start discussing what they think they need. The conversation goes this way because I’m a firm believer in letting others tell me their thoughts and then moving on from there. This particular client needed for me to help lower his monthly adwords costs which was in the $200.00 per month range. He was a couple months in and had only sold one small service that he charged $75.00 for so I could see his concern. He simply wasn’t getting a return on his investment, instead he was losing money badly.

After reviewing his keyword selection and making some changes to his ads and the demographics where they were being displayed along with some other basics, I started talking to him about what he was trying to accomplish. And like always at the end he was a bit flustered and also upset with his current web designer.

The conversation went kind of like this. (more…)

Give your mobile visitors what they crave.

As I sit here at my desk looking at a set of google analytics stats I can’t help but to marvel at the increase in the amount of visitors of our mobile viewers. It’s not just us that are seeing this either. All across the internet, business owners that check their web stats are noticing hits from mobile viewing devices have gone from 0 just a few short years ago to close to 30% in our case.

Think about it. When was the last time you were out in public and didn’t see somebody texting on their cell phone? They’re not all texting friends or hitting up face book. Some are actually looking for products and services

Obviously the stats I quote are going to be different regarding ohter sites. But still, 30% is a large number and not to be taken lightly.

Case in point. I was out in the field last week visiting a client, while I was waiting to get started I got a call from another potential client. She wanted some pricing info so I asked if she was still on our website and she was like.. “Yeah, I’m still there”! When I asked if she could fill out our form so I would have her info, she told me no because she was buzzing down the highway in her car, and didn’t think typing on her phone would be a good idea at the time. And me, always being the marketer and stat junky that I am, asked her “would it be OK if I ask about your searching habits?

Mobile friendly landing pages for your site are essential.

Here’s what I learned. She didn’t type a search string into her phone because she was driving. Instead she used googles mobile browser with voice search and just spoke in the term of what she wanted.

After the returns came back she clicked on a few till one came back with a mobile friendly page (like ours does), then she just pressed the button that said “CALL US”. According to her she doesn’t like visiting a site, then having to leave it while trying to remember the number. Then having to open her dialing pad and dialing. According to her “That’s just not going to happen. It’s unsafe!” It’s just so much easier to have a “CALL US’ option. And without it? We’d never have gotten to speak to her.

If you’re not on board with the proper landing pages for your mobile visitors, you’re losing out on a serious amount of contacts that you could easily be interacting with.

I’ll write more on this topic in the future, because face it. The future is here!