Last chapter we talked about how to do local keyword research, and dominate your market. That chapter maybe one of the most important chapters because, if you can’t do research on who’s searching for your product or services then you’re in big trouble.

You need to know what keywords people are using to find what you have to offer. Not doing this in the right manner leaves your business out to dry while the competition steals all the online customers.

Yes, no matter what business you’re in, people are searching online for what you have to offer so don’t overlook this like it’s just an online thing. If your business is offline and you feel like it’s important to be listed in the big yellow book “YellowPages,” then you better believe it’s 100 times more important to be found online. Reason being is that no one carries around that big yellow book anymore, but they do have mobile phones at their fingertips.

Wink, Wink, doing local searches…get it

So today you have the keywords you want to target, let’s build this online presence so hundreds if not thousands of people can find your business without me spending tons of money on advertising. For this whole chapter I will still be using the “Shreveport Real Estate” keyword as my local business I’m trying to dominate. Remember over 1,900 searches for that keyword per month, so if I have a real estate business in Shreveport best believe I want to be found locally.

The best way I’m going to do this with or without a website, is that I’m going to be using business directories to do this. The power of using business directories will just blow your mind by the time you complete this chapter.

What Are Business Directories?

How has the internet changed since the early days when I started back in the late 90’s? I can’t even tell you if I remember seeing business directories online. Plus, the only one that most people knew about was from Yahoo. Think you had to pay tons of money just to be listed in that one.

Gratefully now there are tons of these sites that allow you to submit your business information for free which will be indexed by the search engines. If you do any google search on most big name companies you will most likely see the yellow page, manta, Angie’s List, Google places and much more I can’t list.

These sites are here to give you, the searcher, an overview looks as of the company you’re searching for. You don’t even have to search a company name, all you have to do is type in “the city + keyword” then it will spit back targeted information.

This is a great place to have your business due to the many factors that I will be talking about here in the minute. But overall just understand these sites are free to be listed on, so it will be wise to dominate this space of marketing if your competitors are not.

How Do They Work?

To the average person, these sites are nothing more than a big yellow page book to get a phone number, address, and ect. But good old marketers like me see them as gold mines for local businesses, and this is the reason I created this local marketing guide.

I know that these sites are powerful if you did the right keyword research, and willing to put in a little time to get them filled out completely.

So all you have to do as a business owner is to go to any of these sites, and set up a free account. First, make sure your business is not already posted if so then all you have to do is claim it.

Once you have an account, now it’s time to fill out all the information from A to Z. Don’t leave any stones unturned because you want as much content on your listing than the local competition. The more complete your profile listing, the more visibility you will have over your competitors.

The setup of these sites are easy as pouring a glass of water. You can easily setup a fully customizable profile in about 20 to 30 minutes if you really take your time. So, before you know it you will have built your first online presence, and one step from someone searching and finding your business.

How Can Business Directories Grow My Business?

I remember for years people thought it was best to start with your website when it came to local rankings. Marketers said it was best to put in more work right off the back to get your own site to the top of the search engines before your small business profiles.

Since the search engines over the years has turned a whole 360 in the way they rank websites from its algorithm such as panda, penguin and the latest the hummingbird. The releases of these animal updates really hurt the old way of doing SEO for your own site.

Now it’s taking a real long time for your personal site to get that authority it needs to even rank locally. So, instead of starting with your website it’s best to build your online presence through the major business profile sites, and then bring your personal site along later.

Now it’s time to learn how these sites help grow my brand and overall business? The first thing you as a business owner need to understand is that people are searching for that local car dealership and ice cream shop. So the only way you will be able to get in front of all those people who are searching for these places of your own business is to be everywhere.

Being everywhere is going back to our example for this local marketing guide. Our keyword is “Shreveport real estate” so every word that someone searches for online that contains “Shreveport + any real estate type word,” then I want to be the company profile or website to come up.

Now, if I do the research it will show that there are about 1,000 keywords that contain my main keywords and/or similarly searched terms. So these 1,000 words are getting anywhere from 5k to 10k total combined searches per month.

 

So it’s my job to create hundreds or not thousands of places online that contain these keywords so whenever someone searches for anything in this industry concerning “Shreveport real estate” my content or profiles will come up.

By having this sort of online presence is more powerful than any type of advertising you can name. What other platform allows you to put your brand in front of potential 10k people per month that targeted. This is all forms of free marketing that your competitors are not doing so if I were you then I will be on the first bus to get this done today.

There are 25 to 50 small business profile sites that are the cream of the crop that you can start using today by setting up your company information on. But to be honest, there are hundreds and thousands of them out there which you can be using also.

In this guide, I’m only going to list the top 50 so you don’t get too overwhelmed. The other thousand or so I have are mainly the ones I use for my clients who really want to target every area of the market so their domination is felt throughout.

Business Directories to List Your Business With

1. Google Places (aka Google+ Local)
2. Facebook
3. LinkedIn
4. Yellowpages.com
5. Yelp
6. Local.com
7. WhitePages.com
8. Manta
9. SuperPages
10. CitySearch
11. Patch
12. City-Data
13. MerchantCircle
14. Yellowbook.com
15. Yahoo Local
16. Mapquest
17. Topix
18. DexKnows
19. Yellow.com
20. BBB.org
21. ServiceMagic
22. Angieslist
23. AreaConnect
24. Foursquare
25. AmericanTowns
26. BizJournals
27. LocalGuides
28. 411.com
29. Yellowpages.aol.com
30. Insider Pages
31. MagicYellow
32. Hotfrog.com
33. Mojopages
34. Switchboard
35. Demandforce
36. MojoPages
37. Bundle
38. Metromix
39. Yellowbot
40. Kudzu
41. ShowMeLocal
42. ChamberofCommerce
43. LocalPages
44. HopStop
45. YellowMoxie
46. Phonenumber.com
47. Best of the Web Local
48. Yellowise
49. GetFave
50. Tupalo
51. ZipLocal
52. EZLocal
53. CitySquares
54. USCIty.net
55. LocalDatabase

Secret of Local Domination

Now comes what you all have been waiting for which is the process I will take if I was doing this for my business. Now this is all by hand so it’s a little time-consuming, but it works if you want to do it yourself or hire someone to do it for you.

The whole key to this is to optimize each and every small business directory you sign up for. You have to make sure each one of them hit on at least 3 to 5 of the keywords you’re looking to rank for locally.

Your goal is to have all the 55 profile websites above fully filled out and optimized for at least 3 keywords. So, now this puts you at around 150 keywords that a potential customer/client can find you by doing a search on the major search engines.

Just simply doing this easy to do action is the difference between an extra 100 or so people visiting your place of business each month. Only because you took action to build the beginning stages having an online presence that you’re in the running of dominating your local market. Now the game gets even better when you have your business listed on 100, 500 to even 2,000 small business profile sites optimized for every keyword in your market. “Numbers Don’t Lie”

The Daily Game Plan to Follow

What I said before is that doing this by hand is time-consuming, but best of all it’s free to do. So, you have to crank the muster to do it or hire someone to take care of it.

So, what I would do if I had to do this myself manually, is that I would create a game plan that will be easy to implement, and not kill too much of my time away from my business.

First – I will take a two-week approach on this project to get my business listed on all the 55 business profile sites above. The goal is to get all of my profiles completely filled throughout within two weeks to get the ball rolling.

The objective will be to do and complete three business profiles per day at a mere 20 minutes per profile. Now it will be possible to do this in this amount of time because you should keep the information you need at your fingertips in some notepad.

This is your name of the business, address, phone numbers, logos and ect…having these items present on your hard drive will be as simple as copy and paste. So, if you’re doing this manually then you should not be spending no more than one hour per day to get this project done in two weeks or so.

Second – Now it’s been two weeks, and all of your profiles are completely done. You should be able to search the name of your company and see all the listing you created. Now, if you don’t see all of them don’t worry too much because sometimes the search takes a couple of days or weeks to index them.

Now comes the fun part, and the reason why you need to build an online presence to be able to dominate your local market.

Potential Results

Just wanted to say that results for your business will be a lot different than your counterparts. Depending on your industry, some businesses will get more searches per month versus others.

Meaning in the “Shreveport real estate” market gets around 1,900 searches per month. While another industry who focus on “Shreveport Ice Cream Shops” may only get 300 searches per month.

No matter the number, just understand that as long as you’re getting targeted traffic it doesn’t matter how big or small the searches…never forget that. So never get upset when you do keyword research, and the monthly traffic is low because no matter what somebody will search for what you have to offer.

Here are some examples of the way your listing title or description should look like. Either way, you do it should bring up one of your local business profiles…such as

• Coleman Investment – Shreveport Real Estate
• Coleman Investment – Shreveport Homes for Sale
• Coleman Investment – Shreveport Home for Rent

If you’re able to get this into your title, then I would say do it because it will help you get that ranking you need locally. But if you find it difficult to add this to the title of your listing, then enter something like this in your description. I say this because some business directories allow you to do this and others don’t so just give it a try.

So, after two weeks of completing these profiles, and you’re ranking not for your business name or your local keywords then it’s time to step up your game. Meaning your listing will need a little SEO love.

Most of your listings will rank well regardless because of the authority of the listing website. But, a good majority of them may lag behind, so you should do a little SEO by using my SEO in Practice ebook. This book will educate you on all parts of SEO, so you can use the basics to move your listing up the ranking.

The Numbers

Once you put in the work of moving your listing up the ranking, you should start to see results. These results will come in the form of more phone calls, website visitors, reviews if you have the right incentives in place.

One of the things most businesses don’t do is that they don’t track their ROI (return on investment) now even though you didn’t spend money on this project if you did it yourself. But, you did put in quality time which is worth something in the long run.

So, the best thing you can do is to track where all of the calls are coming from. Are they coming from the newspaper advertising, radio promotion or are they coming from the online presence. Best believe most of it is coming from the online presence you have which should be around 90% or even 100% if that’s the only marketing you have out there.

One way to track this is by using the free way of just taking notes of the calls that come in. You can simply ask “how did you find us,” and if they say online then record that in a notebook. This is a cheap way of doing it if you don’t have money to spend on something. I suggest you do this to make your life much easier.

I say get a 1-800 number and forward it to your main number. There are many companies online that will help you set this up very inexpensive. Now you will be able to log into your back office account and see how many calls are coming in from your online presence. This is by far the best way because you’re not forcing your customers to remember how they got your number.

Over time you should see tons of calls coming in which will be targeted, and more willing to do business with you. If done right no matter what business you’re in, you should be getting at least 100 more calls per month which turn into 1,200 new calls per year. You wouldn’t have gotten it if you didn’t take the approach of building an online presence. Believe me, it would be hard to get 1,200 people to walk through your doors by doing traditional marketing.

Reviews Builds Creditability

When people are searching for that “Shreveport Attorney” and they come across the listing profiles, then they have a choice to make. That choice usually comes down to the reviews left by previous clients.

The good and bad things about the internet is that it’s a place for freedom of speech. People can go on any review website, and just trash your business or talk highly of you. That line is very thin, and its something you must monitor on a daily basis.

But, what will separate you from the rest is having reviews on your Google Places, Yelp and other listing websites you created. Your goal is to ask for reviews when appropriate. I’m not going to go into depth on how to get more reviews because I will write more about that in a separate blog post.

Just make it your duty to stay active building your reviews online by asking customers to review you. One way of doing this is by having signed up saying that you’re listed on certain business profile sites, and encourage them to leave a review.

Place a link from the profile listing sites on your website which can be easily found. You can just ask them to head over to your website, and follow the link to leave a review.

Last Thoughts

With this guide of dominating your local market, its purpose is to educate you on what’s working for those across the world. Yea, I know many of you are used to the old way of advertising which is the norm for most but it’s time to take on a new way of building your brand.

Many small businesses don’t even know how powerful it is to have an online presence. Hopefully, I at least gave you a blueprint to follow on at least getting some sort of online presence. This could have gotten even deeper but I think just for this guide, it covered the hot spots to get you started.

It’s important to every business to have this setup asap. No matter what industry you’re in it will be wise to build up your visibility today.

But, I’m not going to leave you hanging, so if you need more educational help getting this rolling then don‘t hesitate to contact me. I know most of you are not computer savvy, so help is here for you even if you just need a question answered.

Start Building Your Online Presence Today

 

 Let’s Dominate This Local Market…