Questions that I get all of the time from business owners is how to get more leads? It’s something that all business owners are looking for to help grow their business into the success that they always dreamed of. People want to gain those leads, clients, and customers who are ready to do business with them.

The issue is that getting leads can be something of a daunting task if your budget is not up to par. It takes tons of money to start advertising on any platform. Before knowing it, you could efficiently be spending thousands of dollars per month just to keep your name out there.

For you, there is a better way of doing it, and something that most business owners will overlook. Heck, not even ignore, but outright not also consider it. The truth is that most companies are used to the common ways of advertising is by spending money to get in front of people who may be interested in their product or service.

 

Want More Leads?

Today I want to go over something that will help you grow your business over time, and get the targeted leads you need to be successful. You see, most people never heard the phrase “Local SEO Marketing.” This seems like some Dr.’s term that is hard to understand, but I’m going to clear it up for you today and how it can bring you those leads that you’re looking for.

What this phrase consists of is you getting your business online in front of potential people who want to buy or use your service. You see, no matter what industry you’re in, people are searching for what you have to offer online, so if you can place your business in front of them, then you can turn that person into a customer or client.

For Example:

Let’s say that I have a real estate company located in Shreveport La. Now I did my research on this area, so I know for a fact that each month thousands of people are searching online to find real estate online. Now, this is a wide range of people from buyers, sellers, wholesalers, etc…

So as a business owner, I’m still doing the traditional way of advertising by using newspapers, radio ads, just to name a few. These are still useful but expensive platforms, but they’re the only way to turn due to not knowing too much about my opportunities online.

With local SEO marketing, the advantages that I have over any other form of marketing is that I can target my audience, and only serve them when they go searching online. Local SEO marketing allows you to go after a keyword such as, “Shreveport Real Estate,” which I found out gets over 1,600 searches per month.

The key is to get my business in front of those people so that I can grow my customer base without having to spend an arm and a leg on advertising.

 

Introducing Local SEO Marketing

If I tell you that there are 1,000 business listing places online where you can go on and enter real content such as:

• Your Business Name
• Address
• Phone #
• Company Description
• Website
• Hours
• Photos
• Video (optional)

Example of these sites are…Google Places, Manta.com, Yellowpages.com, Yelp.com just to name a few.

But what if you could get your business on 100, 300 or even 1,000 of these sites, where one completed listing will get placed in the search engines under your business name. Not only that, most of these sites allow you to enter some keywords that you want to be found by.

 

Wink, Wink, Wink

The most impressive thing about search engines, such as Google, is that they seem to bring back the most accurate searches possible. By using keywords in your listing, you can be found by those keywords depending on the search competition. Now in this post, I’m not going to get into all of those levels of local SEO marketing, but know by having a filled out profile with the right keywords, you can see yourself ranking online for any of these 1,000 profiles.

When you do a Google search for something, Google will send you back tons of results. So if someone is looking for a donut shop in Little Rock, AR, then they will Google “Donut Shop Little Rock.” If you as a business owner did your job, you could be taking up some spots on that front page and get that business.

Thinks about this

Let’s say that we have three donut shops in this city that approximately 90% of the people go to. We are going to name them from 1 to 3 so that we can recognize them as I do this example:

• Donut Shop 1
• Donut Shop 2
• Donut Shop 3

Now all three of these shops have what we call finger licking good donuts that are made fresh daily. The locations that they’re all in can be accessed easily from any direction in the city. These are what I call the primary donuts shops in the city, and they’re all fighting to get your business.

So you have to take a step back and think about all of the ways that you can get more people into the shop. Yes, you can continue to do the same things that all of the shops are doing, which is local advertising in the city paper or merely rely on the old school way of word of mouth.

If all of the shops from 1 to 3 do this, then which ones do you think will have the most success? Well, history and research show that all three will do very well because they all are in the same boat going the same speed.

People stopping at one shop compared to the other one is a mere coincidence of which direction they are going in the city. Plus to take it a step further, neither one of these shops have websites, so they’re not even educating the customers about the business and all of the things that they have to offer. Just this alone is a killer to any business who doesn’t have a website.

Know that without a website, you risk losing out on that extra 100k to a million dollars in your business every year. Reason for this is because a site is one employee that works 365 days a year without a day off. So you use that platform to educate people about your services, offers, discounts and more so that they will keep coming back even through the slow times.

Besides that, the #1 important thing that you can do as a business owner is to go the local marketing route. I’m not talking about standing outside with a poster asking people to come in to get a free donut, “which is a good idea.” Our mission is to harness the power of the internet to get in front of the customer and convince them to give you a visit.

 

Doing It Big

Now let’s say that donut shop one owner wakes up one day and talks to his staff about what can be done to get more people in the doors. He says that we have excellent service, excellent product, then we must take this to a new level.

One of his young employees, who is internet savvy, says that he has a great solution if you want to listen to it. This young employee starts to talk about something new, which is online local SEO marketing. The owner looks around and asks what exactly is that, and how can it help us?

That evening the owner sits down with the kid who has been learning all about local online marketing from many places. Let’s say that he came across my free guide, which is the Ultimate Local Marketing Domination Guide, that I wrote some time ago. The kid starts to explain to the owner that if we follow these simple to do tasks, we should be able to help grow the donut shop over time.

The young man starts to show the owner the research that he had done before he got there, on the many people who are searching for donut shops in our city. They do the Google search and finds out that not only doesn’t his shop comes up, but even the other two donut shops are nowhere to be listed. All that comes up on the front page where national brand profiles and business listings.

You see, the young employee found that over 1,000 people searched for donut shops in their city every single month, and what they saw is small national brands. So the owner asks the biggest question of them all:

 

How Can I Get Business On that Front Page?

The young man says that there are name brand services out there like “Me,” but this is something that you can do on your own if you have the time and effort to do. Plus, the kid tells the owner that it will take some time to get your online business presence to the front page for the keyword that we want to tackle. He explains that from reading the content on CMG, he found out that it can take anywhere from 3, 6 or even 12 months to dominate the search engines.

The owner takes a big breath and asks him could he do this for them since he already has some form of knowledge on doing it, because he has read the ultimate guide to local marketing. The young man said that he doesn’t know, but if he wants to keep this in-house, then he could work on this full time, 8 hrs a day for around $15 an hour.

The owner of the donut shop paused for a moment, and thought about those 1,000 people who were searching for donut shops in his city, and not being given accurate information. He knew that if he could get around 50% of those people to see his business online, then there would be a good chance that they will come in and purchase something.

When you break down the numbers, if the owner can grab about 500 more customers per month at an average transaction of about $10 per visit, then he can see about an extra $5,000 or a whopping $60k more revenue each year by just taking advantage of building his online presence.

So the owner signed up, and the rest was history.

Over the next 12 months, the young man worked on building the donut shop’s #1 online presence by following the steps in my local marketing guide. He created the following online presence for his boss, that paid off big time.

He Created Over:

• 1,000 Profiles
• 50 Videos
• 1578 Facebook Fans

 

The Results

First and foremost, I would like to say that when you see numbers like those above of 1,000 profiles, 50 videos, and over 1,578 Facebook Fans, you start to think about that’s a lot of work. You know as a business owner that’s doing something like that, it may not be on your schedule when trying to run your business day to day.

The truth is that if you stick with me enough and absorb more of my content, you will see that I keep saying the same thing. This is the same thing that I say to all of my clients, and those who are looking to become clients of mine to allow us to take entirely over their local marketing.

My Favorite Saying is…. 6 Months to a Year

Even when I’m doing workshops working with other corporations around the world, I’m always preaching the six months to a year process. Why? The simple answer is that no matter what industry you’re in, still give yourself this length of time to accomplish your goals.

When it comes to local SEO marketing and building an online presence, you must be patient and wait for success. It’s nothing like putting an ad in the local paper, of doing some direct mail that can have some form of impact starting today. Online marketing is another animal that takes a lot of time and effort, and those who stay the course are the ones who reap the benefits.

So when this young man started the online marketing for donut shop #1, he knew that it was going to be a long road. The guy has obviously read tons of my content, which states that this is not a 100-meter dash, it’s a marathon that must be running at an even pace.

 

Fast Forward 365 Days

First I want to start with the 1,000 local business listing profiles that the young man created. Once again, you may think that this is a significant number of patterns, but it’s not. With our clients, we can create up to 3,194 local online places to put their business on if they want to stay the course that long.

I think that he only created about five profiles a day from Monday thru Friday, which gave him around 25 per week and 100 per month. If you multiply that by 12 months, you get 1,200 profiles that could’ve easily been created with no effort at all.

What happens from the result of this, is that the donut shop listing started to dominate the local market online. You see the other two donut shops were still doing the same old marketing of spending tons of money on advertising. Even though all of these profiles were set up to target around the company name, the young man followed my advice of using the right keywords in the tags and description.

When you do this, it forces the search engines to bring back results also that have words on the page that’s centered around targeted local keywords. Now since there are thousands of profiles online of this donut shop, the search engine started to begin to recognize them as an authority company, so they ranked their profiles very highly in the search engine.

This is what happens when you start to build an online presence, is that you begin to move further away from the local competition because they’re not doing anything but sitting there. Now this donut shop is not only showing up for their targeted keyword, but also getting lots of searches for those long tail keywords that most people type into the search engines.

Side Note: One thing that they missed out on, is not having a website, because the search engines would have rewarded their site with overall top rankings if they had one. So for those of you out there with no website, just think about getting something set up online just to have a place for your customers/clients to come to.

So by having over 1,000 profiles online, and ranked for thousands of keyword phrases, the donut shop now is getting tons of more customers throughout the week. Business is up, new people are coming into the donut shop, and the owner is pleased to see his business starting to make that turn for better.

 

Video and Facebook

Now I’m not going to get too much into this side of marketing because I would like to cover it in more detail later. But I will say that the young man wanted to take things a little further by doing about two simple videos of the guests, staff and any event that they were having.

He posted these simple and short videos online and made sure to use their targeted keywords in the title, tags, and description. What also happens over time, is that these videos started to show up in the search engines. Know that the other two donut shops are just sitting on their hands doing nothing while donut shop #1 is creating an online presence with many forms of marketing.

These videos ranked well even though they didn’t have an SEO performed on them. Some of the videos needed SEO terrible because they were sitting around page 1 at the bottom, or on page 2 or 3 just needing a little boost to get them to the top of the search engine. This is where all of the clicks come from.

But overall, these videos were ranking in the search engines such as Google and started to even outrank some of the profiles naturally. The video in a search engine can standout like a swollen thumb, so people will click and watch, which we hope turns into them clicking on our website in the description.

All of this online presence working together brought tons of more new faces into donut shop #1. What resulted in 1,578 Facebook Fans from people coming to the shop, joining their Facebook fan page. This page was set up also by the young man to capture those who wanted special offers, like discounts and coupons that they could download and come in to redeem.

This exploded their Facebook “likes” which resulted in even more foot traffic and revenue. All of this from building an online presence at a steady, but consistent pace.

What you need to realize if you want to grow your business, is you must first start with the online presence, and implement other forms of marketing to put everything in the super drive. Donut shop #1 took an approach that about 98% of the businesses don’t make, so their efforts paid off over the local competition. Now it’s time for you to think about the route that you want to go for your business, by getting some form of local presence so that you can become the dominant force in the community.