Third Party Blogs!

Companies that provide products and services to a local or regional marketplace want to do well with local SEARCHES in Google, Yahoo and Bing. They want to be at the top of page one on Google search results pages. They have different challenges than companies that market to national and international marketplaces.

For instance, consider service businesses that are marketing to a metro area. Like “plumbers – Greater Metro New York area” or ” Attorneys in Minneapolis/St. Paul”.  In the past, this was typically a “yellow pages” phone book function. But online search has radically changed that. Phone book yellow page ads are on the path to extinction. They are not dynamic, are linear and differentiation is difficult. How many full page ads in a row for one service do you want to see?

Winning at Internet Local Search

This is a multi-faceted endeavor. You must have a strategy to utilize:

1) Organic Search Engine Results – Great results on page one of Google and others for your marketplace. These will drive traffic to your website.

2) Local Directories – Yelp, Google Local, Yahoo Local, AOL,  zillions more. These will be informational listings with links and reviews.

3) Local News Websites & Portals -They get good traffic and might be a good place to be.

4) Internet Yellow Pages

5) Local links – Chamber of Commerce, Business Organizations, Local Partners

6) Social Media Strategy – Twitter and Facebook programs

You will also need to manage reviews and customer feedback in this realm on the local directory sites as well as Twitter and Facebook. A good strategy here will build great word of mouth and affinity. This can be a boom but can be an challenging issue as well.

But I Am a Plumber, How Do I Do This?
Personally, I try to stay away from plumbing. I am great at building websites that get excellent traffic and provide revenue opportunities. And if you are a plumber (any any other business), you should outsource this vital task of increasing website traffic. The good news is that it is actually easier succeed at local search positioning than national or international. Why? Less competition. More focused vertical marketplace. The downside is that there is less volume of searching on any given keyword. Consider the search terms “website designer” (22,200 avg. monthly searches) and “St. Louis website design” (170 avg. monthly searches) .  But if you are in St.Louis and you are at the top of page one on Google searches for “St. Louis website design”, you will get the lions share of opportunities.

A Third Party Blog Will Help You Dominate
Here is the truth. A Third Party Blog will rapidly position you at the top of Google search results pages for keywords and key phrases for your local search marketplace. And we couple this with promotion most of the other local search avenues. This solution works even better in a local/regional marketplace than it does for broad or horizontal marketplace. And it succeeds in either. And the reason is that not only is there less competition for search, but the competitors are just not very sophisticated. And most have very modest Internet marketing budgets.

But what is a Third Party Blog all about? Read this earlier post. Want to learn more, click here to submit an information request form about a Third Party Blog.