Recently I was at the West County Mall in St. Louis and ran into something that could only be described as amusing.

Local Search Engine Optimization

After leaving the Apple store I noticed a kiosk with a screen rotating the services the company offered, typically I do not pay much attention to these things but in this case as the screen switched from home computer setup, wireless networking, and other mundane services to something a bit more complex and something that was quite funny.

The company was asking if I wanted to be found on the first page of Google. Did you know you could buy local search engine optimization in a mall???

Since I like to instigate a bit I thought it would be fun to quiz the person in the booth about getting my business found on the first page of Google. My wife thought it best to walk away before it started for some reason...

Local SEO at the Mall

After the person first did not even know about the sign that had just flashed that the company he was promoting offered such services and local SEO he then tried to sell me on coming to my house to setup my internet (I would of paid a million to hear him say interwebs). I then asked again as the slide flashed again, even after I had already explained my company did online advertising, web development, and we helped businesses get found online he asked if I needed a website.

I was done having fun at this point but he did then continue to tell me that "Josh" was good at this that or the other, literally everything on the board from anti-virus to local search was his "specialty".

So, next time you are in the mall beware of search engine optimization from a kiosk, but then again, maybe you can have your spyware removed at the same time.

One of the things I see come up over and over (and over) again when people are discussing various domains and developments is that websiteA.com does not rank well in Google for the keyword websiteA, I thought I would explain a bit about why this is not a good way to judge rankings, because in reality 99 percent of the time you do not know what someone is trying to rank for unless it is a very small site with a single keyword targeted.

This typically shows me that someone is not familiar with the targeted marketing that is possible with SEO, and specifically how important that targeting is now that local search is growing faster than ever and will continue to become more important with the growth of smartphones and location based services.

Legacy advertising methods were not targeted, based completely on the number of eyes balls that may look at an ad in a newspaper or magazine during any given time frame. With search marketing this model is no longer the proper way to look at advertising, or traffic.

Twice lately I have witnessed people saying that Missouri.me does not rank for the term Missouri. Well you may be surprised but I could really care less. What I care about is ranking for very targeted terms in regions we are focused in promoting our services. We work to rank for terms that bring targeted visitors that will convert better for our customers.

We are not a Missouri tourism portal, if we were I would focus on Missouri and terms surrounding Missouri tourism. This post is not about Missouri.me but it gives me an example to work from that came up a few times lately.

Its not about the broadest term to bring the highest amount of traffic at all times, in many cases its about ranking for the terms that bring the BEST traffic that provides the most value for website advertisers.

With local search growing at a better than 50 percent clip local targeting is more important than ever. This means SEO for localized terms becomes more important than ever so those local businesses are found when customers are looking for them, or in the case of portals, that the highest value customers are finding the website when looking for a particular thing.

This post is not meant to be a knock on people that questioned rankings, etc but really to help people understand a bit more of how they should approach site developments and the targeting of the SEO around it.

I have been using Foursquare for sometime now and have recently started to see quite a few more people start to join the fast growing social/location based game/app/service. With most of my attention being focused on local search for local businesses and local online advertising on Missouri.me, apps like Foursquare pique my interest and I like to watch their evolution and the way people use them as they evolve.

It is important to not necessarily watch how the early adopters use them since they tend to be power users and their day to day usage will be much different than the mass of users that come in later and are less techie. When I see my wife using Foursquare everyday I start to see how people will really use the service and the power that small businesses will have if they use the service to help draw people into their doors.

The past month (with one of the examples happening today) I have witnessed a couple examples of what will start to happen as the general consumer starts to come online with apps such as this. There is no need to go through all the hype around Foursquare and all the huge projections since all of that has been reported on virtually every tech site in existence so I would prefer to talk real world examples of how it draws people in.

First example is a restaurant in the town Localtek is based in, Spokes is the name of the restaurant, this is a place that I visit on occasion when friends are there. Recently while I was checking into locations on Foursquare I noticed there was a "Special Here" banner at the top of the Foursquare iPhone app. If you click it you could see that Spokes was offering half price burgers to the person that is the Foursquare mayor of Spokes (Foursquare has the concept of Mayor for the person who checks into a location most frequently plus a few other requirements).

So what happens? I start to go to Spokes now because it is a competition to try to get the mayorship, it should be noted I do not even necassarily eat burgers when I go there but based on the competitive factor I start to go so I can check-in. I am sure the special will change at times so why not go for the mayorship so I get future specials.

A little special like that and I show up, and I am sure others have as well. And when people show up to eat at a restaurant they typically bring more people. It all starts to add up. This is a simple example, but this is in a town of less than 20 thousand people. This is not a large city with a huge base of technology focused people. This is rural Missouri and people are taking advantage of this. There is a base of right around 2 million users on Foursquare and I am already having to fight for mayorships.

Now you start to think about local coffee shops offering half price coffees or other specials for mayors, or maybe a restaurant offering something to people who are mayors elsewhere to try to get them to come to their restaurant instead of the other and you start to see some of the power.

Another example is something that happened just today, my wife, daughter and I were in a mall and they were running into "chick" stores so I was browsing a bit. I happened to notice another "Special" banner and it was for a small watch kiosk. You could unlock the special by checking in.

So what happens, I go check out the watch kiosk and since I checked in I got a free watch cleaning. Small stuff but now my wife and daughter start browsing. As you can imagine other consumers will do this same thing and this will drive additional purchases since people show up for the free watch cleaning. What an easy and great way to drive people to stop at a kiosk most people would just walk on by.

These are just a couple examples but as you can see this is something local businesses will have to watch and pay attention too. With apps on both the iPhone and Google Android based phones based on location launching everyday and those with disposable income being the ones most likely to have them it is no longer possible for a business that has been around for dozens of years to ignore the shift happening to local online and in the mobile world.

Foursquare is just one example. Watch as many more come to market as people figure out new and unique ways to tap this new technology. For those of us in the tech world it may not seem new but until recently there was not a true way for local businesses to be able to tap into this marketing channel.

A little over a year ago I quit my what could only be described as a corporate sales job in the telecommunications and mobile space and entered the world of marketing and selling to local businesses in rural Missouri.

In the beginning I was a little concerned about being able to translate the approaches that I had used in the past to generating new business and putting together proposals that were valuable for my customers.

There are many differences that you have to keep in mind when dealing with small businesses as compared to dealing with large or medium sized companies, here are 5 that I have found very useful to keep in mind when my sales team or myself is planning on meeting with a local business:

• Let's start with an obvious one, in most cases you will be dealing directly with the owner meaning if this person is spending money it is coming directly from their own pocket. This causes a completely different mentality than someone spending someone else's money like in a corporate environment.
• Education is key but do not overwhelm, unlike in corporate business environments where there are typically teams of people to work on individual projects or even people dedicated to just one specific topic in a small business people are much less specialized and resources are much tighter. Keep your "pitch" on topic and show the value points. Examples of how it relates to their business is key to making the point fast.
• Expect to be more flexible with appointment times even when the customer is interested. One of the things that I had the hardest time with when first moving into the small business sales world was the fact that things were not as structured when it came to meetings and appointments. Even with your best clients things can get busy and they have to cancel at the last minute. Be respectful that they are running a business and do not have a large team to do so.
• Do not be a salesman. Everyone is trying to sell something to them everyday. If you are coming into to their business and are trying to be the slick sales guy in a suit, their automatic "no" response will prevail. If you are trying to be a local person and dealing with the local community, let your personality and friendship with these potential customers be one of the selling factors in your product.
• One major difference I found between the corporate sales world and the local business world is that you cannot expect the customer to make themselves available for you after hours. In my past life much time was spent on customer calls at all hours of the night, it was expected that employees on both sides put the hours in to get projects engineered and sold. Local businesses have a different focus and have more structured business hours. Many have no interest in the "wine and dine" of the corporate world and would prefer that time with their family. Make sure you factor this in when you are pushing for time on their schedule.

For those of you that may be making the leap from selling to large businesses as compared to the core of American business, which is the small business, some of the above items may help when you think about your approach.

I spend a lot of time explaining to people that they need to change the way they have been promoting their small business, typically this starts with choosing the right domain name and ends with a marketing model that pulls all the various advertising mediums together.

As you can imagine there are times that we explain that certain media types are not as effective as others but we never tell any customer to spend all their money online. In most cases local businesses need to market in more than one place but we try to help them understand that it is much more effective to wrap all the promotional efforts together into a holistic marketing model.

Radio is type of advertising I have always had a hard time grasping how it would be effective for certain types of businesses but I wanted to  give a big thank you to the team at KTJJ and KREI who also happen to run MyMoInfo.com for proving that it can work for virtually types of businesses if done right. They are based in Farmington MO and cover Farmington, MO news as well as the entire region of Missouri they are based in through their network of stations (KJFF, KREI, and KTJJ).

Dick Womack and Kim Long had attended a couple of our local online marketing seminars and had found that the information provided could also be useful for their local news site. We had some great discussions about the future of marketing for small businesses and decided that it would be useful to have both a technology radio show and technical tip spots on their network of stations.

As I admitted to them at the time I was a bit skeptical that this type of promotion would be useful for a business such as ours but have been pleasantly surprised. Based on the methods we used we have been receiving customer calls and emails asking for follow ups every week and virtually everywhere my sales team goes they get feedback that they have heard the radio technical tip spots

In the spots and radio show we spend a lot of time driving people to both our Facebook page and our website. One thing I have noticed is a uptick in traffic to our website from the ad spots and specifically on days we have the radio show (twice a month).

What does this mean? Use a model of marketing for your local business that ties legacy methods such as radio together with both your website and social media to get the most from your marketing campaign.

Spending time with local small business owners over the past couple years there is one theme that is constant no matter what type of business. How do I get the most bang for my buck?

Most of the businesses want to find away to start working online and promoting awareness of their brand online but typically do not have the time or the ability to change their marketing spending on the fly as it is planned out in advance.

This means that when working with them it is very important to help find cost effective ways for them to promote themselves, sometimes in ways that may not be obvious in the beginning but once recognized are easy to implement and take advantage of. Many of these companies have been working with legacy marketing companies for years who do a great job with creatives, brochures, and overall design but may not have worked in making sure they do the same level of branding online.

It is important as a small business starts making the move to taking advantage of the growth in local search to make sure they brand themselves and not someone else each step of the way. What do I mean by this? Consider this example of a way for any business that has a website to easily keep their business name in front of people they are communicating with daily.

Everyday I get emails from various types of businesses: customers, partners, competitors, etc. They may be the most professional, perfectly written emails with great logos, maybe even a really nicely designed brochure attached that was done by a marketing firm paid thousands of dollars, but then you see this:

Jane Doe

Business XYZ

jane@hotmail.com

It may not be obvious but there is a major issue here, especially if the company is paying people to help promote their company or working on branding campaigns. Business XYZ , in this case, is promoting Hotmail, not themselves. There is a very simple solution to this.

Use your website name as your email address as well, in other words use jane@businessxyz.com instead of the hotmail address. Although not every business has a website the cost of a domain name and email at most places these days is a very small percentage of the cost of advertising in most mediums these days. Why not take advantage of a free or low cost way to promote your business name?

These days setting up email and buying a domain name is almost as easy as setting up a free email account at most services. And if you are concerned about the technical nature there are more and more companies available to help local businesses with simple technology needs at reasonable costs compared to what companies may of charged in the past.

If you do have a website and the company that put it together for you did not offer the option to setup your own email make sure you talk to them, there is no reason you should not be offered email as part of your website package.

No longer can you look at your website as a technical, nice to have, item. It is an essential part of your marketing. Over 51 percent of searches are locally focused now (read this article at Frager Factor). This means people are not looking in the places they have in the past  like the Yellow pages. Make sure when you start your marketing online it is not just your website though, use every email as a chance to keep your website name in front of your partners and customers as well.

If you need help with understanding how to extend the marketing of your business online visit us at Localtek.com

As most of my readers are familiar with, we here at Localtek love to see great uses of a dotME domain name since we have launched our own site developments on them, such as Missouri.me.

Well, when I first heard about the movie Despicable Me many months ago and heard about the domain name they chose to use to promote their soon to be released movie I was happy to see a major motion picture company understand the power behind using .ME to promote their "brand", what did they use? Despicable.Me and then also they forward Despicableme.com to the .ME. As a fan of .ME I was happy to see the .ME domain being the one used to promote the movie though.

After getting past the techie and marketing side of my brain I realized that the movie actually looked like it would be rather entertaining to kids like me (OK people that still act likes kids such as me) and actual kids like my daughter (she is 9).

If you have not seen the marketing push behind this movie you have been hiding under a rock, the movie has been promoted relentlessly and they have over 172 thousand fans on their Facebook page. They have done a great job promoting this movie with social media as well as the standard TV trailers, etc.

As a big fan of The Office I was pleasantly surprised when early on I found out the move starred Steve Carell. He is one of my favorites of all time and my daughter was more than happy to see Miranda Cosgrove in the movie as well, she is a big fan of iCarly so we both get some of our favorite actors/actresses in this movie.

The movie opens July 9th in Real3D if your theater has it available. In the mean time you can watch a few 2D trailers here: Despicable.ME Youtube Channel

The movie is based around Steve Carell's character Gru who is pure bad and has a group of minions to help him in his evil ways. Once he runs into a group of three little girls he has met his match which is much tougher than any scheme he may have (such as stealing the moon), the girls soon see Gru as a father figure looking past his bad side.

I look forward to going to see this, it looks like a lot of fun and of course I will take my daughter with me.

Great to see a major motion picture using .ME to promote the movie, even though I would of went to see the movie anyway that sealed the deal.

Although this blog has been a lot quieter the past couple months I have been very active working with small businesses on everything from selecting the right domain name for their website to using social media to promote their business effectively.

As much as we may be a for profit business we also truly feel it is our mission to help educate the local business owners who understand they need to move a portion of their marketing efforts online but either a) think the cost is too high or b) feel like it is too time consuming or technical.

One of the things that we show as part of the holistic marketing model they need to look at now that they can no longer just use the legacy methods (i.e. print) as their only form of advertising is social media.

Over 50 percent of their customers are now looking online but most have not shifted any of their marketing spend to online (more on that in a future post). Since they may not feel comfortable spending money online as they are just now in the beginning of the education process we feel it is important to help them with low cost or even free online marketing tips, in many cases these are social media tips.

Here are 5 tips that a local small business can use today to help promote their business for free using social media:

Use Proper Links To Your Website When Posting On Facebook:

One of the most frequent mistakes I see people make when promoting their website on Facebook is not actually making the link to their website active, for example if I was to share something about this blog and put the following you would not be able to click on it and go directly to this site, instead you would have to hope your friends on Facebook either copy and paste the link or type it in, people will not typically actively do this:

Check out my blog at BruceMarler.com

Instead you need to add http:// in front of the link or website name to make sure it is an active link in what you are sharing on Facebook, for example it should look like this:

Check out my blog at http://BruceMarler.com

If you do the above on Facbeook people can click directly on the link to the site and this will drive significant more clicks to your business website.

Create a Facebook Page For Your Business Not A Personal Account:

One of the more frequent mistakes that people make when first thinking about using Facebook for business promotion is using a personal Facebook account rather than a Facebook Page. This happens more frequently than you may realize.

It is best to keep your personal account separate from your business account. This will help you promote to your customers rather than family and old high school friends who may not be interested in a business thousands of miles away and on the other side keep you from posting vacation pictures to customers rather than your family.

Facebook pages are free. They are great for interacting with your customers and promoting special offers. They also allow you to get top of mind awareness with your customers after they had forgotten about you. As many people may visit your website, do business with you, and then move on by taking advantage of a Facebook Page to put links to your website and specials and events you may be having you can keep your brand or business in front of customers who have visited you in the past.

Claim Your Facebook Username For Your Facebook Page:

One of the easiest things you can do to protect your business brand online is by claiming your Facebook Username for your business page. This means that you no longer have a long string of characters as the link to your page, instead you have a short and brandable link to your fan page, example is http://facebook.com/localtek

You can see exactly what brand is being promoted (Localtek) instead of something much longer like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/CITY-NAME-MO/YOUR_BUSINESS_NAMEs/7708322067?ref=ts

As you can see the top link is much more effectively promoting your local business online. To do this you can read this How To Set Your Facebook Page Username Tutorial.

Promote Your Facebook and Twitter Accounts Offline:

As much as we online marketing folks like to believe that the world revolves around online marketing and nothing else matters that is not true, more and more a holistic approach is needed when promoting a business. One easy way to take advantage of mixing various promotion types is to make sure you add your Facebook Page and Twitter account on any print materials you may have or even make sure you mention in any radio promotions you may be doing as well.

As an example we recently designed new business cards for our company and on the front we have standard corporate business card information (website, address, etc) but on the back we have our social media information to make sure people know where they can connect with us through our social media presence online.

If you are already paying to have materials created you should promote your online presence. If they become your friend on Facebook or follow you on Twitter even after they through away that business card you still have access to them when your promote yourself on either service.

And one more tip:

Suggest Your Facebook Page To Your Friends:

To be clear as I say suggest your page I do not mean be spammy, do not promote it daily to all of your friends but if you are in business and need to promote why not start with people that are comfortable with you and are likely to accept your Facebook page suggestion?

That way when you put out promotions they are likely to "Like" them and this in turn means it is likely to be seen by their friends as well which begins to take advantage of what social media is all about when it comes to business promotion, peer to peer recommendations. A recommendation from a friend will always go further than any advertisement someone could do.

In many cases we have heard customers tell us that they have created a Facebook Page but could not understand how to get people to see it. The step missed was suggesting to friends and family to get things moving.

The above tips may be simple but they will help get you moving at no cost, if you have further tips feel free to post in the comments.

Just read some comments over at MorganLinton.com asking where I had been and what was going on with myself and where I had went too. I use to post once or twice a day and I think my last post was in April so I can understand why people would be asking. I have been talking to many of my domain investor friends by phone and email in the background and they know what has been up but after reading the comments on Morgans site I thought I better put an update post out.

Well, I am still here. I just have not been blogging the past couple months based on a focused effort on getting our new staff up and moving and many things that been going on for our localsearch and online advertising business at Localtek. My blog posts would be lacking in quality if I had been posting the past few months so rather than put out daily posts that were not of quality I thought it better to not blog for a few months while getting people ramped up and moving.

At the same time I started focusing on getting myself back to the level of fitness I was at previous to starting the business. Previously I had been doing marathons, triathlons and other endurance events. After starting Localtek I changed drastically and had set a date directly after the Domainer Mardi Gras festivities to get myself back in shape.

We have had many great things happening for the company, we have our own radio show now (every other Wednesday on KREI 800 AM in the area I am in) and also have started to have articles in print media even. A local magazine (one of the few stable areas of print media is localized magazines) has started putting articles in monthly. We have been fortunate to have companies that would normally consider us competitors to realize that we can all work together to help each other.

Also, we recently moved offices, we are now at 119 E Columbia in Farmington, MO. The new space is over double what we had and is quite amazing actually and is in walking distance to my favorite coffee shop and restaurant (to anyone that is my friend on Facebook you would know those as 12 West or Bauhaus Kaffee).

As far as the fitness has went I have lost 42 lbs and have completed a triathlon and some running events since getting back into it and have another triathlon planned for July 18th. Anyone that knew me before starting Localtek knows how important biking and running and staying active is to me. It is nice to be back at it.

This week alone we have 5 seminars we are giving to local businesses, 4 in Kentucky which will be recorded and played on a local TV station as an actual show and then one in the local area we are at during a Chamber of Commerce meeting. These seminars really help to educate the masses on the importance of using technology to help their business now that the yellow pages and other legacy methods of business promotion are faltering while online becomes more important than ever.

Luckily the team that we have now has ramped up quite fast and I expect to be back to regular posting with even more info than before soon.

As the date nears for next weeks GeoDomain expo the agenda continues to firm up and it is looking to be a good one. If you have any interest in developing your Geo domains into money making properties this show should help you along the way.

You can see the agenda here:  GeoDomain expo agenda.

I look forward to being on the panel concerning developing any size city, large or small. With our development of Missouri.me we have worked hard to determine how best to monetize and develop everything from 1000 person community websites to city portals.

Looking at the agenda this is a conference that should really help companies looking to learn how to best market and grow their properties, as our geo properties grow in importance based on the failure of print media and the continued move of eyeballs to online media rather than print it is more important than ever for people to learn the best way to take advantage of this.

Also, an interesting addition to the agenda is that of Chef Patrick now of Oversee.net, this will be Patrick's first panel since joining Oversee. Nice to see him on the circuit:)

And yes, this expo is being held during Jazz Fest which means great entertainment and events surrounding the great opportunity to learn how to grow your business. Make sure you look at the agenda linked to above.