Online Marketing Tips - One

One thing we've proved beyond doubt is that promoting your business online involves more than just building a website and promoting it once. Our online marketing test for Bury St Edmunds was certainly instructive.

Although it's perfectly possible to dominate your local market with online marketing, it's not just something you can 'set and forget'. You need expertise to set up your online marketing campaign and you will need to devote some time to running it.

That doesn't need to be your expertise, of course, or your time - that's what professionals are for. But just so you know it won't be a one-off effort or expense.

Mind you, when you do online marketing right you can get and keep most of page one to yourself, as we've also shown, so you might want to invest some of your time anyway.

So in future posts I'll look at the specific steps you need to take to get your business all over page one of Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Your first step is to decide what search term your customers are most likely to use when they search online for products or services like those you offer. That's the phrase you'll be targeting from now on. So if you're an emergency plumber, do more people search for 'emergency plumber', or '24 hour plumber'?

I don't know but you can easily find out. Google obligingly offers a free keyword tool for you to find your best search term.

Find Google's tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

When you enter a possible keyword into the tool it creates a long list of related terms with numbers of people searching for those specific terms. Don't take these numbers too literally, but use them as a good indication of which phrases are most 'searched for'.

Enter your keyword idea without a local 'qualifier' so the numbers are big enough for Google to measure and you get useful, meaningful results. Pick the most popular and appropriate phrase from Google's results. Then add a local qualifier when you use it - which is what we'll look at next time.

So you might end up with a popular search term like 'emergency plumber', to which you add your local qualifier to get something like 'bury st edmunds emergency plumber' for your target key phrase.

As I say, we'll look at where to use that phrase next time.

Roy