Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing

The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing is Now Available on Amazon

The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing teaches that one of the greatest cataclysms a business owner can face is the ongoing loss of customers. According to the experts 20% of the population moves every five to seven years. Add to that lifestyle changes that are brought about by death, divorce, sudden loss of employment, promotions, retirement and debilitating diseases and you have a growing threat to your business. You have the potential to lose 20% to 30% of your customer base every year. You need to actively market your business continually just to break even. If you ever want to increase your business, you will really have to forge full force ahead with your promotion efforts.

The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing will show you that it is at the darkest of times like these that the forces of evil appear. They will play on your emotions and your fear of losing your business. Once they have you under their spell, they go in for the kill. They offer you the magic bullet, the holy-grail of marketing, the long lost secret manuscript of the ancients, the most technologically advanced super software that will solve all your business problems over night with the ability to increase your profits 100 fold. There have been so many snake oil salesmen in recent years promising results they couldn’t deliver that many business owners have been burnt. Some were burnt so badly they let their customer base shrink farther and farther each year because they are afraid of getting burnt again. It is high time someone threw them a life line and let them see that the forces of good do exist and are ready to help.  That lifeline is found inside the small business owner’s guide to online marketing.

Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing – The Author

Allen Harp, the author of this small business owner’s guide to online marketing, was born and raised in central Missouri. After nine years in the US Army during the late sixties and early seventies, he and his family settled into the Cumberland Valley of Western Maryland – Hagerstown. With more than 25 years of heavy manufacturing, sales and internet marketing experience he has had the opportunity to learn from the masters of internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization. From the late internet marketing legend Corey Rudl to current day experts Aaron Wall, Jack Mize, Tim Castleman, Christopher Griffin, Howie Schwartz, Maria Gudalis, Kevin Wilkey and Daniel Tan. They have all instilled in him a sense of quality, accuracy and effectiveness.

Small Business Owners Guide to Online Marketing – The Plan

The small business owner’s guide to online marketing explains that as a local business, you have a huge, wide-open opportunity to dominate your local competition by getting a free, prominent listing at the top of Google, using Google’s local search features. Google has spent a large investment on becoming the most relevant search engine to its users, as Google understands that if you live in Hagerstown and you do a search for pizza, they know you want a pizza place in Hagerstown—not in Baltimore.

This book is the ultimate secret weapon for local businesses to climb to the top of Google search results in their area. Forget about traditional SEO and expensive pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Local Search is king…and getting your business listed on top of Google’s local search features is absolutely free, making your investment into this book a complete “no-brainer.”

Understand that the information I share in this book is the same information that I follow (step-by step) for my clients, who happily pay me an up front fee and monthly maintenance to keep their business at the top of Google’s search results. Nothing is left out.

The book you hold in your hands was not written to sing the praises of local search, but instead, it was written to help you dominate your competition in your local area through local search using step-by-step, actionable methods.

Simply put…if you can follow step-by-step instructions, this book will teach you how to open the virtual floodgates of more business through new leads, increased sales, more visibility and additional customers.

As you go through Apocalypse Online, remember to not lose sight of the fact that optimization is nothing but a tool to achieve specific results. Those results are more paying customers.

I truly hope you understand ‘you’ can generate steady streams of free traffic to your site without spending a fortune on experts. ‘You’ can achieve first page results on Google without me or any other expensive consultants.

‘You’ can initiate these very effective optimization procedures without spending thousands of dollars on optimization software and tools. ‘You’ just need a little time, patience, determination and knowledge. I can provide the knowledge, the rest is up to you.

Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing

I hope you find Apocalypse Online productive and profitable for your business. I would enjoy hearing your comments. about the small business owner’s guide to online marketing.

Apocalypse Online:
The Small Business Owner’s Guide
to Online Marketing

If you do purchase the book, drop me an email  allen@consultingservicesmd.com giving me your name and email address.  In return, I will add you to my update list and you will receive any updates to the book in the future.  The future survival of your business may in fact be secured inside the pages of this small business owner’s guide to online marketing.

Small Business Owner’s Guide to Online Marketing.

GOOGLE Places Quality Guidelines

Google Places has always been the talk of the town.  It was always the one route a local business owner could travel to get directly to the front page of Google.

You know what I am talking about, the small map at the top of the search page results that would show local businesses listed from A through J and would have links to their Google Places page.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Google Places Search Results

The nice thing about Google Places is you didn’t have to spend a fortune to get there either.  In fact, some businesses landed in those first seven results without even trying.

It has always been well known within the industry that a #1 listing in the natural search results page 1 (SERPs) would get about 40 – 45% of all clicks,  #2 about 12% and so on down the line.  Then a strange thing happened.  The Google Places map box listings started getting more and more clicks until they took over the results.  In many searches, people don’t look any further than the Google Places map results.

Google Places Rule Changes

Over the years I have learned a mighty lesson:  Any time you notice Google’s search results changing in layout, or format or style or in any way at all…changes are in the making.  And when this happens you need to re-evaluate your search engine optimization strategies especially as they pertain to your Google Places listing and make sure you are playing by the rules.

It has become a common practice for a business owner to put their city into their Business name listing i.e.; Nancy Jones Beauty Salon would be listed in Google Places as Nancy Jones a Dallas Beauty Salon.  That in itself would help to optimize the listing if people were searching for “Dallas Beauty Salon”.  Well, it worked quite well for a long time.  But Google Places, in its ongoing efforts to deliver the most relevant search results is constantly changing the way they look at websites and the way in which they are evaluated.

Very recently, just a few weeks ago, the Google search results began shifting over to a new format.  The Google Places map, in most local searches, now appears at the top of the right hand column, just above the paid advertisements (AdWords). Now you see the first page pretty much filled with the Google Places results. You may still see one or two organic (natural) listings at the top of the page above the Google Places results and you will still see, sometimes, two or three organic results at the bottom of the page.

Search engine optimization specialists and online marketers have been telling the public for years that the YellowPages book was no longer effective.  Then the advertising industry tried to make the shift to the internet. Then many of the first page results were nothing more than business directories.   The end result was that you had to wade through ten online directories instead of one physical book, or you would have to click through several pages of listing to get to the merchants you were interested in. Maybe just as bad as picking up the phone book.

Here again, Google Places wants relevant results for you so they changed their search formula to give you what you want.  You are searching for a business and business results are what you want.

Google has published the all new Google Places Quality Guidelines.  These are the most straight forward and easiest to understand set of rules that Google has ever published. One clear cut rule:  Enter your business name exactly as it appears in the real world. If you don’t have the name of the city or area or street in your legal business name don’t put it in your Google Places listing title, or else.

Another big item is the Google Places Categories. As before you MUST use at least one of the Google default categories.  As you begin typing Google will offer suggestions.  Maybe you want to use the term Dallas Beauty Salon because it gets lots of searches each day. Don’t do it. Location based information is not allowed in the category field either, so Dallas has got to go, or else.  The categories, up to five, must say what “your business is, not what it does or things it sells”. If you are a dentist and you have categories saying teeth whitening, invisalign braces, etc, you should change it to teeth whitening dentist and invisalign braces dentist, or else.

The “or else” that I keep throwing around comes from Google’s Disclaimer where they state that they (Google) “reserve the right to suspend access to Google Places or other Google Services to individuals or businesses that violate these guidelines”.  They are telling you to just “don’t do it” or else.

I am inserting a copy of the guidelines for your to read for yourself.  These are direct from the Google Places pages:

Google Places Quality Guidelines

Your Google Places Account

•Do not include marketing taglines in your business name.These are pretty straight forward.  In the short run you may be able to ignore these guidelines, maybe even beat them.  But eventually Google Places will catch up to you and you will pay the penalty.  Gypsy marketers can afford to take the chance but not you.  You have a legitimate business that you have worked hard to build up.  You don’t want to risk it all by ignoring the Referee (Google).  The referee will put you on the sideline, maybe even permanently, and that can have a devastating effect on your business.

•Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name field, unless they are part of your business name.

•Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business in the business name field.

Business Location: Use a precise, accurate address to describe your business location.

•Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist. P.O. Boxes are not considered accurate physical locations. Listings submitted with P.O. Box addresses will be removed.

•Use the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
•Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.

•Businesses that operate in a service area, as opposed to a single location, should not create a listing for every city they service. Businesses that operate in a service area should create one listing for the central office or location and designate service areas. Learn how to add service areas to your listing.

•Businesses with multiple specializations, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties. You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.

•Do not include information in address lines that does not pertain your business’s physical location (e.g. URLs, keywords).

Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

•Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.

•Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Categories: Provide at least one category from the suggestions provided in the form as you type. Aim for categories that are specific, but brief.

•Categories should say what your business is (e.g. Hospital), not on what it does (e.g. Vaccinations) or things it sells (e.g. Sony products or printer paper). This information can be added in your description or as custom attributes.

•Categories should not contain location-based information (for example, Dog Walker Los Angeles is not permitted).

•Only one category is permitted per entry field. Do not “stuff” entry fields with multiple categories.

Custom Attributes & Description: Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. Learn more about acceptable custom attributes.

Other Items of Note

Ineligible Business Models: Only businesses that make in-person contact with customers qualify for a Google Places listing.

•Businesses that are under construction or that have not yet opened to the public are not eligible for a listing on Google Places.

•Rental properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible for a listing on Google Places. Create a listing for the central office that processes the rentals, rather than the individual rental properties. If you’d like, you can then add your real estate properties to Google Maps so that they are available on our Real Estate layer.

Google Places Specialists

We currently offer totally FREE, no strings attached training on how to properly claim and optimize your Google Places lising yourself.  We have nearly an hour of “do it your self videos” that not only show you exactly how to do it yourself but how to optimize your listing for the best results.  All that is require for entry is your email address.  Once the training is completed, if you wish, you may unsubscribe from our mailing list.  Click here for full details:  Google Places Training

If these revised Google Places quality guidelines are still confusing to you or you just don’t have the time to “study up” on them, give us a call.  We can clean up your current Google Places listing so that it is compliant with the new guidelines.  If you haven’t yet claimed your Google Places listing we can do that for you as well.  We are here to help you.  We are the Google Places specialists.

Consulting Services MD

Marketing Consulting Services

Consulting Services MD welcomes you, the small business owner. We provide you with marketing consulting services to increase sales and improve your bottom line. The Consulting Services focus is simple: We meet with you to see what you want to accomplish with your business. Knowing that, we will suggest effective solutions to achieve your goals.

In this day and age, if you have no online presence, you are shutting out a large source of fresh, new, highly targeted customers. As the trends are shifting rapidly, it is becoming even more important to consider the mobile market and how to best utilize it to capture the largest share of your market.

Consulting Services Goal

Consulting Services MD has a wide array of tools and strategies to help you achieve your goals in a timely manner. We don’t enter into the consultation with predefined solutions to your problems before we know what you actually want. Consulting Services goal is simple: You know your business better than anyone else does and only you know what your business needs. We simply supply the tools and services to help you accomplish your goals.

Consulting Service Agreement

The Consulting Services MD agreement is straight forward: We perform our services in a manner that reduces your costs and increases your profits. Partners for life!

Give us a call today for a free, no obligation consultation!

301-791-1503

Allen L. Harp

 

 

 

Consulting Services MD