Latest News News: Internet marketing research
Business owners must break boundaries to attract new business
By John Webster, Aim IT, 9 Dec 09
With 93% of our population now using web search engines and directories to find information, business owners need to understand how to use this medium to promote their products and services.
A clue to delivering your online marketing communications comes from recent university studies in the USA and UK. These studies found that the location of a business was important to a staggering 63% of web searchers. This finding has major implications for your business.
Where do you provide online information about the availability of your products or services? For many web sites the only place where location words are used is on a “Contact Us” page that lists their address details. Businesses in this situation will probably only be found with a company name search or when their office address suburb is combined with a business category name search. As a result, many potential sales are lost.
What about the surrounding suburbs? Do you want customers from these areas? How about broader area search words like “Pittwater”, “Warringah” or “northern beaches”? If your customers reside in the peninsula, you have to target search phrases that could include any one of around 50 suburb and general location words.
Here is a test you can run on your own business. First select some commonly used business descriptions. If you are an accountant, words/phrases like “accountants”, “accounting services” or “chartered accountants” would be very relevant. Now enter them in a Google Australian pages search in combination with your location suburb then swap your suburb in the search phrase with a surrounding suburb name and search again.
If you target customers in all peninsula suburbs and areas you would have 150 different search phrase combinations to completely assess this example.
As you run your location search phrase tests, note how frequently a page about your business ranks in the top 10 search results.
Experience suggests that most businesses will not achieve a top 10 ranking result to 5% of search phrases in location search tests like this. Yet, high levels of top 10 search rankings can be achieved.
The benefit to business owners who adopt web marketing strategies like this can be enormous. We have seen increases in visits to websites and ensuing enquiries well in excess of 300%.
“Location, location, location” is as important on the web as it is in selling real estate.
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Reference: Discovering Users’ Specific Geo Intention in Web Search
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