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SEO is Dead in St. Louis

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

There’s a very huge untapped SEO market in St. Louis. It’s sitting just under the surface, waiting to boil over. Can you find it?

Every time a potential client from the Saint Louis area calls me, I’m honestly baffled by the lack of SEO – both on their part and that of their competitors.

I was recently approached by a local manufacturer of a certain product. They asked me to do an SEO audit on their website and I was blown away by the potential that they had online. There are NO other local businesses building their website in any search engine-friendly way. Most of their competitors (and you’d know their names if I said them) have very archaic websites, some still with splash pages and graphic-based navigation on most sites. It’s pathetic. This smaller business has a huge advantage if they start SEOing their site now.

Nearly two years ago I met a nice guy who’s Dad owns a retail business in the St Louis area. He had taken one of my free classes I teach at the local library on online marketing. He and his dad hired me to rebuild their website in a more SEO-friendly manner, and in early October 2007 we launched their new site. By November they were receiving more traffic than they’d ever had before, and then the record months started. This (literally) Dad-and-son shop has now had ten record months of sales – and they are not afraid to admit most of this is attributed to their local SEO efforts. These guys are outranking some big chain stores for moderate to high-priced products.

Even an industry like real estate is mostly untapped. Sure, the real estate market isn’t exactly teeming with extra funds for marketing efforts, but that’s just the point. This down economy is the best time to get strongly positioned online for ‘real estate town‘. And when the market swings around (and we all know it will), some real estate agent is going to be so damn busy they won’t know what hit them. Why are no real estate agents in Saint Louis doing SEO?

One last thought – perhaps the reason no Saint Louis business is really putting money into online efforts is because they think there is a big lack of people (customers) online in the local area. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Just because we don’t have the population numbers of towns like San Francisco and New York doesn’t mean we don’t exist. Saint Louis is strong with bloggers, business leaders and online searchers. These people buy your products and will tell others about them.

The recent InterPlay festival – while it isn’t yet rivalling festivals like SXSW – will soon be a major event based in the Saint Louis area. There are some very active bloggers who like to talk about your products.

There is so much potential for local industry leaders to move into online but no one is doing it. I see it a lot and I’m still blown away by it. If you own a local St Louis business, no matter how small, you’re missing a golden opportunity to steal business from your larger competitors.

Posted in Interplay STL, local marketing, SEO, St Louis | 2 Responses »

Got Me Some New Biz Cards

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I ordered some new business cards for the big festival this weekend. My old ones didn’t mention my Missouri SEO website, and I kinda want to start promoting that more than the hosting one.

What do you think, too girly?

Posted in conferences, free stuff, local marketing | No Responses »

SEO Seminar Yesterday

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

Yesterday was my first seminar of the fall 2008 season. I may end up doing another, I’m not sure.

I’ve been teaching Internet Marketing now for 4 years. Originally the size of the seminars/class were packed out, but now they are waning. I was teaching one every month, now it looks like maybe 4 a year.

I think part of the problem is perceived value. The seminars are free, and therefore not much value is passed on. I bet if I charged $50 for the seminar, people would be more likely to come. Problem is, I can’t do that as a library volunteer, since its a library sponsored class. I’d have to find another venue, which means costs for me.

I received only good feedback from the class, which is always nice, but I often wonder what happens after the people leave the class. Are they simply overwhelmed by the volume of information they got, and don’t know where to start? Are they overwhelmed to the point that they just say ‘forget about that’ because its so time-intensive? Or do they simply file this in the ‘I need to do this stuff’ category, and probably never do.

I was asked about my fees, which are comparable to most local SEO firms, probably a little cheaper. However, as usual, the fees are received with an “Oh wow” or “Oh my gosh” kind of tone. This probably goes back to the classes being free. The people that do show up are not those that are apt to spend a lot on their business marketing.

It’s a bummer, really. There are so many local businesses that could use SEO to their distinct advantage. I’m continually very surprised by the lack of big businesses that are doing this, giving small businesses in the area a HUGE opportunity to profit, but they don’t see it.

A local furniture store owner, however, has seen it. He hired me late in 2006 after attending one of these seminars, and has seen record months for nearly a year now. Record months, month after month! They are on track to a record year, and they’ve been in business for over 20 years. They attribute this to SEO, no bones about it. They’ve dropped their YellowBook ad size significantly, they’ve added some more ‘hip’ products (like organic mattresses – who knew?) and they’ve ramped up their SEO spending. They are outranking some big furniture stores in the area, and even nationally. They’ve started drop-shipping some items because of their sudden national exposure. All these things have resulted in their best year ever, even with the economy in the dumps! Why don’t other businesses get it?

I implore everyone who has taken my class to take advantage of the information I’ve given you. I don’t care if you hire me, but use the techniques I’ve shown you and watch your business grow. It’s really that easy.

As for upcoming seminars, I will be on an SEO panel for an upcoming blogging convention in St. Louis in September, and I may do another free SEO seminar in October. It may be my last.

Posted in competition, free stuff, local marketing, seminars, SEO, site ranking, St Louis | No Responses »

Really Small Business? You Still Gotta Have an Address

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

This post is for those really small businesses (that are usually based in someone’s home).

I’d define a really small business (RSB) as one that operates out of someone’s home or other residential location. The RSB does not have a ‘main office’ or even a place for customers to drop off checks or view products. A majority of these businesses have a website, and rely on it for most, if not all, of its revenue generation. Most of these businesses have one to five employees.

Since these RSBs rely on their website, and thus their marketing/ranking of their website for a majority of their income, it would make sense that they need to rank well for local terms. It would also make sense that they would prefer not to use their local address (ie home) on places such as Google maps, Yahoo local, etc. – yet they really need to be listed on these sites. Plus, these websites won’t accept PO Boxes for addresses. They want a real physical location.

Well, these businesses can have a ‘real’ address, not a PO box, and can use that street address to add their business to these sites.

Everyone knows that the UPS store will ship things, but you may not know that they also provide post office-type services as well. They have PO boxes, but with a twist. Instead of your address being PO Box 123, you can use their street address and then use a Suite # or Room # to distinguish your business. This gives you a real street address for your business.

For example, my hosting business is run from my house. But I don’t want people showing up at my house, and I don’t want to list my house address for my business on Google maps. So I went up to the UPS store and bought a box, at a whopping $8/month, and now I have a real address which I can list on all the various websites.

Lighthouse Technologies Web Hosting
1243 Water Tower Place
Suite 180
Arnold, MO 63010

I could also say

1243 Water Tower Place #180

or even

1243 Water Tower Place
Room 180

The goal here is to get a physical street address, which this accomplishes.

I should also mention that there are other companies that do this as well. MailBoxes Etc is a good example, and there are other local ones that may work for you. The trick here (pay attention) is not to get the cheapest one, but to get the service that is physically located the closest to the center of your town, or the town you are targeting.

Why? Because when someone searches Google maps (for instance), they may type in something like ‘widgets in Utopia KS’. If your fake PO Box address is located closest to the center of Utopia, KS, chances are you’ll be the first listing for widgets in the area. This, of course, means you’ll have to optimize your business listing to have the word ‘widgets’ on it, which isn’t a hard task.

So how do you find the ‘center’ of town? Easy. Simply type in the name of the town into Google maps. This will give you what Google maps considers to be the starting point of reference for anything related to that town. In most cases, it will actually give you a street address.

Now you can go do a search for local mail box providers (make sure you weed out mailbox manufacturers and sellers, like hardware stores), then get a box there.

It should also be noted that it’s not necessary to get a box in your town. If your ‘target town’ is one of more affluent people, then get a box in that town! Wherever you think more people will search for your products or services, that’s where you need to list your address!

Lastly, there’s no rule that says you can’t have more than one address, neither. If you can afford it, get a box in several target towns!

Posted in beginner sem, Google Maps, local marketing, Marketing, small business | No Responses »

The Invisible Website with a Big Following

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

There’s a local tattoo shop in my town Arnold, MO. There’s nothing special about the shop, it’s just like most other tattoo shops you’d visit across the country. The artists are good, the ink flows plentiful, and the business appears to be doing well.

But they don’t have a website.

Interestingly, they do have quite a decent online following. On Yahoo Local, they’ve got over 50 reviews. They aren’t listed on Yelp. CitySearch lists them, but with no reviews. And the Google Ten Box shows them with some weird Arizona thing going on, and only 1 review.

So how does a business which appears to have no online presence get over 50 reviews on Yahoo? I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to bet they are simply asking their customers to post them.

People that get tattoos are a ‘unique bunch’. They love the art, they love to share/show their tattoos, and they are mostly loyal to one artist/store for their artwork. So the fact that they have 50 reviews on Yahoo doesn’t necessarily surprise me. But it bothers me how they got there.

Theory One: People just decided to write a review of their tattoo (very possible), so they searched out the company on Google or Yahoo. They all ended up at Yahoo Local. Since the business has no website (or if they do I couldn’t find it), the Yahoo Local result is the first one that shows up in a Google search. So that’s where they posted their review. Perhaps its that simple.

Theory Two: The store owners noticed that people coming into their store had read some reviews on Yahoo, and the owners keyed in to the fact that these reviews were driving foot traffic. So they started asking people to add their review, thus driving more (hopefully) walk-in traffic. They saw the social potential and revenue increase from the reviews, but haven’t quite grasped the concept of the overall web as a revenue stream.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts and comments. How do you think they got all those reviews? What did I miss?

Posted in local marketing, small business, trending | No Responses »

Five Things You Can Do to Your Website Right Now to Achieve Higher Rankings

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Most people hire a web designer based on a very fragile set of criteria, mostly because they have very little knowledge of the design process or industry. Since about 95% of “web designers” don’t understand the marketing side of web design, they fail to realize that they are not helping their clients by ‘doing what they do’.

It’s really no fault of their own, heck for years I was just that. I’d pump out a site a week. Clients were happy to have a site, and I was happy to have their money. They ended up with an online brochure.

An online brochure is ok if that’s all you want, but most likely you want more than that. A $2000+ investment ought to do more for you than just look pretty. It should bring you revenue, customers, or members. Whatever your goal is with your business, your website should simply be another means of getting that result.

With that said, here is a list of ten things most businesses can do to their website today that will help them rank in the weeks to come.

Fix your title tag
Search engines read this tag to help it decide what your website is about. So put something that makes sense; something that a potential customer would type into Yahoo to find you.
Something like “Bob’s Widgets – Widget Repair and Manufacturing – St Louis Missouri” is better than “Welcome to our Website” or “Home”
Don’t waste real estate
If your designer thought it’d be cool to put a bit of blank space at the top of your page so that it looks ‘centered’, he was wrong. Since everyone around the world uses different screen resolutions, its pretty much impossible to vertically center your website copy on every one of them.
Sure, you can build it for the most common resolution, but why? Just put your info at the top so you’ll be sure that everyone can see it.
Put your contact info on every page
This should be a no-brainer. The purpose of your website is customers, so make it as easy as possible for them to get a hold of you!
To further this point, make sure your contact page has a form they can fill out to get more information. You need more than just an email address, because many people don’t know how to configure their browsers to handle email links. A form they can fill out will make sure you don’t lose that technically-challenged customer.
Get yourself a real street address
This is one many small and home-based businesses overlook. They’ll use their home address or a PO box, which is actually losing them customers. Go up to the UPS store and fork out the $8 bucks a month for a ‘real’ mailing address. Then put this address into Google maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Insider Pages and others.
People like playing with maps, and with SmartPhones getting overly popular, you’re going to need a real street address to capture those users when they type ‘Widgets in St Louis MO’
Get the visitors email address
Face it, they came to your website for a reason. Even if they’re remotely interested, you’ve got a lukewarm lead. Offer them a free whitepaper on ‘Trends in Widget Colors’ in exchange for them signing up to your newsletter.
Then, of course, don’t forget to do a newsletter at least once a month. Market to those leads!
Bonus tip: Get rid of Flash
No matter how cute, and no matter what designers say, Flash still sucks when it comes to ranking your site. “cute” don’t pay the bills. Ranking does.

Posted in beginner sem, local marketing, SEO, site ranking, small business | 3 Responses »

Where the Lawn Chair Rental Booth Went Wrong

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

Last night my wife and I went to the Three Doors Down concert at the local outdoor amphitheater. The venue has some under-roof seating, but the vast majority of the seating is on the lawn, a huge grass-covered hill where you can just pick out a place, flip out a blanket, and sit.

You can also rent lawn chairs. After about 15 minutes of sitting on a blanket, my back was hurting and I was ready for a chair. So we walked all the way back down the hill (about 10 mins) and scoped out the rental place.

I noticed the sign right away – Lawn Chair Rental $5. Excellent. Five bucks. I can handle that.

So we go up there and hand over the $5 bucks. I get a chair and a ticket. The lady explains to me that if I bring the chair back, along with the ticket, I’ll get a dollar back.

Wow, really? I can walk all this way back for a dollar?

If you’ve read the book Freakonomics, you’ll remember a story about daycares in Israel that were having problems with parents picking up their children late. So the daycare decided to issue a ‘late penalty fee’ of $3.00. And what happened? The amount of late arrivals increased dramatically. The parents realized that for only $3/day, they could extend the time they had without the kids to get things done. The daycare’s plan backfired.

Same for the lawn chair. I had walked up there fully expecting to pay $5 for a rental. Once there, they informed me of the deposit return, but instead I heard “For no extra money, you can leave your chair on the hill after the show”. They just saved me from walking all the way back over there, thanks.

So in my little marketing mind, I started thinking about things they could do that could actually work. We know the chair rental really costs them nothing, other than the initial purchase price of the chair, which I’m sure they recouped in the first two shows of the season. That means the other 100 or so shows are pure profit, minus having to pay the girls that man the rental booth. So let’s just say the profit per chair per concert is $4.50.

There are many businesses who would love to get the exposure of thousands of people nearly every night of the summer. These businesses would be wise to contact the lawn chair rental place and work out a deal. For example’s sake, lets say I own a sandwich shop near the ampitheater. I could print up some buy-one-get-one sandwich coupons, and give them to the lawn chair rental booth (up to $5 value). Now the booth can promote something of more value for each returned chair, a free $5 sandwich, making the rental “free”.

They’d do even better if they got a few vendors to offer deals. A local nightclub/bar would do well after most concerts. A free bucket with purchase of a bucket would pull people in. A skate shop (for the teen visitors) could offer a $5 discount off shoes. Dave & Busters (which is very near the amphitheater) could offer $5 in free tokens.

Even if the lawn chair company paid $1 for each coupon, they’d still come out was ahead.

Be careful how you portray ‘value’ to your customers. I was fully willing to pay $5 to rent a chair, and when I found out that I could just leave it, and didn’t have to bring it back, it was even better. I was in no way notified of the $1 ‘refund’ until I had already paid for the rental.

A ten minute walk with an already-hurting back vs. a $1 refund was an easy decision. Someone come get this chair. I’m going home.

Posted in local marketing, money, offline marketing | 2 Responses »

Wehrenberg Theaters Gets It

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008

This summer, on Wednesdays and Thursdays at the Wehrenberg theater in Arnold Missouri, you can bring your kid and watch a kid-themed movie for free. First come, first served, no rainchecks.

What a brilliant idea. Their marketing team hit this nail on the head.

Moms (and Dads) can give their kids something to do during summer break
Moms (and Dads) will spend money on snacks
The theater makes money that otherwise would have never been made by opening the theater at ‘off times’ that they are normally not open
Families are exposed to the theater’s branding and a positive experience (free for the parents, fun for the kids)

This is the kind of thinking that most marketing people don’t get. Or worse yet, upper management freaks out at the word “free”. Thing is, they’ll be way ahead on this deal by offering these free movies. Good move, Wehrenberg!

Posted in customer service, local marketing, offline marketing | No Responses »

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