Local Internet marketing is becoming increasingly important to your success on Google and other search engines. As Google continues to move toward local search results, your effectiveness at local Internet marketing can have a major effect on your bottom line.

Let’s try an experiment. Go to Google, and type in your industry or niche, and your city and state (e.g. Italian restaurant, Wichita, KS). What will pop up is a map of some of the Italian restaurants in Wichita (or whatever you typed in) that may or may not include yours. If it doesn’t, that’s a real problem, but it’s one that’s easily solved.

Optimizing for Google’s Local search is an important part of local Internet marketing. They’re the biggest search engine, so they’re the gold standard for search engine optimization. They also already have your company information in their servers, so it makes sense that they put that information to use by helping their users find you more easily.

The great thing about Google is that it also scans different review sites, like Yelp or Urban Spoon, for user reviews. So B2C businesses (business-to-consumer) may end up getting some great local Internet marketing juice if people leave positive reviews on the different review sites. These reviews also make Google map listings more useful, because people can see whether they want to visit your establishment or not.

Should Regional and Online Businesses Do Local Internet Marketing?

Even regional businesses and online businesses should optimize for local internet marketing. While most of your customers may not come to your location, this will still help improve your search engine ranking. In fact, local Internet marketing is one of the most effective and efficient forms of SEO.

That’s because you need as many inbound links to your website (links that go from another site to yours) as you can get. The more you have, the more valuable Google thinks your site is, and so the higher it appears in search results.

But you also never know when you are going to get a local visitor. While you may not want visitors at a home-based business, it’s worth doing if you have an actual office. You’re already going to do it for SEO reasons, so just consider any visitors who find you this way as a bonus.

Should B2B Do Local Internet Marketing?

Companies that focus on business-to-business should also take advantage of local Internet marketing. For one thing, a number of your customers may be local. You want them to know you’re in the area, so filling out your Google Local profile is going to be a big help.

While your local customers may only be two percent of your customer base, you might as well take advantage this. Besides, if your competitors are already on here, you want to make sure they’re not beating you. And if your customers aren’t on Google Local yet, you could be the first. Take advantage of their absence.

How Can National Chains Do Local Internet Marketing?

You’re probably thinking I’m going to tell you to manually enter in each store location on Google’s Local Business section. And while they would be a great job to give the interns, you can just upload a list of your locations, including the addresses and phone numbers, and Google Maps will place the markers for you.

Where Else Should I Focus My Local Internet Marketing Efforts?

Don’t think that Google has the lock on local Internet marketing. There are several sites, including the aforementioned Yelp and Urban Spoon, that may be worth your time. There are also the Yellow Pages, Super Yellow Pages, Yahoo Yellow Pages, and other similar directories that can help your local Internet marketing. There’s also Yahoo’s listing service, and the new kid on the block, Bing, has a local business listing you can take advantage of. Visit them and update your listing information.

Local Internet marketing can greatly help your search engine results, but you don’t have to be a search engine optimization expert. This is something you can do in a matter of minutes, and it can make all the difference in the world. But if it seems like something you don’t want to mess with, call a local online marketing expert. They’ll be happy to help you out.

Reverse SEO’s importance never became more apparent than it did a couple of weeks ago. I got a call from a potential client — we’ll call him Ken H. Block — who had a Google problem.

Ken was a former sports anchor, well-known to sports fans in his area, and has been online for years. He does video marketing for a couple of very large, multi-national companies, as well as some smaller clients. He banked on his name, but hadn’t done very much to promote it. The problem was that there was another man — Ken S. Block, a convicted felon and scam artist — who had the same name. The problem became obvious when the CEO of one of the companies had Googled his name, and found Ken S. He knew Ken H. was not Ken S., but he couldn’t resist teasing him about it. During a phone call with other company executives.

Ken H needed some reverse SEO badly.

What is Reverse SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing your website so it appears at the top of search engine results. Conversely, reverse SEO means you push down unwanted, negative results by piling your pages on top of the negative one, pushing it right off the page.

Most people only have to worry about name doubles stealing their thunder, but Ken H. had a problem with people confusing him with a convicted felon. While it wasn’t an issue for the people who knew Ken, it could be a problem for the people who wanted to hire him. And short of paying for a Google Ad that said, “Ken S. Block the felon is not to be confused with Ken H. Block the video marketer,” reverse SEO was going to be his best option.

What can Reverse SEO do for me?

Since Ken H’s search results were a single blog post, it doesn’t look like it will be that difficult to knock from the top rank. But it is not always this easy. We know people who share names with other notable people, and they have worked hard to maintain a top search ranking. One friend shares a similar name with a Big Ten running back, which can sometimes lead to some interesting search results.

There are only a few steps we would need to take for Ken S, but we need to do them many times until we achieve the desired result.

• Blogging is the primary tool in our reverse SEO toolbox, and should be the hub in your social media campaign. Ken H should blog about anything and everything related to his work. He should also write about the Ken S./Ken H. confusion (“I am not Ken S. Block”), and try to focus on getting that as a featured post so people will find it during future searches. By winning searches with that post, he can reverse SEO the Ken S. Block page down from the top position.
• YouTube videos are a great reverse SEO tool. And since Ken H. is a video marketer, he needs to use video to promote his work anyway. And as videos become more popular, easier to access, and available on mobile devices, this will become more important in reverse SEO campaigns.
• Backlink to your website. This is a practice for regular SEO, so you know it’s going to work for reverse SEO too. Basically, the search engines put more stock into websites with a lot of links going into them (that’s a backlink). The more you have, the higher your site appears. In Ken H’s case, if he were to increase his backlinks, his blog will rise to the top of the rankings, which will push Ken S’ name down.

Reverse SEO is not that difficult. It’s just time consuming. You can’t just do a couple of optimization tricks and sit back and relax. These steps need to be repeated many times, and in the right places, if you’re going to have a successful reverse SEO campaign.

Finding affordable SEO services can make the difference between success and failure for your online business. That’s because the once-popular pay-per-click model (where you pay for ads to be placed on a search engine, such as the right-hand side of Google search results) is not bringing in the results they once — if ever — did.

So why do you need affordable SEO services? What can they do that a pay-per-click campaign can’t. And why can’t you just create a website and count on people finding you that way?

Let’s test pay-per-click vs. affordable SEO services: the next time you do a Google search, pay attention to where your eyes go on the results page. If you’re like most people, they found the top of the search results, and quickly scanned to the bottom of the screen, not the bottom of the page. They didn’t jump to the right side and the paid ads, and they didn’t look at the sponsored links at the very top of the page. They looked at the actual search results, and skipped the stuff people paid for. You’re not alone. There have been several studies that examine eye tracking and heat mapping, and have found that users tend to skip the ads on a page, and zero in on the results.

In other words, the pay-per-click ads are not receiving the attention the online business owners were counting on, but the affordable SEO services are creating positive results.

And why doesn’t “if you build it, they will come” work either? Because most web designers don’t have the knowledge and skills an affordable SEO services firm has when it comes to optimizing your website for maximum search effectiveness.

That’s why affordable SEO services are very important. Search engine optimization is the idea that you make your website everything the search engines want to see. An affordable SEO services firm can help you with organic SEO consulting — putting your website at the top of the search results without paying for any ads or sponsored links.

An affordable SEO services firm will work with you to find the ideal keywords for your website, and then help you write your web copy, format your web pages, and even choose the best domain name and page titles to achieve those top rankings. A pay-per-click firm will just help you find the lowest price for getting your links on the part of the page people rarely look at.

Organic search results are more trusted and accepted by search users, because they’re real websites created by real people based on things people really want to find. They’re not bought and paid for by a pay-per-click campaign. They’re created by either the user or an affordable SEO services firm that specializes in organic search consulting.

But you can even forgo the affordable SEO services and take the DIY route instead. If you want to take the time to learn the proper formatting and web copy creation, you can create your own search success. It’s not that hard if you have the technical skills and patience to do it, although we should warn you that you’ll need to spend quite a bit of time each week keeping up with any changes to the accepted search techniques, to the algorithms the search engines use, and even to your competitors’ websites. (That’s why an affordable SEO services firm is often a better alternative.)

Investing in affordable SEO services is a great way to propel your website to the top of the search results. And when your online business relies on people finding you quickly and easily, it’s one of the smartest business decisions you can make.

An Affordable SEO Services Firm is tough to find, especially when you are new to online marketing. When you first get into web commerce and Internet marketing, you’ll start hearing a flurry of terms, like “organic search engine optimization” and “paid search engine listings.” What do they mean? Are they the same thing? Is this something I should be doing myself, or do I need to find an affordable SEO services firm?

Search engine optimization is one of those “so easy a caveman can do it” areas that people often end up neglecting it, or worse, not understanding it completely. That’s when it may be important to call in an SEO firm to pick up that part of the program for you, because, let’s face it, it’s really not that easy. But if you work at it, and spend a lot of time doing it, you can actually do your own search engine optimization. However, it can be rather time consuming to do properly, so if you have a large site or a new campaign, find an affordable SEO services firm to handle the heavy lifting for you.

There are a few major differences between organic search engine optimization and things like Google Adwords – paid search engine listings – which are a different beast altogether. So you need to make sure you find an affordable SEO services firm that understands that difference.

The first place you’ll see the difference between organic SEO and paid ads is on Google’s search results page. Type in a search term, and see what comes up. You’ll see two sets of results, one on the left, the other on the right. The results on the left are based on organic search, while the results on the right are the sponsored links, or paid ads. According to some search marketing experts, organic search results make up almost 90% of total search results; the remainder are the paid search engine listings.

Second, the organic search results are improved by adding backlinks to a website, using keywords in an article and in anchor text, and using other proper SEO techniques. On the other hand, paid search engine listings only require some keyword research and a willingness to pay more money than your competitor to have your paid results appear higher. An affordable SEO services firm is going to be able to show you the best way to accomplish either or both of these.

To the purist and the social media expert, the organic search is going to produce more honest, trsutworthy, and therefore, more-likely-to-be-clicked results that will lead to better search engine performance. However, the affordable SEO services firm will recognize that paid search engine listings are also an important of any effective search engine strategy, and will work with you to make it as successful as possible.

Third, paid search engine listings can let you “own” more keywords than organic SEO. With paid listings, you’re limited only by your budget — you can own thousands or even tens of thousands of keywords. With organic SEO, you’re limited only by your time, which means you will typically only be able to own tens, or possibly a couple hundred, keywords. And you’ll spend a lot of time trying to own them all, which means you’ll miss out on a lot of other work you could be doing for your business. Of course, an affordable SEO services firm will be able to take the time issue off your plate, which means you will be able to focus on the other aspects of your business. They’ll also be able to help you find and claim the best keywords for a paid listing campaign.

Fourth, while all search is trackable and measurable, paid search engine listings are more measurable than organic. For one thing, you can measure actual conversions and sales with your keywords, rather than just clicks and eyeballs. This will also speed up the research time in finding which are the best keywords to use for your organic search. By seeing which keywords have the most clickthroughs and conversions, you can see what the most important search terms should be for your organic search. You can do all these things with organic search too, but the paid search engine listings lets you get that laser-like focus, and to do it much more quickly. Talk to an affordable SEO services firm about how they can help you.