What do online marketing and holiday shopping have in common – beyond Exhibit 1 (Internet) often facilitating Exhibit 2 (gifts/commerce)?
Getting started is generally the hardest part of either process, regardless of whether your destination is SEO or FAO Schwarz.
We here at SEM Zen aren’t fond of latching onto a “Christmas” theme for a blog post even before “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” has aired on network TV. However, one seasonal initiative that you’ve probably heard about, called “Small Business Saturday” (and incongruously sponsored by corporate behemoth American Express), does a nice job of encouraging the U.S.’s 20-plus billion local and independent U.S. business owners to get started with marketing to both customers and the search engines.
For Small Business Saturday, businesses get a multimedia “toolkit” approach to promoting the business via branded SBS offerings, including:
- Print signage
- Logos, buttons and other tools for Facebook, Twitter and other social media
- A tool for creating a “My Business Story” YouTube video
- Free Facebook ads (free, that is, to the first 10,000 businesses who claimed ‘em)
Naturally, all this marketing goodness doesn’t arise from the sheer kindness of a Platinum heart. AmEx customers get a monetary incentive to shop at SBS stores on Saturday, Nov. 26, using their AmEx plastic – thereby also incentivizing businesses to accept those higher-rate charge cards. But overall, this campaign will give some mom-and-pops a gentle nudge toward taking advantage of Internet marketing solutions.
Optimize For Search Directories
Being local in nature, the SBS marketing campaign is also a good reminder to make sure that your business is listed not only with the big search platforms (Google, Bing and Yahoo), but also with the other major directories that folks are likely to consult online. These include:- Yelp
- YellowPages.com
- SuperPages.com
- YellowBook
- CitySearch/CityGrid
You’d be amazed at the millions of unclaimed pages are floating out there right now, just on Facebook alone.
To optimize your business for local searchers, ensure that your business name, phone number and other information (e.g., category of business, business hours) are not only accurate, but also consistent across search engines and directories.
Once your basic information is up to date and verified, a good SEO practice is to periodically refresh the listing (wherever possible) with special offers, coupons and video.
As a small business with many small-business customers, SEM Zen would like to hear about your online advertising challenges and, of course, triumphs. Here’s how you can contact us.
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