When was the last time you picked up the Yellow Pages to find a plumber, accountant or any other type of local service provider? If you’re like most people (76% make regular local searches), you’ll be using Google to find what you need and leaving the Yellow Pages as a door stop.

But whilst more and more people are conducting local searches (e.g. ‘barbers in Buckingham’), many business websites aren’t properly optimised to take advantage. Many continue to focus on targeting competitive keywords, lured by the chance to reach a global marketplace. But the fact is that most people would still prefer to do business with those they can meet face to face, or can more easily get hold of in the event of a problem.

Here are some tips for improving your website’s chances of showing up in the local search results:

1. Include your geographic location in your keywords – Instead of using ‘Chinese restaurant’ in your website’s copy make sure you include your geographic location i.e. ‘Chinese restaurant, Richmond’. This applies to your page titles and headings as well as your body copy.
2. Feature your address on every page of your website – As well as making it easier for visitors to find you, featuring your address in, say, the footer section makes it clearer to the search engines where you’re located.
3. Include a local phone number – Google can’t pinpoint your location from an 0800 number, so it’s wise to include a number with your local dialling code as well.
4. Add your website to Google Places –Google Places enables you to create a local search listing with your contact details, a description of your services as well as photos of you or your shop. You can also add coupons to your listing for customers to print off. Perhaps most crucially, adding your site to Google Places offers you the chance to appear on Google Maps and at the top of the page of search results. Bing and Yahoo offer something similar, but Google is the big daddy to focus on with the most traffic.
5. Ask for reviews – To improve your chances of appearing in the Google Maps section of local search results, you need to persuade your customers to write reviews of your service. Consider adding a request to your invoices, follow up emails and other marketing material. Customers can submit their reviews directly into Google Maps, and reviews are also collected from third party review site, such as TripAdvisor.
6. Add a page mentioning local towns and places – If your website has an faq section add plenty of local place names to describe the areas you cover and to give the search engines more local keywords to feed on.

There are other technical tricks you can try (such as adding your geo position to your websites code), but these 6 tips should give you a head start on your competitors at being found in the lucrative local search results.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Search marketing firm Epiphany Solutions has found that many of the UK’s top brands rate poorly when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). It seems that whilst they’ll happily spend millions on TV slots and magazine ads, the leading brands struggle when it comes to making their websites easy to find.

I do have some sympathy for them though, because SEO can be a confusing and complicated business. But there are some tried and tested methods you can use to maximise the chances of your website reaching page 1:

Keywords – People are more likely to be searching for product keywords than your particular brand. So it’s sensible to be optimising your website for keywords that are relevant to your industry. Google’s Keyword Tool can tell you how frequently keywords are searched for and offer suggestions on alternatives. It’s a good idea to choose 4 or 5 primary and secondary keywords, which you can then mix and match in your content.

Content – It’s widely believed that keyword density has little bearing these days. Instead you should aim to feature your keywords in your headings and subheadings (using H1-H3 tags in html speak) and ideally in your domain name.

Blogging – Google’s success relies on its ability to return the most relevant and up-to-date information. So it tends to push websites which are regularly updated to the top. This is one of the reasons why a blog can be the engine room of an SEO campaign – they keep Google fed with new content and, if given time and attention, can attract links from other relevant websites.

For blogging software look no further than Wordpress – it’s free, easy to use and has a great collection of plugins for maximising its SEO power.

Backlinks – Another key factor in SEO is backlinks, which are links from other websites pointing back to your own. The key is to build up links from relevant websites with a high Page Rank. Page Rank is Google’s ranking system for defining a website’s authority – you can check a website’s Page Rank by installing the Google Toolbar into your browser.

To attract links you can try commenting on popular blogs in the hope of being noticed so they read your posts and, hopefully, publish a link. Other tactics include writing articles and publishing them in article directories and writing online press releases with links back to your website.

Analysing – Once your SEO campaign is up and running you’ll want to watch the results. Google Analytics is far and away the most popular website analytics software. It’s free and gives you a wealth of information on what visitors are clicking on and what’s making them leave. With it you can find out how to gradually improve the amount of time people spend on your site and its success in generating enquiries.

The proof is in the pudding

We applied these principals to a website we launched three weeks ago for our client Misys. We worked hard to generate backlinks by posting links to relevant LinkedIn Group discussion forums and on Twitter – and the results have been spectacular. To date we’ve attracted 1,250 unique visitors (260 of whom have visited the site more than once) 63 visits via Google and according to Mike’s Marketing Tools the site already ranks 14^th on Google for the search term ‘the future of banking’ – making reaching the magic ‘top 10′ tantalisingly close.

Hopefully these tips should get your SEO campaign rolling. But if you’d like to find out more, Econsultancy has a long list of popular SEO articles you might like to have a read through.

Useful resources

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://wordpress.org/

http://www.dwpub.com/

http://www.articlesbase.com/

http://www.seobugz.com/

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Is your marketing aimed at building closer bonds or telling people how wonderful you are? If it’s the latter you might want to head back to the whiteboard. The fact is that consumer mindsets are changing; the ability to share opinions globally, in mere hours, is irrevocably changing the nature of marketing.

No longer can we simply spoon feed people advertising whilst they’re slumped in front of the TV, or carpet bomb messages they’re now adept at sidestepping. People just aren’t listening anymore when there’s so much noise to contend with.

Added to this is the recession tightening purse strings and hardening people’s resolve not to be bullied into buying ‘stuff’.

So what we’ve now arrived at, in 2010, is the rise of the cynical, sceptical and often critical consumer, who’s not shy of sharing their opinions with friends, followers and the search engines. With consumers now less trusting, building more personal relationships will be the key to marketing in 2010.

Here’s a rundown of some of the trends to watch out for this year:

1. Driven by the proliferation of laptops, smartphones and internet enabled TVs, people will be going online more often and from more locations – positioning digital closer to the centre of marketing campaigns, rather than an offshoot

2. Despite what some digital fanboys might say, direct mail still has a role to play. Surveys show that people prefer to receive offers in print. But to help print survive it needs to be supported by email, personalised URLs and mobile to enhance its relevance and impact

3. Digital advertising will become more targeted as advertisers start using data on where visitors have been and what they’re doing. Expect a backlash when complaints on privacy lead to rushed government legislation. You can pre-empt this (and build trust) by making it clear what data you’re collecting and what visitors gain in return

4. Expect more cases of multi million pound marketing budgets being ruined by critical or mischievous consumer generated content

5. Brands will create their own media channels (and sidestep the traditional media) offering consumers valuable content, useful apps and branded live events

6. Search gets social –Tweets and status updates will start appearing in the search results, making customer service more integral to marketing

7. Crisis marketing – the ability to spread negative opinions globally in hours means you must have a plan in place for monitoring what’s being said, and have the tools to respond and be a part of the conversation

8. Social networking will fragment as teenagers abandon Facebook to escape snooping parents and as people form private networks amongst those whose opinions they actually care about. This will make the job of identifying where customers are congregating that little bit trickier – you won’t be able to just slap up a Facebook fan page and tick social media off the list

9. Mobile will come of age as people start buying more than just ring tones. Short code and coupon marketing will become more widespread, and smartphone apps will evolve from mere gimmicks into useful tools

10. 2010 is going to be an interesting year for marketers, and one in which you’ll need to significantly update your job description as marketing becomes integral to everything a company does

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

Google has been ruffling a few feathers recently after announcing on its Adwords blog that the position your ad appears in the search results doesn’t affect its conversion rate. Its research suggests that whether your ad appears at the top of the page or the bottom the likelihood of people taking action on your website remains the same.

This news has been greeted by a mixture of shrugged shoulders and furrowed brows. Some people wonder why this is even news, whilst others are annoyed at Google’s subtle marketing ploy. Because Google’s research could be interpreted as suggesting the only way to improve your website’s sales is to attract more traffic, which means getting sucked into a bidding war for the top positions.

So is Google correct and the conversion rate remains the same wherever your ad is placed? Or can its position and content be optimised to attract a higher proportion of buyers, rather than browsers?

Who cares about clicks? Send me customers!

Many big companies buy up the top positions for generic terms as part of a branding strategy. They want you to find their website as soon as possible so you can register and bookmark it, even if you’re not yet ready.

This strategy is fine if you’re happy to throw £1000s at Google Adwords everyday. But if you’ve a limited budget, chasing after the top position might not offer you the best return.

Most people initially search the web for information. So if your ad is in top position you’ll attract a lot of browsers at the early info gathering stage.

If your ad appears lower down you’re going to attract fewer clicks. But the clicks you do receive will be from people who’ve scrolled down the page, which suggests they’ve progressed further along the research stage and are closer to buying.

So an ad in 7^th or 8^th position might attract fewer clicks than those at the top. But, potentially, a higher proportion of those clicks will be from people who’ve picked out your ad for a specific reason. So managing your bids to appear further down the page could offer you a better return on your Adwords investment than fighting an expensive war for top position.

To increase your conversion rate it can also help if your ad is targeted at specific prospects, rather than as many people as possible.

How can my Google Ad be better targeted at buyers?

One of the world’s best known copywriters, Bob Bly, recently said that every great ad has four ingredients: urgent, useful, unique and ultra-specific. This is particularly appropriate to creating targeted Google ads.

Instead of focusing on generic keywords, consider how your ad can be made more unique and ultra-specific. If you sell a range of products, how can you create an ad targeted at customers for each one?

For example, if you sell industrial furniture you could create separate ads focused on ‘antistatic workbenches’ and ‘small parts storage cabinets’. You could also include the price to dissuade clicks from those on a limited budget. Your ads might attract fewer clicks. But a higher proportion of those clicks will be from targeted prospects more likely to buy.

The beauty of Adwords is you can split test different keywords and descriptions to discover which offers the best conversion rate for you. Just don’t listen to Google and settle for a 1% conversion rate when higher ones are possible.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

With all the excitement over the internet in the marketing world, you’re often left thinking that if your marketing plan doesn’t include a Facebook group, a ‘viral’ YouTube video or a Twitter campaign you might as well not bother. Apparently, people aren’t interested in traditional marketing anymore, and printing off brochures and direct mail is a waste of trees.

So, is traditional marketing a waste of time? Are people so engrossed in looking up old school friends and online shopping that they don’t have time to read anything you print?

Well, you’d certainly think so based on recent Advertising Association research, which found that one in five marketing pounds are now being spent online, whilst traditional budgets appear to be in freefall.

Last year, spend on press advertising fell 11.8% and TV ad budgets fell 4.9%. But spending on the web grew 19.1% to £3.6 billion, which means it’s now snapping at the heels of the wheezing £4.4 billion TV ad market.

Nearly 60% of web budgets are spent on search

According to an eMarketer report, 59.3% of online budgets were spent on search marketing in 2008 – an increase of 4.9% on the previous year. Whilst growth has since stalled to 0.9%, the proportion of web budgets being spent on search shows that driving traffic is top priority.

But is this the smartest approach? Is investing in search the best use of your shrinking budget? Or are there other methods of driving traffic that marketers are missing out on?

60% are most likely to visit a website in response to print

Bastions of the print world, Pitney Bowes recently reported that it’s actually good old traditional direct mail that might be the most likely medium to trigger a visit to your website.

In fact, 60% in the survey said that addressed mail was the most likely to trigger an online purchase, whilst only 24% believed emails and sponsored links would send them to a website they hadn’t visited before.

This follows on from previous Pitney Bowes research in which 73% said they’d prefer to receive special offers and product announcements in the mail rather than in digital form.

Print can be the trigger for digital marketing

It’s easy to get carried away with all the excitement on the web’s potential: people are spending more and more time updating Facebook, looking up product info and shopping for the best services. So it’s easy to see why shifting your budget from print to search marketing seems to be the smart thing to do.

But as the Pitney Bowes research shows, print still has a vital role to play. It can act as the introduction to your digital marketing and trigger people into visiting your website.

Just remember that direct mail can be binned as junk as easily as an irrelevant email. So make sure your printed offers are relevant, personalised and delivered to the right person at the right time.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

In its Madison Avenue strutting heyday, advertising was the only way to sell. Back when people spent their evenings reading newspapers or glued to the TV, brands relied on ads to grow desire and plant jingles in people’s minds.

But unfortunately for the once cocksure ad man, people and times have changed.

The old adage of ‘advertise or die’ is now being replaced by ‘evolve or die’. People are binning newspapers permanently, and fast forwarding or switching off the TV altogether.

The problem with advertising

Advertising’s first aim has always been to grab attention. Then it implants an appealing collection of thoughts and feelings that spring to mind when people are trawling supermarket shelves.

The problem is that consumers have been dazzled with advertising for so long that they’ve started ignoring it. Over time, the unfulfilled dreams promised by ad men have created cynicism, and an attitude has grown towards avoiding ads altogether.

So, brands need to find new platforms for engaging with their ad weary public. For many, this has simply meant diverting their budget online.

But as studies are showing, people are forming buying decisions based on the quality of the content brands provide, and not just on their advertising.

Brand perceptions are being formed online

Last year brands spent nearly £3 billion chasing after the migration of eyeballs onto the internet. But simply raining down ads isn’t an adequate response to the way in which people use the web.

A survey of UK consumers, last year, found that 86% had researched a company online before deciding whether to buy their product. And 22% always conduct an online background check before parting with their cash. Whilst these stats sound promising, less than half (49%) found the information they were looking for.

So, brands should start providing useful content on their website if they want to engage people’s interest and influence their buying decisions. After all, people use the internet to find information, not advertising.

Brand perception is built at every touch point

Advertising can be expensive and makes less of an impact than it once did. There are also now too many other ways in which people can engage with your brand (and they’re looking for a conversation that isn’t one way).

So you need to consider how your business is engaging with customers at every touch point. Whether it’s via magazine ads, direct mail, email or customer service, every engagement influences how people perceive the quality of your products.

And as the survey shows, people are increasingly demanding informative, useful content that answers their questions and assists their buying decisions. Which is why advertising alone, ultimately, is no longer enough to satisfy the needs of today’s cynical, connected consumer.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.

So you’ve built your website and ready to start greeting customers. But first you need to make sure your site can be found.

In follow up to last week’s post on Pay per click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO), here are 10 free tools for boosting your search engine ranking, and welcoming more visitors to your virtual shop:

1. Google Adwords Keyword Tool – the first step in any SEO campaign is identifying your keywords. This handy tool will let you know which keywords to target, as well as offer suggestions on popular phrases you might not have thought of.

2. Wordpress – now you know which keywords to target you’ll need to boost the number of times they appear in your content. More than just blogging software, Wordpress offers an entire content management system for adding keyword packed articles. With 100s of customisable themes to choose from and a vibrant community of plugin developers, Wordpress can transform your website from a static brochure to a resource of industry news and info. Publishing great content will also work wonders for your search engine ranking.

3. XML Sitemap Generator – whenever you add new content to your site you’ll want to make sure Google knows about it. Sitemaps help the search engine’s spiders crawl around your site and understand what it’s about. This generator will create a search engine compliant sitemap that you can upload to your home directory every time your site is updated.

4. Google Webmaster Tools – after you’ve uploaded your sitemap you can use this handy utility to analyse its data. Google Webmaster Tools shows you how the search engine views your website, and, crucially, it will let you know if there are any problems to fix, such as broken links.

5. SEO Book’s Rank Checker – created by Aaron Wall, one of the SEO scene’s most respected bloggers, this Firefox plugin enables you to check where your site is ranking in keyword searches. You can save the details of every campaign and run reports from your browser in seconds.

6. Hubspot’s Website Grader – this award winning tool can run an SEO health check on your site before awarding it a grade and offering advice on how it could be improved. You can discover how effectively your site is described, its readability level and how often it has been bookmarked on social bookmarking sites (e.g. Digg and Delicious). Should you wish to show off, the Website Grader provides you with code to paste into your site so you can display a badge featuring your search marketing quality score.

7. SEO Quake – this plugin for web browsers adds a toolbar displaying info on the SEO effectiveness of websites, as well as underscore entries on the search results page. You can check the number of your website pages that have been indexed by the different search engines at a glance, as well as spy on the success of your competitors’ campaigns.

8. Backlink Watch – along with regularly adding great content, you’ll want to build up the number of inbound links from relevant sites. If you’re posting useful content then you should start to attract links naturally. But it also helps to post comments in forums and on blogs to let people know you’re there. This handy tool will let you know who’s linking to your content, and track the success of your link building campaign.

9. StatCounter – once your visitors start arriving you’ll want to be able to know what they’re looking at and how long they’re engaging with your site. This free tool offers a wealth of valuable info, such as what links visitors are clicking on, how they’re finding you and in which country they’re based. Warning: checking your stats in the hope of seeing a flood of new visitors can be addictive.

10. Google Analytics – no list of SEO tools would be complete without mentioning Google’s free analytical software. It tells you everything you need to know about your visitors and the ‘stickiness’ of your website. The insight you gain into how visitors are interacting with your site can help you understand the journey they’re taking and what pages need improving to push more visitors to the contact page or checkout till.

Search marketing is a complicated beast. But at least with these tools you’ll have a fighting chance of understanding how it’s done.

As mentioned last week, getting onto page one can take weeks, months or even years for competitive terms. But the sooner you implement an SEO strategy the sooner you’ll be able to greet customers finding you through the search engines and buying your pixelated products.

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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.