Conducted by Gary Woods

Academy of Web Specialists

Take search engine marketing training!

17:59:39 gary woods So what kind of businesses do you have?

18:00:20 pata I do internet marketing for clients. One of them...

18:00:37 pata is a local college selling continuing education

18:00:43 gary woods So you're planning on marketing only to your immediate area?

18:01:02 pata yes

18:01:27 pata it is hard to find kw for seo

18:01:29 gary woods How do you plan on marketing to your area?

18:02:07 pata I have been hired to market online. I have started with seo, but...

18:02:16 gary woods Pata what kind of businesses are in your area that would be good to market to?

18:02:27 pata can't find any powerful kw for local traffic

18:02:48 pata all sorts...

18:02:56 gary woods What's the name of the town?

18:03:10 pata we teach html, dreamweaver. flash... that sort of thing

18:03:27 gary woods These are private courses in

website design?

18:03:27 pata Denver Baby!

18:03:53 pata yes private certificate type 11 week courses

18:04:07 gary woods So have you had any success with a particular market segment?

18:04:31 pata can't tell,

18:04:56 gary woods Most success springs from previous success

18:05:08 gary woods Do you ask for referral from your present clients?

18:05:25 pata do you mean what KWs have been successful?

18:05:29 gary woods Your best source for new business is previously happy clients

18:06:26 pata What are your general strategies for the local market? what were you planning on discussing?

18:06:31 gary woods Are you looking primarily for building your own business or soliciting new SEO work for yourself?

18:07:02 pata I am a consultant. the school is a client

18:07:15 gary woods Robin had asked me to talk about local markets because I'm a Realtor and have been very successful at targeting particular local markets

18:07:46 pata well I say you should just babble at us for a while!!

18:08:02 gary woods Okay then are you promoting the school's courses?

18:08:09 pata yes

18:08:34 pata Its for lead generation... call or email

18:08:51 gary woods Alright, what about breaking down the curriculum by departments in the school?

18:09:10 gary woods Creating doorway pages, or even small sites for each department to highlight areas of interest

18:09:46 pata I started with that but...

18:09:53 gary woods What was the issue?

18:09:55 pata take flash for example..

18:10:06 gary woods What about flash?

18:10:27 pata a lot of people are interested but when you filter everyone out who does not...

18:10:46 pata live in Denver you are not left with much

18:10:48 pata done

18:11:19 gary woods So you want to teach Flash to people who live in Denver, is that correct?

18:11:26 pata yes

18:12:28 gary woods And you're concerned that the marketplace of people in Denver is too small?

18:13:36 pata maybe... when I use wordtracker with Denver or Colorado, the results suggest NO TRAFFIC will come

18:14:05 gary woods I have that when I look at word tracker for my keywords which are Santa Barbara Real Estate

18:14:27 gary woods But when I target those words I get about 7,500 hits a day

18:15:05 gary woods Sometimes Word Tracker is not a good judge

18:15:14 pata so should I look for kw that I think are good (w/o) Denver and then tag it on the end?

18:15:16 gary woods Particularly with narrowly defined words

18:15:36 gary woods I think that's an excellent want of looking at using Word Tracker

18:15:52 gary woods Find your largest market and then just tag Denver on the front of it

18:16:20 pata thanks... I'll be quite for a while now

18:16:30 gary woods Look at words like computer graphics, Photoshop, illustrator, etc

18:16:39 gary woods See where the marketplace leads you

18:17:00 gary woods Does anybody else have a local business they are interested in publicizing

18:18:37 gary woods I love it when everybody participates on an idea

18:18:58 burke Yes, 1 client of mine a business Storage facility, for furniture Cars RVs Boats etc... ....

18:19:35 gary woods Okay, what kind of keywords do you target with these businesses?

18:19:42 burke I have mentioned Overture to them but sort of turned their nose up at that so kind of at a dead end now.

18:20:42 gary woods Overture is good in the short run just to get them some kind of recognition, but I never got much return on investment for my Overture money

18:20:44 burke I was using Lloyd Minster Storage facility, Lloyd Minster storage .....

18:21:15 gary woods Lloyd Minster is the name of the town?

18:21:19 burke yep

18:21:43 gary woods Have you done searches on other business in Lloyd Minster?

18:21:53 burke I was always sort of wanting to have Lloyd Minster in their for the geographic placement.

18:22:39 burke a few yes and always get the chamber of commerce sites and HUGE sites but never any local markets.

18:22:47 gary woods I just ran Lloyd Minster in Google and it looks like mainly municipal sites that show up

18:22:56 burke yes

18:23:29 gary woods I just ran Leominster Public Storage and got mainly public school sites

18:23:42 gary woods Does that match the results you get?

18:23:47 burke mostly city related not business if that sounds reasonable

18:23:59 gary woods That does sound reasonable

18:24:51 gary woods I also just ran Lloyd Minster Realtors and didn't get a lot of sites. How a big place is this?

18:24:57 burke been wracking how I get above or beyond all city stuff.

18:25:09 burke wracking my brains

18:25:09 gary woods That's pretty tough isn't it.

18:25:34 gary woods Have you looked at how else you might describe Public Storage with Word Tracker

18:25:58 gary woods Also, have you looked at the keyword density and word placement on the page of the top ranked sites

18:26:03 burke like I say they (client) don't really want to put any effort(monetary) for advertising

18:26:38 gary woods I can understand that, but look at the sites that rank well in your categories even though they have nothing to do with public storage

18:26:52 gary woods There is some element, and maybe more than one that is bringing them to the top

18:27:15 gary woods It might be keyword density which I think is a lot more important than Link Popularity with Google

18:27:26 gary woods But, you also have to look at your Link Popularity

18:27:32 burke yes, Ill take a look and see for KW and their sites.

18:27:49 burke and snoop at theirs and see

18:27:58 gary woods Have you started a Links page or pages, and then contacted under firms that deal with public storage?

18:28:18 gary woods I used to do a lot of downloading of sites just to see what kept them up where they were

18:28:30 burke they were pretty picky in # pages so will suggest that again to them and see

18:28:37 gary woods When you get the actual HTML on your desktop you find some pretty amazing things

18:28:49 burke hopefully they've eased up a bit. :-)

18:29:01 gary woods I'm sorry, what does # pages mean?

18:29:09 burke number of pages

18:30:05 gary woods I just ran a Google search on the words Public Storage and the top ranked page is only a Page Rank of 4.

18:30:10 burke I'm seeing them tomorrow so I'll have a few more things to "throw" at them. lol

18:31:04 gary woods I also just ran Lloyd Minster Public Storage and the top ranked site there is only a Googled Page Rank of 3.

18:31:06 burke I'm still a little fuzzy at Page Rank, meaning. You fill me in if you don't mind. Sorry.

18:31:32 gary woods That tells me that it's perfectly possible to build up enough Link Popularity without too much work to make to the top of the heap with those words

18:31:57 gary woods Page Rank is an overall ranking of your Page with Google.

18:32:11 gary woods It's just one of the elements that determine how well a page places.

18:32:33 burke SEO Links everything .........

18:32:42 gary woods You'll see all the time that pages with lower Page Ranks are listed above other pages, but it's just one way of keeping score

18:33:25 gary woods Yes, I would create a links page and start looking at Public Storage sites all over Canada and the US that would be willing to link to your site

18:34:07 gary woods If you do that be very specific about the words you would like them to link with i.e. "Lloyd Minster Public Storage"

18:34:39 gary woods I would also look at Moving Companies because a lot of times this is an ancillary business for them

18:35:12 gary woods Here's a site that you could start by soliciting http://www.moveeast.com

18:35:21 gary woods They're very aggressive about adding new links

18:35:21 burke never thought of that. thx

18:35:45 gary woods It's just like any other business. The more people that say you're good, the better you become.

18:35:55 gary woods Does anybody else have a business they would like to talk about?

18:36:19 frisco what is the URL for Lloyd Minster Public Storage?

18:36:25 Beth I do, kind of the same thing as Burke's

18:36:42 gary woods Public Storage Beth?

18:37:24 Beth Potential client wants to lease or sell a huge call center warehouse space used to be Magnavox plant

18:37:53 gary woods Okay, and what keywords do you target for this client?

18:38:19 Beth most of the sites I have looked into

linking with want to charge a fee, this client hasn't actually signed on yet

18:38:39 gary woods I've never paid a fee to link to anybody

18:38:53 Beth these seem to be real estate

directories

18:39:02 gary woods Most of those companies that want money to link to them aren't worth it even for free

18:39:24 gary woods I would target Commercial Real Estate Brokers

18:39:32 gary woods Uh oh, we lost Fernando

18:40:09 Beth would the "moving site" thing work for me too?

18:40:11 gary woods There are big real estate directories like realtor.com and they want about $500 per year to list with them. It's probably a waste

18:40:26 gary woods I think it would work very well for you

18:40:29 Beth that's what I thought too

18:41:14 gary woods Yes I would target keywords like storage, warehouse, manufacturing site. Something along those lines

18:41:35 gary woods The thing about a facility that size you should probably widen out the net a little bit

18:41:53 gary woods In other look at adding in the State of Province into the keywords

18:42:12 Beth it is connected with the railroad too, could I use for instance Southern Railways and not get into trouble?

18:43:28 gary woods I don't think Southern Railways would get upset if you used their name, but why not go more generic and just target railways

18:43:51 Beth good point

18:44:19 frisco Companies can be *really* touchy about how you use their name - ITT Tech, for instance, is ruthless

18:45:09 gary woods You're right about some firms being very touchy, I'm just not sure that Southern Railways would fall in that category. I could be totally wrong here, but that's what I think

18:45:37 gary woods Okay let's extrapolate out on that one Beth.

18:45:53 gary woods Would it be appropriate to even look at a group or states or area?

18:46:12 gary woods Again, a warehouse of that size would be looking for a large client

18:46:21 Beth exactly

18:46:43 Beth it has a huge office space as well

18:46:49 gary woods It would be good to go to Word Tracker with the words like storage, manufacturing etc and see what plays well for them

18:47:00 Beth I will do that

18:47:09 gary woods Then go and make searches on Tenn., Kentucky, the south and see how they work

18:48:14 Beth I usually get the same thing as Burke... tourism and municipal sites. Dolly Parton has a monopoly on the search engines

18:48:47 frisco Get Dolly Parton to endorse your warehouse!

18:48:52 gary woods What with Dollyville?

18:49:02 pata Gary...what other strategies, other than seo, do you use to promote your local business?

18:49:19 Beth there ya go ....the answer to my problem!

18:49:39 gary woods I do a pretty good amount of direct mailing, I have what is called a sphere of influence people that know me

18:50:02 gary woods Then there are past clients, they're always your best source for repeat business

18:50:24 frisco Are you willing to conduct a Direct Mailing chat? I don't know enough to venture very far into it.

18:50:38 gary woods Sure I can do that

18:50:51 burke Great Idea!!!!

18:51:01 frisco that would be terrific!

18:51:04 gary woods One of the things that I do is teach at the local Board of Realtors and this week I taught a Mail Merge class

18:51:35 pata so is this electronic or snail mail?

18:51:40 gary woods Mail Merge is a powerful tool when you address someone directly and speak about a piece of property they own

18:51:51 gary woods My Mail Merge is all snail mail

18:52:08 gary woods I probably send out about 300 to 500 per month

18:52:50 gary woods I know a lot of Realtors spend a lot of money on print advertising, but I've never gone that route

18:52:51 burke Hey, Gary, How would I "approach" some realtors in my city for Web Design and SEO?

18:53:16 gary woods I get solicited at least once a week and probably more than that

18:53:48 gary woods You can call them and speak specifically about their site and how you can help them in the rankings

18:54:15 pata are you an independent or do you work for a large firm (e.g. Remax)?

18:54:18 gary woods Most realtor sites aren't very good, and with a little tweaking you could probably break through with some great numbers

18:54:50 gary woods I'm an independent. I'm a child of the 60's, so it's hard for me to imagine working in a large corporate environment

18:55:02 burke I know some realtors here are strictly with their "head" sites

18:55:27 gary woods How do they do with the engines?

18:55:31 pata would it make sense to market an individual realtor, who worked for a big firm?

18:55:51 gary woods Absolutely marketing to an individual is really the only way to start

18:56:07 gary woods We're actually independent even if we're working for a large company

18:56:24 gary woods The overall cost of advertising ourselves and our businesses falls on our shoulders

18:56:46 burke do you do any SEO work or strictly realty work ?

18:57:00 gary woods I don't have any SEO clients

18:57:56 gary woods Does anybody else have any questions, suggestions or just fun stuff to say???

18:58:34 gary woods Well on that happy note, I think I'll go get a glass of wine and ooze into the evening

18:58:42 burke you have a URL gary ? I'm kind of interested in what realty is in CA.18:58:45 gary woods Thanks to all of you for coming and really making my evening

18:59:04 gary woods My main site is http://www.santabarbaraproperties.com

18:59:47 gary woods Thanks again to all of you, if you'd like to write to me I'm at gandlwoods