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When Local Marketing Fails Do This One Thing
By Sarah Giometti | Google
By Sarah Giometti | Google
Hey everyone, Sarah Giometti here, the founder of Provaro marketing. I was just meeting with a client of mine who’s a local business owner and their story got me thinking that this is probably a very familiar story for a lot of small business owners. Let me know if this rings true for you. My client received a cold call from a search engine optimization company, and they were given an amazing sales pitch. It sounded too good to be true, almost. And so my client signed up for 12 month contract, they paid out several hundred dollars a month every month for 12 months, and at the end of that one-year contract, there were no visible results. So my client not losing total faith, when found a search engine optimization person, that’s local to them, hired them for a three-month contract, again, paid several hundred dollars per month, and at the end of three months, had no visible results.
Now, this story I hear all the time, unfortunately, I hear it more than I should. And it leads me to believe that the digital marketing agencies and the digital marketing industry, is really getting a bad reputation, especially when it comes to trying to help small local business owners, this drives me insane. I basically equate this to bullying of local business owners. Now look, I was bullied as a kid, and it sucks. And this is what I’m seeing happening to local business owners. They’re often getting talked into signing these expensive contracts that are also really hard to get out of early, and then you’re getting no results at the end of it. So what do you do? Do you just ignore that part of marketing your business? And in this day and age, you really can’t ignore being online, doing some digital marketing, something. But how do you know who to trust? Now, if you stick with me through the rest of my client’s story I’m going to give you actionable steps that you can take today. You don’t need to hire a digital marketing agency, it’s the first thing that you need to do to take action on marketing your business online, which again, you cannot ignore it any longer.
Now, back to my client’s story. In the first 30 days, they went from being completely invisible online to being found on at least 48 different directory listing sites, including things like Google Maps, Yelp, Yellow Pages, some of the more important ones. Now, here’s an example of the baseline report for my client. When I ran the initial analysis of their business, this is what came back. And what you’re going to notice is on the right hand column, they are not found anywhere except for Facebook, they’re not on Yellow Pages, they’re not on Google Maps, which is incredibly shocking to me, and they’re not on Yelp, either. None of the major places. There you go, you can see Facebook is the only one that’s correct, and that’s because my client did it herself, the companies she paid, didn’t do that for her, they didn’t do anything for her.
So here there are, everything is not found. And after 30 days, like I said, we have them. Let’s bring that over here. And here you can see now that they have a zero percent error rate, zero inaccurate sites, and they’re accurate on 48 different sites. So they are synced everywhere now, and it’s all accurate and linked up, and this helps Google know that their information is correct, ’cause Google verifies it against a lot of these directory listings. Now, we’re working on getting them to show up for a specific keyword phrases, so they get in the front of their ideal target audience.
So why am I telling you this? I’m a fixer, I absolutely love fixing things, especially for small local business owners. I can’t stand hearing business owners getting screwed by people in my industry, it is not okay. So I’m working on changing the way that local business owners view digital marketers. I want to make sure that you not only show up online, but you show up when it counts, when your best clients are looking for you and your services. Now to the part I promised, I’m going to show you the exact steps you need to take right now to get started on taking control of your digital marketing, without getting locked into long expensive contracts.
This is the most important first step that you can take for your online presence. I want you to go to business.google.com. If you have not already claimed your Google My Business listing, then I want you to go through the steps that’s on that page to claim your listing. If you have already claimed your listing, I want you to go through and absolutely fill out every single tiny detail you can. Now, if you are just now claiming your listing, Google has two ways to verify that you really own the business, one, they may do a phone call where you enter in a code or they’re going to mail you a postcard. More often than not, it’s the post-card options, so don’t worry, it only takes a few days for it to show up. If it’s a phone number great, make sure you do it right then and there, because you won’t go live until it’s fully verified. But in the meantime, you can go through and fill out your… The entire profile, you want to make sure your hours are on there, your website, your phone number is correct, a description of your business, put some pictures up there. Especially if you are a service or a product, a contractor, show some pictures of your work, because that’s what people want to see. What kind of payments you take, every little detail, the more thorough you are the better it is for you, that’s it.
That’s all you had to do to take the first step in taking control of your online presence for your local business. You don’t have to sign an expensive contract, you can do it yourself. Shouldn’t take you more than 10 or 15 minutes to get it taken care of, and you’re going to be well on your way to seeing an increase of website traffic to your website, and phone calls to your business.
I really appreciate you watching this video, I hope you found value in it. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or feedback. We’d love to hear from you. And if you know another business owner that you think would find value in this video, feel free to share it with them. That’s what we’re here for, we want to make sure local business owners are successful. Again, I’m Sarah Giometti with Provaro marketing, and look for the next video where we’ll give you step two of how to take control of your SEO and Local digital marketing.
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