Local Internet Marketing for Small Business - watch out for the "experts"

Maybe I’m old school, but this seems wrong to me. 

I've been seeing more and more of these "experts" popping up and getting hired by local businesses who don't know better.

You’re a business owner and you need to market your business. You’ve got a local store and you want to get some new business.

So you hire a local “internet marketing expert.”

But this “expert” doesn’t work on driving business to your store – instead he opens a new store and brings in a crowd who buy your things at his new store.

You’re selling more stuff.  So you should be happy, right?

There is a group of "experts" who are doing this right now.

They og to small businesses - some don't even have websites - and promise them new business.  Instead of opening a new store, they put up a special one page website on their own servers. 

Here’s where things get “kinda funny.”

By opening that new "store," this “local internet marketing expert” has taken control of your business.  He’s no longer marketing your business, he’s selling your product. And there's an important difference.   If you stop paying his bill, he simply shuts down the store and your sales fall over the cliff.

In my old school advertising days, advertising built your business.  Sure, if you stopped buying the ads in the newspaper or on the radio or TV, your sales would drop.  But your business had benefited because of the awareness of your store that those ads built.

Your advertising was building your business.

In my mind, this is exactly what local internet marketing should do.  It should drive traffic to your website and your business, not his.  

But he promised instant results!

It’s easy to win a race when there are no other competitors

Open another tab on your browser, go to Google and search for this text “more competition, tightened purse strings, and a media world turned upside down”.  Look who’s number one. Works in Yahoo and Bing, too.  There is no competition for that phrase and I can guarantee that there is nobody looking for it on the search engines. It's a race with no competitors - and no prize, either.

Gray and Black Hats and Spam.

Black Hat and Gray Hat are search engine optimization industry terms for methods that work (for now) but are against the rules.  Getting caught can mean having your site removed from the search engines.  That’s a devastating event – just ask the British version of JCPenneys.com who got caught not too long ago.

You know what spam is – it’s filling up the internet just like it does your email.

I’ve looked at how some of these “experts” are getting results and I’ve found “spam” on foreign language forums and blogs and inane comments on blogs that aren’t policing their comments.  I even found a commercial message for a local business on a website devoted to parents with kids who have cancer!  Does this "build your business" or just sell stuff?

This is exactly what Google and Bing don’t want.  And they keep working to stop it, updating their algorithm a couple of times a year.  Just like delisting, eliminating the value of spam could devastate your business if this is how its getting ranked..

Finding valuable keywords and getting ranked for them doesn’t happen overnight.

You need to make sure the “expert” you hire isn’t going to do more harm than good.  Got a question, call us.

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Lynn McColley wears a white hat for all of his local internet marketing work.  If you would like to discuss building your business for the long term, give him a call at McColley Marketing Media.  Small Business Web Site Design – Local Internet Marketing for Small Business and D-I-Y Email Marketing.  Call 480-704-4286.