By Tracy Congdon
Once the keyword research and competitive analysis are done (since these are your very first steps in creating or improving your online presence or to “getting found online”), we can move on to a couple more.
Creating your citation, or how your company name, address, phone number, and website appear, is another overlooked step. You want it uniform across the entire web. Each correctly created listing gives you and your website more authority on the internet, increasing your placement.
For example your phone number could appear 734-252-9014 or 734.252.9014 or the more traditional (734) 252-9014. It doesn’t really matter how it appears as long as all of your business listings are identical, down to the placement of a period. Business listing websites like Merchant Circle, Yelp, and Citysearch will pull from Google, Yahoo, Bing or other reputable sites and create their own business listings for you. Their goal is to drive web traffic to them when a search is performed. These listings are not always identical, creating erroneous citations. These should be claimed and corrected as soon as possible. I created a tool to check your listings along with your online presence and posted it here
http://goo.gl/8fQE2 (this link was created with Google’s URL shortener.) This link will open an application I have placed inside of my Facebook business page.
When you create certain business listings you must also claim them to make them effective. Feel free to email me for a complete listing of these sites or for additional help.
According to
NYTimes.Com, 68 percent of consumers look for a company’s
Facebook business page before they choose to do business with them. If you are not found there, those Facebook users will find your competitor and give them a call instead. Creating a correct Facebook business page, NOT a personal page, for your business will only benefit you. If you are not on Facebook, at least make sure your business is. There are companies, like us, that will create and monitor your Facebook page for you. We monitor over 35 pages and see to it they are up to date along with being found and generating positive traffic.
Tracy Congdon, president of Get Found on Google, has 15 years of business-to-business sales experience and over 5 years in business development. During that time, Tracy has extensively studied internet marketing, picture and video marketing along with consistently staying on top of Google’s numerous trends and changes in the way they rank websites. Combining these techniques gives him many powerful tools to place companies on the first page of a Google search for their industry and area in an organic (not paid advertising) search.
