And for good reason.

Although service delivery can now be done anywhere fairly easily – given the availability of remote control tools and networks of contractors – the sales and marketing of managed services is still more easily done on a local basis.  Getting referrals, meeting people in person, etc. – all easier locally.

Even though most MSP’s are focused on their local markets, many are still ignoring one of the most important factors in getting found locally – having a local domain name.

What do I mean by a local domain name?

Local domain names are domains that include some reference to your market, such as BostonITSupport or ITSupportBoston.  Instead, most MSPs tend to buy domain names that stress some particularly technology or their brand name.  I did this for years at Everon, without ever taking advantage of local domain names.

Big mistake.

Why such a big mistake?  I’ll give you two reasons:

1. Ease of getting ranked - it is far easier to get a local domain name ranked for a local business than it is to get a non-local domain name ranked.  I’ve tested this and proved it over and over again, having achieved first page ranking in competitive markets in a week or two. This, of course, is not always the case – and is ultimately up to the search engines – but my experience is that generally it’s the rule.
2. Rate of conversion from search to opportunity – this is the BIG reason.  I was shocked to find in my analytics report how much higher “local” searches were converting to inbound leads versus “non-local” searches.  I’ll provide some data to illustrate.

As you may know, I’ve spent a lot – well over half of a million dollars – marketing managed services online via Google AdWords and other platforms.  I’ve also done a ton of optimization and content building for my sites to make sure they show up organically.

Thanks to the beauty of analytics, I’ve been able to run reports to see which keyword searches actually convert into good prospects and eventually paying customers.  Here is what I found:

For my top performing non-local keyword searches – phrases like IT Support, IT Services, etc. – I had an average conversion rate of right about 2.7%

Now get this – for my top performing local keyword searches – phrases like IT Support Boston and IT Support Denver, etc. – I had an average conversion rate of about 53.77%

My local search terms convert at about 20 X the rate of my non-local search terms!!!

Talk about an eye-opener!  It makes sense – people searching locally are clearly demonstrating the intent to find someone local to work with, so they take action when they find a good match in the search engine.  Those using non-local terms are most likely much earlier in the buy cycle and not as focused on finding a short term solution.

If you aren’t using local domain names to get ranked for local search terms, you are missing a big opportunity.

Mike

PS – If you are a MSP that sells EHR services, or a physician shopping for EMR software for your practice, make sure you check out Electronic Medical Records Companies, a new informational site from Kutenda.

We are officially launching our Local Accelerator program to the Colorado public. Designed to accelerate online lead generation and sales for Colorado small businesses, this program promises to offer a complete Internet marketing makeover to one lucky local business every month!

The program combines fulfillment services with access to Kutenda’s Internet marketing tool-set and training to get your company successfully marketing online. We’ll be choosing one lucky company every month … Selected companies will receive over $9,000 in services at no cost and 3 months of free Kutenda access.

If you’re based in CO, submit your company here: http://kutenda.com/accelerator.html

According to new projections from Outsell, Inc., digital/online marketing will overtake print in 2010. Companies are projected to spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies. For small businesses, marketing online is a known challenge due to the intense learning curve, budgetary constrictions and the lack of available software. Kutenda has set out to change that with it’s Internet marketing tool-set for small businesses and the Local Accelerator program is making the extra leap locally by offering tools, services and training for free.

The Local Accelerator program includes all of the foundations for a comprehensive Internet marketing strategy that will drive leads and sales. We begin by creating a website or optimizing your existing website for lead generation and search engine rankings. Companies walk away with a list of campaigns, content and the tools, training and support to pick up where Kutenda’s fulfillment process ends.

Specifics include:

• Promotional landing pages with automated response emails
• A prospect-focused email marketing campaign designed to convert
• Customizable email templates
• A search advertising pay-per-click campaign
• Live local search listing
• Optimized keyword list for specific products / services
• A knowledge base of Internet marketing best practices

In order to qualify, companies must be based in Colorado. We’re accepting submissions at http://kutenda.com/accelerator.html via a short form. Each monthly winner will be contacted directly by Kutenda’s director of training, Alex Ross. We are allowing companies to resubmit monthly for another chance to win.

Submit your business today!

Suggestions for increasing your chances of being chosen:

1) cross your fingers

2) grab your rabbit-foot key chain

3)  send your intern on a hunt for the perfect four leaf clover

4) maybe eat a bowl of Lucky Charms… whatever it takes…

GOOD LUCK!

Affinity Track focuses on providing quality search engine optimization and marketing services to their clients. By utilizing both organic SEO and effective paid search campaigns, they help businesses improve their performance online and get real results.

Emily’s guest post focuses on some of the key components needed to create a successful local online presence. From local listings to on-page techniques, the tips are designed to be bite-sized pieces to help you begin right away. Check out the post and get started with your local search campaign today!

Follow Emily on Twitter: @ekthompson

Affinity Track logo

Join the Kutenda team next Tuesday, February 2nd at 1pm ET. Limited space – Register today.

During the webinar, Mike will discuss the challenges he faced marketing Everon, his first business, and how Kutenda evolved into a solution we’re now able to share with other small businesses.

We’ll also have Kutenda’s Director of online marketing, James Omdahl, on to discuss the power of Internet marketing and how you too can harness a seemingly unapproachable marketing practice.

Stay on for a live look inside the Kutenda toolset and a Q&A session with Mike Cooch, James Omdahl and our director of training, Alex Ross.

Reserve your spot on the webinar today and find out what we’ve been up to for the last year!
Register today!

Why would there already be a listing for your business? Because Google sometimes creates listings for businesses that have not yet created their own, and it does this by pulling information from sources across the web, including human-powered directories. It’s common that these Google-gathered listings have errors—for example, you may have changed your phone number or relocated since Google gathered its information.

There is often much confusion on what the proper steps are when you discover more than one existing local listing for your business in the search engines. The thing to do is claim and edit the existing listing.

It’s important to remember: For each physical location of your business, you should have only one listing. Having more than one can negatively impact the position of all of your listings, decreasing your visibility among local prospects (bad).

What if there are multiple listings? Google has recommended some steps to take to properly handle multiple listings for their Local Business Center:

1. Choose the listing that you’d prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
2. For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and one phone number.
3. Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
4. Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks – just for good measure.
5. Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.

The key point to remember is that it’s crucial to have one optimized listing for your business. This entry should have all of the additional information and be as close to 100 percent complete as possible. Local search has a ton of potential for small business and creating this optimized listing can dramatically increase your visibility among your target market and create a steady stream of free inbound leads.

We had an excellent turnout for the first installment of our free three-part webinar series on search engine optimization (SEO). We also had some excellent questions at the end. If you have questions of your own, be sure to register for part two now!

In part two, Kutenda’s director of online marketing, James Omdahl, will expand on his novel ‘SLEEP’ method (search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform) for generating inbound leads through SEO.

Part II: On-Page Optimization and Tracking (Evaluate, Estimate)

* How to evaluate your web site and tips to optimize
* What the competitive landscape looks like for your business
* How to measure progress by tracking your results

Why attend?
If your business isn’t ranking in the search results for key terms, you’re missing a huge, cost-effective opportunity to drive leads and fuel growth. Our webinar series will help you seize this opportunity.

Who should attend?
Business owners and marketers who want clear, practical guidance on using SEO to increase leads, sales and revenue. Maybe you need a refresher on key SEO principles. Perhaps you’re brand new to search engine marketing. Either way, you’re guaranteed to learn something you can use to grow your business!

What if I missed part one?
Don’t worry. Each installment is designed to stand on it’s own. Register here.

Yes, it’s true: Some people continue to use phone books.

But today’s consumer increasingly favors that great information repository known as the Internet, and they use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to find what they’re looking for. With this change comes a new mandate for businesses: make sure your web site gets found.

So how does one get found in the search engines? If your business serves a competitive market, just having a web site doesn’t mean you’ll rank for key search terms. Google may list your competitors ahead of you in the search listings, and studies show that searchers rarely even look at the results beyond the top three. If you’re not in the ‘Golden Triangle’ you’ll get crumbs for clicks while your competitors get all the action.

We can help. We’re offering a free three-part webinar on search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing your web site’s content and code for better placement in the search results. It also involves off-site factors, such as acquiring inbound links (which Google interprets as votes) from other web sites.

The series will help businesses ‘SLEEP’ their way to the top of the search results. (SLEEP: search, leverage, evaluate, estimate, perform). At the end of the series, we’ll provide attendees with a free SEO checklist that will help you apply what you’ve learned to your business’ web site. Register for the webinar today!

Register here for Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) their way to the top of the search results.

As we mentioned in a previous post, if you want to meet new prospects and close more sales in today’s internet focused world, you need to be visible in the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) for the search terms/keywords that are relevant to your business, a goal achieved through search engine optimization (SEO).

Problem is, SEO can be confusing for small and midsize businesses that don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to optimizing their company presence online. We’ve got the solution: Kutenda’s free three-part webinar series on how small and midsized businesses can actually SLEEP their way to the top of search results. Register today.

James Omdahl, our director of online marketing, will walk you through Kutenda’s SLEEP (Search, Leverage, Evaluate, Estimate and Perform) technique and provide the best practices, tips and tricks you need to start driving qualified traffic to your web site today.

Throughout the three sessions, James will demystify the optimization process so that you can grow your business online no matter the size of your marketing team/budget. All attendees will receive a free checklist designed to help you get started immediately.

Who should attend
Internet marketing beginners, small business marketers, and anyone else who wants to improve SEO.

Details/Registration

As discussed in my last post, finding the right keywords for your search marketing campaigns is essential for getting the right traffic to your web site at the right price. But many small and midsized businesses should also consider adding geographic keyword modifiers to their search campaigns to really target their search marketing campaigns. In this post, we’ll define geographic modifiers and discuss why they are important to localized search marketers.

What is a geographic modifier?
A geographic keyword modifier is the use of a geographic term in the beginning, end, or in the middle of a keyword term. For example, if my core keyword was “health insurance,” you could geographically modify the keyword by adding the term “Denver” to it, making it “Denver health insurance” or “health insurance Denver.”  Pretty straight forward, eh?

Why would I use a geographic modifier?
Even if a business wants to appeal to searchers on a national basis, it’s not a bad idea to start out by targeting a local market, because they will be able to see better results more quickly. Why? Because competition can be fierce on the national level, and the timeline for success can be considerably longer.

An unscientific way to assess the competitive landscape is by Googling your keyword and viewing the total number of results. While this number does not express the amount of search marketing competition per se, it does give a good indication of how many web pages have been found on the Internet that could fulfill a search for your search term.

For example, the total number of documents (web pages, PDFs, etc) in the Google index for a term like “health insurance” is 105,000,000. That’s a lot. Even though a majority of those pages are not well optimized for that term, the web pages are still competing for a space in those search results.

Now, let’s add some geographic modifiers for a state, city and neighborhood and see how that number of indexed pages change:

- Colorado health insurance (state modifier) – 24,300,000 documents
- Denver health insurance (city modifier) – 16,100,000 documents
- Denver Highlands health insurance (neighborhood modifier) – 149,000 documents

As you can see, as the geographic area gets smaller, the number of web pages and other documents goes down as well. This shows the big advantage of geo-modifiers: a reduction in keyword competition.

Geo-modifiers give you the ability to target a specific local or regional market, and this means you can get results more quickly and get a faster ROI on your search marketing efforts. It also means you can focus on the areas that are most profitable for your business.

Starting local can get you from start-up to success quickly.  And if you want to go national right away, go for it, but consider doing it in a two-pronged approach where you target your local market with one campaign (including a local website) and another where you go for the whole nation.  That way you’ll be able to profit in the short term while waiting for long-term national success to kick in.

How do I choose the right geographic keywords?

So now that you have an idea of why you would want to use a geographic modifier, you might be wondering how to pick the right modifier for your business.

Sometimes it’s obvious. There are many businesses that are geographic dependent, such as sales people with a specific territory or a brick-and-mortar store that has limited regional draw. But other times it’s not so obvious.

Some companies that are able to operate in many locations struggle to define the geographic area that they will market to. This can be tricky, but one good way to make this decision is to ask the following question:

What is the smallest definable geographic area that I get or want to get 80 percent or more of my business from?

Is it your city? Your state? Your neighborhood?  Think of the answer to this and write down 3–5 potential geographic areas that would fit this definition.

Once you have done this it’s time for you to check and make sure there is search volume in your area for these search terms. Go to the Kutenda tool or another keyword tool, and plug in your keyword along with each geographic modifier (e.g., “Denver health insurance” or “Colorado health insurance”).  Check the monthly search volume on these geo-modified keywords and pick the one with the most volume.  This should be your primary geographic modifier.

Now that you’ve got your primary geographic modifier, it’s time to make a list of secondary modifiers. Secondary modifiers can come from a number of different sources based off of your primary keyword:

1.    Other nearby major cities
2.    Cities/towns within your primary modifier (if it’s a metropolitan area, etc)
3.    Adjacent states, counties, metro areas
4.    Neighborhoods within your primary geographic area

As you did with the primary modifiers, write down as many of the secondary geo areas you can think of and plug them into the Kutenda keyword tool along with the primary keyword you are using.  Check the search volumes for the words and then make a list of the highest volume locations you want to market to.  It’s good to have 10– 5 of these, if not more.

When you’re done, you’ll have a list of your geographic modifiers—congrats!  But what do you do with them? In the next post, we’ll discuss how to use these modifiers for search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising and local search engine optimization.  And no, the use is not the same for all three.

If you have any questions about this post, feel free to leave a comment below.  Thanks for reading and please remember to take action and succeed online with Kutenda!

That’s why you should click here and watch these online marketing videos.

They’re short and packed with practical Internet marketing tips that you can use today to improve your business.

The videos were shot in Kutenda’s very own recording studio. OK, perhaps ‘studio’ is a bit of a misnomer. Michael’s basement is more accurate…

The harried SMB’s shortcut to online marketing savvy

You already know that online marketing—web site development, search engine advertising, email marketing, etc.—is more targeted and more cost-effective than traditional marketing.

But let’s face it: You’ve got a million things to do today just to keep up with your business’s most basic needs, so finding the time to learn about new and more technical types of marketing is a tall order, to put it mildly.

You’ve done some research online, but there’s so much information out there, and how does one sort the wheat from the chaff?

(Plus, if you have a halfway operational bullshit detector, you know that there are a lot of people out there peddling wooden nickels and snake oil.)

So before you buy anything or give up on online marketing altogether, invest ten minutes watching these informational videos.

Here are some of the topic areas, covered by Kutenda’s own James Omdahl and Michael Schmaedecke:

• Conversion Funnels
• Web Site Forms
• Email Auto Responders
• Email Deliverability
• Email Campaign Optimization

If those terms sound strange and exotic, they won’t for long. And don’t be fooled by James and Michael’s professorial demeanor on screen: these videos are not abstract or academic in nature. They’re designed to equip you with practical information in a short period of time—info you can use today to make your business more profitable.

Click here to watch and learn.