Free Advertising - How to set up a Google Local Listing

Small Business has to take every advantage it can, Google local listings are one freely available to everyone!

Google loves localising its SERP's, and provides the local listing service to help add value to local searches. Due to the position of these local listings (right at the top of the SERP's) very often this is the quickest way to top ranking positions whilst you wait for your SEO to kick in!

There are seven quick steps to set-up up you local listing:

1 - Use your Google profile, like your Gmail address and password to log into the Google Local Business Center. Then go to Add New Business.

2 - Enter in your small businesses info including: address, phone number, email address, website, and business description - double check everything that you include, especcially your URL!

3 - Choose categories specifically related to your business (use Googles keyword tool to optimise yourself against the most highly targeted terms). Include your opening hours and your businesses payment options (if need be).

4 - Upload photos that show off your businesses location (shopfront, building etc). You have a maximum of 10 pictures to upload to your profile.

5 - If you have videos specific to your small business upload them to YouTube and place the URL in the local business listing. You have a maximum of 5 videos.

6 - Add all the additional information that you can.. The more the better!

7 - Finally, verify your businesses information. You can do this one of two ways, you can either verify your information by phone or by postcard (don't even think about it, use the phone, postcards can take weeks!), you will eventually receive a postcard with a pin that you will have to later add to your profile.

Once you have verified your information, your business listing will begin appearing in Google Maps and the Google Local Business Results.

Google has kindly improved this service recently and now provides you (via the local business centre) with details of impressions and how many potential customers clicked your free ad.

If you are a small business and you haven't yet added Google local listings to your search marketing plan.. Do not delay, get to the Local business centre, fill in your details and get free advertising right away!!

http://www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

If you are interested in promoting your business via SEO contact Improve Marketing https://www.improvemarketing.co.uk/seo-services

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What is Affiliate Marketing and how can Small Business use it?

Affiliate Marketing is an Internet-based method by which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor, customer or action brought about by an affiliate. Small Business can and does use affiliate marketing to sell its products but also earn additional funds from their website.

Affiliate marketing requires set of people or groups to make it work.

The Merchant: One of the biggest merchants is Amazon
The Network: There are currently four major networks, but there are literally hundreds out there
The Publisher: Can be the smallest or the largest website
And most importantly… The Customer

There are three ways that publishers make money through affiliate marketing:

Pay Per Click — Every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website (publishers) by "clicking" on the link leading to the merchant's website, a a pre agreed commission is deposited in the affiliate's account. This amount can be pennies or pounds depending on the product and amount of the commission.

Pay Per Sale — Every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate's (publishers) website, a percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate's account by the merchant.

Pay Per Lead — Every time a potential client registers at the merchant's website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate's account, a previously determined amount (commission) is deposited into the affiliate's account.

For many website owners, this is a great way to earn some extra money without actually having to "do" anything. All it involves is placing an ad on the affiliate's website. There's no selling or promotion of any kind. The affiliate can just sit back and wait for the profits to roll in.
It's also beneficial to the merchant. By placing affiliate marketing advertising on websites all over the Internet, he has free advertising and doesn't need to do much selling on his own. The more websites a merchant is affiliated with, the more exposure his products get, and all he has to do is allow ads for his products to appear on someone else's website.

The role of the affiliate networks is to provide a platform for merchants and publishers to meet whilst providing the technology and the neutral sales assessment that monitors sales and in turn revenues to be claimed and paid.

The process is tracked via cookies (a tracking technology) placed on a customers profile. These cookies can last one visit a number of days or even weeks.

Whether you are a merchant and want to sell your products via affiliate marketing or you are a publisher looking to earn extra money via your website traffic Affiliate marketing can be tailored to your needs.

For more information on Small Business Affiliate Marketing please see: https://www.internetmarketingstrategy.co.uk/affiliate

Why should Small Business have a blog?

There are thousands of new blogs created each day, but why should small business invest time and sometimes money up-keeping a blog.


  • To Market or Promote your products or servicesBlogging is a great way to help market or promote yourself or your business, product or services.

  • To Help People
    If your small business is related to health or possibly a service that benefits people, you may be able to pass on advice or your customers experiences to help them.

  • To become an established ExpertBy passing on your knowledge to the others within a particular field you can establish yourself as an expert in your industry.

  • To Connect with PeopleCreating likeminded communities around a particular subject allows you to focus a groups attention on a subject relevant to your products.

  • Thoughts and OpinionsPerhaps, you are sick of poorer businesses in your field giving your industry a bad reputation and you want to do something about it.

  • To become even more knowledgeable in a field or topicBlogging has to be regular, researching future blog posts keeps you up-to-date with industry goings on.

  • To Stay in touch with your customersStaying connected with your customers allows you to pass on good news, and deal with negative comments right away.

  • A form of creativity
    Maybe your blog is simply a release from your daily stresses!

  • For SEO reasons
    Although many free blogging platforms contain no follow links you can remove them and start to provide links and PR to your website..

  • To Make MoneyAlthough it is possible to directly derive revenues from your blog via adsense and the affiliate networks, most bloggers do not make much money from the blogging itself. Blogs used in there many different guises help promote a business, inform customers of new products or changes to services or simply become a channel by which to target traffic at your site.

    Blogging has many benefits for Small Business probably many that I have not included. Either way your small business should have a blog and sooner rather than later as blogging is becoming more and more important as an Internet Marketing tool and should be an intrinsic part of your Social Media and Internet Marketing Strategy.

    For more information on other forms of Social Media please see https://www.improvemarketing.co.uk/content-marketing

Pay per click (PPC) tips for Small Business

Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising system used by search engines and websites. Advertisers pay the search engine when their ad is clicked. Advertisers typically bid on keywords and key-phrases relevant to their target market.

All the major search engines provide PPC systems, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft Ad centre are the three largest networks who provide pay per click services. Cost per click (CPC) varies on competition or the amount of advertisers bidding on that term.

Small Business should use pay per click advertising because of many reasons but mainly it is accountable, you can control your budgets and you can target keywords that are too competitive or where your SEO has not caught up.

As a small business you are probably already using Pay per click within your internet marketing strategy, hopefully it is working well for you. However, even if it is working well for you there may be a tip or two below that could make it work even better! Here is my top 6 tips for pay per click advertising.

Optimise your landing pages: Google’s quality score assesses on-page text and load time to determine relevancy (relevance score), and therefore your final click price and ad position are directly related to the CPC. Make sure the keywords you are using within the ad are also on the page that you are directing them too.

Test your ad copy: Always find time to test ad copy and effectiveness. Try different headlines and sales terms, low cost versus affordable, great value versus huge discount. You may find that certain keywords are more effective than others, if so, record the non-effective replace with the more effective and move on.

Test Landing Pages: More importantly, test which landing pages result in better conversion. You can accomplish this by creating an identical ad, yet linking it to different pages.


Use Phrase / Exact Match: It is difficult to get a great ROI with broad match strategy. Instead, use phrase match or exact match to focus in on specific phrases.

Don’t do Bidding Wars: The number one spot doesn’t always convert best. In fact, position 2, and position 3 sometimes outperform position 1. Unlike SEO position 1 isn’t always the best, focus on conversions and return on investment rather than focusing on top position.


If your SEO already ranks well: If you are in the top 3 organic positions for a keyword, you’re probably better off not bidding on those terms, if you do choose to buy them try bidding less and going for position 4, 5 or 6. If you are position 1 for your company name don’t bid on that at all, they already know who you are, and they are going to click on the natural result anyway.

I hope you find my Pay per click tips useful, if your PPC is getting to much for you or you would prefer someone else to manage it for you please see my PPC page at: https://www.internetmarketingstrategy.co.uk/pay-per-click

New Website SEO implementation for Small Business

When building a new website, whether you are instructing a web designer or building it yourself there is some basic rules that you should apply or instruct in order to apply SEO later on.


Building a site so it can be effectively optimised for search engines, at the very beginning, will allow you to cost effectively make SEO changes later on. If a website designer or SEO Consultant had to pick through the whole site and add alt tags or rebuild the URL structure the process would take more time and cost more money. Below is the six basic rules that small business should following in order to allow your site to be fully optimised at a later date.
  • Ensure your URL’s are keyword rich and avoid dynamic URL’s which normally contain characters such as “=, ? or %”.

  • Ensure your copy and navigation is text based and not an image.

  • Avoid an over reliance on flash in websites. Search engines cannot adequately scan and isolate the content of flash based sites if at all!

  • Ensure your images have ALT Tags, Title tags can be added as well.

  • Ensure a sitemap is included in your web design and linked from your homepage (bottom right of the page – make it the last link on the page).

  • Avoid websites with frames. Search engine crawlers have trouble navigating these and hence don’t give you the SEO power from your content.
By having as many of the above features readily available, it will ensure that you have built a solid foundation to which you can start to your SEO campaign.
For small business getting your website right from the beginning saves you time and money, it also gives you a better chance of getting ranked more quickly.. The faster your SEO works and the faster you are ranked, the faster your customers can find you.

For more information on Small Business SEO please click https://www.improvemarketing.co.uk/seo-services

Effective Website Design for Small Business

Effective Web Design – How do you do it?

Web designers or small businesses, whoever you are, all you want when you create a website is a website that works.. Not just in terms of SEO but so that your customers enjoy your website and choose to investigate it, navigate through your pages and eventually purchase a product or contact you about a service.

Within this article I want to focus on a subject that frustrates me most as an internet marketing professional. The good the bad and the effective web design.

On a weekly basis I look at many websites, mostly they are created well and require minimal correction and just some tinkering with to climb search rankings. But all too regularly I am coming up against some horrible mistakes and websites that well… Simply need to be started again!

Websites can be built in many languages; the most common languages are CSS, HTML, Flash and Javascript. There are many more programmes available the more exotic the programme, usually the more useless it is!

Although I regularly use Flash and Javascript within website design, an effective website should be predominantly made up of HTML and CSS. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets make up the layout of the site. HTML lays out the coding and script, it is the HTML that is read by search engines to determine a sites content.

If you are thinking about creating your first website please focus on a simple design don’t over complicate things by using flashy or over-creative programmes to build it. Please follow the following tips and hopefully then you will have a good looking effective layout that is enjoyed by your websites visitors.

1) Defined means of navigation: Once a visitor lands on your site they need to navigate around it. Not just a hard to find pop down menu but a clear and defined menu that takes potential customers to the key categories within the site. One navigation isn’t always enough, try and build multiple means to navigate around the site into it.

2) Build the site from just CSS and HTML: If it is you or you instructing a web designer keep it simple. Using CSS to control the colours, spacing and general look of the site makes for a nice and potentially effective site. HTML is the primary and most commonly used language spoken by search engines and their robots. By relying on HTML and CSS you are focusing search engines to read only the HTML and the internet browsers to read the CSS, this means that the two programmes most essential to your websites success can not be confused. If you have a particular tool or function that requires Javascript, or your headers need flash to make them come alive then use it, just use it sparingly.

3) Clean layout: Sounds simple but it isn’t keeping a site clean and un-complicated, especially when you have a lot to say can be difficult. If you do have a lot of content try breaking it up and categorising it on different pages, after all the more pages you have specific to a particular subject, the more pages you have that can be indexed by search engines and potentially be ranked with search engine results pages. Don’t use heavy coloured or patterned backgrounds either, this makes the content hard to read and makes the site look messy. Additionally, if customers are finding your site via a handheld device it makes it near impossible for them to see it.

4) Optimising the load up time of a website: Making sure that your site loads quickly and looks the way it should within seconds of a customer clicking onto it. This stops the evermore impatient web users stay with your site. If you have a whole page of images this will take a long while to load, if the coding or script behind your page is full of unnecessary HTML, tags or just rubbish, clean it up. Sometimes you have precious seconds to impress or gain the trust of a new visitor; long load times put people of very quickly!

5) Make sure your site works in different browsers: People tend to view web pages in many different types and sizes of browsers so make sure that your site looks the same in all of them. There is nothing worse than opening a web page and seeing that half of it is missing, so make sure that you or your web designer checks that it looks the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari plus all of the different size screens that your customers use.

If you take into account all of the above points you should be well on your way to a good looking and effective website https://www.internetmarketingstrategy.co.uk/website-design, effective websites mean successful businesses!

Welcome to the Internet Marketing for Small Business Blog

This blog is going to be about.. You guessed it, Internet Marketing for Small Business! I hope to cover a whole range of subjects and provide articles that will be useful to small business at some time or another.

Subjects will include:

Internet Marketing via SEO or Search Engine optimisation
Internet Marketing via SM or Search Marketing otherwise known as PPC or Pay per click
Internet Marketing via Email Marketing
Internet Marketing via Digital Media
Internet Marketing via Social Media
Internet Marketing via Mobile Marketing
Internet Marketing via Affiliate Marketing

All of these mediums can be and are used by small business, but knowing that you are using them correctly or making them perform to their ultimate potential is even more critical for small or new businesses. As the internet becomes even more competitive, having knowledge that others do not, or knowing more about a marketing technique than another person can be the difference between success and failure.

I to am a small business owner and trawl the internet for advice and information, so if I come across an interesting story or useful piece of information I will let you know, if you have learned something about a particular subject that I have written please leave a comment.

I hope to build a community of small businesses who share and help each other as they grow so please bookmark this page, or become a fan and be sure to re-visit as I write about Internet Marketing for Small Business.

Find out how to market your small business at https://www.internetmarketingstrategy.co.uk/

Website Design - The basics

Internet Marketing Small Business designs, helps build and SEO’s websites for small businesses, but I thought as I am currently re-designing my own website (http://www.internetmarketingsmallbusiness.co.uk/), I could pass on advice that small business can use.


Thinking about starting a small business online?

If this is your first website or indeed small business? Prior to briefing any website designers you should take time to write a preliminary plan. Although you have probably got many ideas buzzing around in your head, fixing the idea on paper is the best way to start the journey that is planning a successful website or online business.

When you are planning your website you need to write down exactly what you want it to do. This plan will include; what you want to sell, who will buy your products and how are you going to display your products or services to your customers. This plan is a starting point for any website design and will adapt and change as you progress through the various build stages.

Now you have decided on the three key elements who where and how, you’ll need to work out everything that you’ll need to include within the site to make it work. Will you need a large site with 10’s or even 100’s of product pages, do you need to capture data, will you need password protected security for certain pages or even will you need E-commerce… If you aren’t sure what or how your website should do check out what your potential competitors are doing or even model it on your favourite website (as long as it could work for your business – and be realistic!). When you are planning your website you should always keep your visitors in mind, think how they would.

Thinking like your customers do is the key to a successful website design.

Now time to start thinking like a web designer. You know what you want to sell, who is going to buy it and how you think the website should look. These three principles are just the beginning, you need to expand on each.

What you want to sell on your website – Whether it is a product or a service you are bound to have more than one single item. Start listing all of the products or services that you want to include in the website. Think of everything as this is going to be your product page.

Who will buy your from your website – Young or old, male or female, business to business or end consumer. Try to narrow your target market to its largest potential audience. When you have this you should have they style of website that you need to design and a better idea of your target market.

How are you going to sell your products or services – Are you selling huge amounts of different products or are you selling a single service. Are you selling directly off of your website or are you trying to get customers to phone up and enquire. Now you should know how big the website is going to need to be and more importantly how you are going to make money from it.

Narrowing the what, who and how will give you a better idea of how your website design needs to be and what it requires to function how you want it to. Why not make some enquiries into costs based on these initial ideas, then go on to write a business plan to accompany your idea. Most people starting a small business on the internet for the first time choose to ignore these steps and jump straight in and brief web designers before they even know if they’re idea is viable. Once you have taken a little more time to think about your idea you can start to think about putting together a more detailed website design plan. The second plan will be the foundations that will contain the detail that a web designer needs to truly put together a well designed website that most importantly works!

Make your website more effective by making it more useable check out https://www.improvemarketing.co.uk/ux-usability