Marketing Resource for Flathead Valley Businesses

Marketing online…are you doing it right?  Are you sure?

1. Would you purposely have an unlisted business telephone number?
2. Would you open a retail location and choose not tell anyone?
3. Would you hold a grand opening sale and keep it a secret?

Clearly, the answer to these absurd questions is a resounding “NO”.  On the other hand, that may be exactly the way you are managing your website from a marketing perspective.  The old saying, “build it and they will come” makes for a great movie line, but it’s pure fiction in the business marketing world.

Are you shooting yourself in the foot?

You advertise your brick & mortar business. You promote it a hundred different ways, but in all probability, you haven’t done much to market your website effectively, and that is a fundamental imperative today.  Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that Google or Bing see it as a good candidate to include it in search results.  You must convince the search engines that your site is worthy to be listed.

Website Marketing 1.0

You need three things to ensure that search engines acknowledge and index your website before you can hope to achieve search positioning.

1. The keyword phrases that describe your products or services must be properly utilized on your website. As an example, if you own a restaurant you will want to use terms such as “Kalispell restaurant”, “dining”, “food” and other descriptive terms that people would use to search for a local restaurant. You should use these terms in the title of your page, headlines, in the body of your page and name your images using such descriptive filenames.
2. Google now requires “social proof” in the form of comments and engagement on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites like Pinterest, YouTube and the like. Google wants to know that someone other than you is talking about your products or services.
3. You MUST have good “LOCAL” links pointing to your website.  Similar to “social proof”, Google wants to know that other local websites think enough of your business to link to it.

It is rumored that Google will not even index a website that has no links pointing to it.  Ever since Al Gore invented the Internet, links have been important, but Google’s emphasis on “local search” means that local links are paramount. This is one of the primary benefits of having your business listed in the Flathead Valley Business Directory. A link from a “local authority” site pointing to your website is invaluable – and at only $4 per month, it may well be the best marketing value anywhere!

The best way to market your website in the Flathead is to heed the advice of experienced professionals with a proven track record. The Flathead Guide is owned and managed by yours truly, Tom Heatherington, and I have been involved with Internet marketing since 1993. For the past ten years I have been helping Flathead Valley businesses get traction online and improve their search results and ROI.

The Flathead Guide will give you a strong local link, but it also means that your listing becomes a ‘mini website’ that is optimized for mobile search, has a full description of all your products or services, a photo slideshow, Google map to your location and links to all your social sites also.  Before you spend another dime on advertising or promoting your business, spend a few minutes creating your listing in the Flathead Valley Business Directory.