The minute you become our client, we get to work on making your company visible on the web under the keywords and phrases most likely to drive business to your enterprise. The sales professional that you work with will take down detailed information about your business, its products, brands, marketing direction, competitors, and goals. We will also ask you to help us maximize your visibility by providing us with logo’s, pictures, videos, and other digital files that will make your listings more professional, attractive, and likely to create new business.

This package of materials will then be sent to our marketing department and assigned to one of our analysts. Your analyst will next conduct a keyword search to determine which keywords related to your business are being used by consumers of your product or service to find folks like you. The keyword results will be tested through a competitive analysis. Using information supplied by you and online research conducted by your marketing analyst, we will hone the keywords that are actually best for your company. While checking out your competition, we will also note other aspects of the methods being used by others in your industry that might be useful to help you convert visitors to your website or local search engine listings into customers.

In order to maximize this entire effort, it is beneficial to have the website changes made prior to the creating the listings on local search engines (LSE’s.) Therefore, once the changes are in place, the IT whizzes will next upload the compiled information to 72 local search engines (see list here.) Many of these listings will be live within a few days. Others take from two to eight weeks to update. The IT department won’t be waiting around, however. They will next hand load and optimize the 15 most important LSE’s with your content.

MerchantCircle  (MC)

By far the most robust LSE as of this writing, MerchantCircle is a marvelous combination of website, blog, photo and video repository, social networking site, e-mail contact generator, and much more. Your content will be uploaded to MC through the use of sophisticated tools known only to insiders. We are a MerchantCircle Advisor and are constantly updating our knowledge base to help you take care of this amazing business generation engine.  MC, like almost all LSE’s, offers some of its services at a charge.

YellowPages.com

The number one LSE for consumers doing an initial search for local suppliers of products or services is currently YellowPages.com. It is just one of several Yellow Page sites where your listing will appear. Our IT specialists will upload your information to YellowPages.com in such a way that you will get maximum exposure from searches on YellowPages.com and on keywords searches on Google, Yahoo, and others. As with Merchant Circle, you will receive a briefing on how to use the paid options on YellowPages.com, and updates through the newsletter.

InfoUSA.com

The most critical repository of business information in the United States, Info USA provides data to 100′s of other listings and directories. Getting this listing right is priority one for those hoping to dominate important key word searches.

local.Yahoo.com

Yahoo may be #2 to Google, but #2 still represents 17% of all search engine activity.  The local.Yahoo LSE is fairly robust, but poorly run. That could easily change.

Verizon SuperPages

This LSE has the money to spend on marketing itself and the willingness to do so. The guarantee that you may have seen on television is pretty smart. However, at this time SuperPages is just one of the 15 top players in this market. They have the potential to emerge in the top three or four. As with the others, we will optimize this listing and provide you with suggestions on how to use both free and paid services at SuperPages to promote your business.

Google Maps Local Business Center

Because Google controls the location of this information, which is generally at the top of a local search and in color, Maps definitely gets the most attention. Because of this attention many business categories are being gamed by businesses hoping to place well. In addition to those who are spamming or otherwise cheating, major marketing efforts are being mounted by industry leaders to make sure they are at the top on maps.

We are experts at Maps and once your listing is complete, you will usually be prominantly listed on Maps within a few weeks. There are no guarantees. Maps is still in Beta and therefore subject to mystifying results. However, our track record is outstanding for maximizing our clients position on this critical engine.

InsiderPages.com

This LSE is offering some relatively strong elements that commonly result in excellent Google Search results. You will be optimized on InsiderPages.com and kept informed through our newsletter of ways to use this resource.

Yelp

No one can touch Yelp for fun. They get a 10 for enthusiasm, novelty, and being delightful in their visual content and email blasts. They are not as much fun to work with. However, they are a force to reckon with. If you look up your #1 keyword and city or zip in Google, you are as likely to see Yelp on page one as anybody. Here is another engine where reviews are critical, and those reviews need to be positive. We will upload your information using the most recent inside information available, then provide you with methods you can use to create a constant stream of new reviews. Keep in mind that reviews double the chances that a potential customer will take action regarding your business offerings.

CitySearch.com

Currently ranking among the top LSE’s, CitySearch.com is the most difficult to create an optimized listing without paying for their upgraded services. Our Resource Department will be ever vigilant in finding the very best ways to use CitySearch.com for free, and will make recommendations through the newsletter as to how and when it makes sense to pay for an enhanced listing.

Yellowbot.com, AOLYellow.com, and YellowUSA.com

In addition to YellowPages.com and Verizon SuperPages.com, there are numerous other “Yellow Page” listing engines. Some pundits group these together and seperate them from the Local Search Engines. We see this as semantics only. We think you are mostly interested in any search engine that results in consumers or other businesses inserting a key word and a city or zip to search for a product or service you provide. These three yellow pages are not now challenging the big 5 in any meaningful way, but they do commonly show up on page one in Google searches. We will optmize your listing on these three, and keep your thoroughly informed on any information we have that might help you generate more clients from these engines.

Localeze.com

Seen by many as an up and comer among the LSE’s. We are carefully watching this engine to gain inside information that might help you. We will uniquely optimize your business on this engine.

City Voter

This LSE has a clever twist where the number of customers who vote for your business determines your ranking. The engine does get the occassional high ranking on a Google Search, but does not offer enough information about the business to gain major ranking. Your listing will be optimized here and we will keep a watch on this one for you.

 

We will leave the 15th Optimized Local Search Engine up to you. There are 1000′s of smaller local engines driven by newspapers, chambers of commerce, or local entrepreneurs that may be getting traction on Google searches of your key words. We will help you figure out which of these is most important for you, and we will optimize it for you. We will also give you a white paper on how to determine if there are other very local search engines that you should be listed on, and some hints on what to do.

TrueLocal.com, MagicYellow, and others

Of course, there are 57 other major LSE’s today, and there are very likely to be more in the future. This is our list of the top 15 today. When you sign up for our maintenance program, you will be automatically uploaded for free to any search engine that we learn about, and automatically optimized for any engine that we feel has become one of the top 15, thus replacing one on our current list.

When The Work Is Done the Real Work Has Just Begun

When we have completed the optimization of your website and these 15 LSE’s, plus loaded you up to a total of 72 LSE’s, the next step is to review our work. We will spend the next three weeks checking Google and Yahoo searches for your key words to see if we have achieved the desired results.