It started out as a simple goal really. My company is one the top resellers of Cisco phone systems in the Southeast, and we have our main office in Atlanta. All I wanted was that if someone did a search engine search for Cisco Phone System Atlanta that my business’’s website would be listed on the first page of results. That certainly was not the situation when I first began the procedure. What I needed to do was develop some local internet marketing capabilities.
The learning process was slow initially. It took about a year to have our website moved over onto a content management system instead of the static HTML pages that it was first built on. After some initial difficulty we found a good web development company that recommended for local business online marketing purposes we use the WordPress platform.
Because all the information I had found out recommended having a blog, I had started that a year previously. I moved the blog over to the new website, and set redirects from all the previous articles so that traffic would continue to have a place to go. Unfortunately the visitors to the blog were just a handful, and as far as I could tell none of them were from potential customers. I recognized that the blog was really not doing much good from a business web marketing point of view, but was not sure what to do about that at the time.
So my next goal was local SEO, or search engine optimization. The books I read on the topic were good, and mostly discuss optimizing the page itself, starting a blog, and getting links from other websites. I had done the first two, but had no idea how to get links from other websites effectively. I asked some other website owners that I knew to link to our site, but that was a lot of work and I had the idea that it was not really going to get anything done.
Meanwhile our other local marketing initiatives were going well. Our sales representatives were developing opportunities, our marketing campaigns were proceeding well, and our sales seminars were well attended. I still had the idea that if I could get the our company onto the first page of search results ranking it would bring us more business, but my small business online marketing initiative would have to wait until I could dedicate more study to it.
So I took a break from my local SEO research. I improved some the operational efficiencies of my company, handed off some more of my day-to-day responsibility to my vice presidents, and had my design and deployment engineers start writing short articles once a month on a new blog that I set up that was not associated with our company. I did this so there was no pressure on them to be politically correct or write from the sales and marketing perspective.
The articles that those engineers wrote end up being the cornerstone of the Internet marketing campaign that I created that would end up getting me the first page ranking I was looking for, and a lot more besides that. The process of learning Internet marketing that I went through was basically an apprenticeship to the real experts in the field, the successful affiliate marketers.
Read more about local internet marketing and small business online marketing at Priority Cue. Check here for free reprint licence: Business Journey To Local Internet Marketing Success.