Top placement almost never happens by accident. The first step in planning your search engine strategy is to consider the search phrases potential customers are likely to use to find your website. Start with listing a few phrases off the top of your head. If you’re a Realtor serving a local market in Kansas, you’ll probably come up with a few phrases like:

1) real estate
2) homes for sale
3) Wichita
4) Kansas

This list gets the ball rolling, but if you stop here the game is over. Your hope of gaining top placement on any of these individual search terms is practically nonexistent and would not serve you effectively even if you succeeded. The broad term “real estate” returned Google results from almost four hundred million web pages when I searched it recently. As a local real estate agent, you don’t have a chance of appearing in the natural results in this list.

Even if you did rank well for any of these terms individually, you’d be missing your market. With a broad search term (“Wichita”) the prospective customer is more likely to be browsing for general information and less likely to be in the mood to buy. A highly targeted search (“Wichita Crown Heights Homes for Sale”) represents a searcher with a specific goal in mind, and someone nearer to making a decision about purchasing a home.

The general term may provide more traffic (if you succeed in getting top placement for it) but the leads are more likely to be cold. A very specific search phrase may generate less traffic, but the leads are likely to be red hot.

Ideally you want to find a handful of highly specific phrases (not individual words) that uniquely describe what your business offers to the searching public.

Want to learn more? Request our free White Paper on SEO strategies: "Top Placement: Eight Strategies for Effective Search Placement."

In times like these, you can’t afford not to advertise. But in times like these, you can’t afford to waste a single advertising dollar. At USA4SALE Networks, we can help you grow and defend your local business through targeted local advertising in our network of community classified sites. Here are four ways we can benefit your business:

1.) Catch More Fish by Fishing in the Right Pond

While traditional media outlets have remained stagnant or declined in recent years, people are spending more time online. Our network of classified sites draws visitors throughout central Florida for one primary activity – buying and selling. Our unique layout makes browsing easy – and it’s designed to put your message in front of the right audience at just the right time. We call it contextual targeting. And it gets results. Here’s what Mike Kurbanick of Mike’s Lawnmower in Ocala told us:

"I have found Ocala4sale to be the best value in advertising. I get more direct leads and sales from my ads placed on Ocala4sale than other form of advertising I have done. It has also driven my website traffic through the roof. This is the only form of advertising I have ever done that I can honestly say has paid for itself multiple times." — Mike Kurbanick

2.) Rescue Your Customers from the Clutches of the Competition

Truth is, we’ve been spending a lot of time with your customers lately. And they’ve been spending time with your competitors, too. Our doors are open 24 hours a day and we attract visitors late at night as well as during office hours. Your customers often come to our website in the buying mood. Our display advertisers are just one click away from the sale . . . or the beginning of a new relationship.

But you don’t have to stay up late yourself to keep your customers in the fold. We’ll do that for you. And while you may have difficulty reaching people at their desk at work, we reach into thousands of workplaces and cubicles every day.

3.) Generate More Qualified Prospects with Improved Lead Generation

You can fill your fishbowl with business cards by giving away popcorn at your trade show booth. But you know that what matters most are qualified prospects. The Internet is an information-driven medium that puts the consumer in the driver's seat. By giving them the information they're seeking (and requesting information in return), you can qualify prospects more efficiently — giving you more time to focus on the best leads.

4.) Skip to the Head of the Line (We’ll Show You How)

Are you new to local internet marketing? We're not. USA4SALE Networks has been a leader in local online advertising for more than a decade. Rather than re-invent the wheel, let us put our experience to work for your business and save you the time, trouble and expense of learning by trial and error. One of our executives will be happy to give you a free consultation.

"Where did you hear about us?" It’s a critical question for gauging the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. It’s a question you ask every customer (or at least know you should!) Our favorite response — and probably yours, too — is "a friend told me about you." Referrals from a friend are powerful and effective. There’s simply no match for the credible testimony of your friends and colleagues.

But as you investigate a little deeper, you’ll discover that a simple referral from a business associate is not quite as simple as it seems. In fact, it’s usually the result of a complex set of factors. When we ask someone, “Where did you hear about us?” the answer we receive is typically mentions only the last in a long series of interactions with our company and its products and services. When we ask a different kind of question, we get more detailed information. As an example, we recently surveyed our web users and asked them to review a list of places we advertise and check any that they noticed.

After more than a hundred surveys were completed, we noticed emerging trends that gave us a much better picture of what drives the “word-of-mouth” advertising that we value so highly. It’s not unlike the picture described in Jay Lipe’s book, The Marketing Toolkit for Growing Businesses. Lipe describes the long chain of events that brought a single new  customer to his consulting business.

It started with a piece of direct mail, followed by a face-to-face meeting, then a proposal. But then it took nine newsletters, a visit to his website, another email and meeting, and a  second proposal before this prospect became a client. Altogether, the journey took five years.

In our own experience, we get plenty of new customers because of word of mouth. But that “wordof-mouth” referral took place in the context of a larger marketing strategy that reinforced our message consistently through advertising in a variety of media, over an extended period of time.

So what’s the best way to drive this process?

Understand The Strengths of Different Media. One example: We’ve been in business for ten years and we’ve used billboards for several of those years. We’ve never made a direct sale from a billboard, as far as I know.  But that’s not why we use them. We use them to reinforce other aspects of our marketing strategy.

In contrast, one strength of online advertising is that we can measure its immediate impact on our website traffic. A website offers prospects a way to “kick the tires” without a salesman lurking over their shoulder, ready to pounce. But after many years in the business, we recognize that it usually takes repeated visits to our websites to turn a prospect into a customer.

So here’s a typical chain of events: A customer may visit our website because of some online advertising, then find themselves reminded of our service through some offline advertising. Then they’ll come back to the website again for more information. Finally, in a conversation with another business owner, they might hear about the success their friend is having by advertising on Ocala4sale.com.

Now at last we have that wonderful word-of-mouth referral. But it’s been supported and reinforced all along the way.

Maintain a Consistent Message Across All Media. Since we know that effective advertising requires repetition, it’s important to maintain a consistent message across your media mix. Why dilute your message when you can give it strength by reinforcing it in all the channels in your marketing mix.

Every successful business understands that the real value in advertising is achieved over the long haul. As part of an effective marketing strategy, strong advertising reinforces existing customer relationships, sets your business apart in the marketplace, builds trust, and brings customers to your door.

It even leads to one friend telling another about your business. So what’s the best way to drive word-of-mouth? Keep giving them something to talk about! As one business owner recently observed: “I used to think most of my business came through word of mouth, so I decided to stop advertising. But the funny thing is, when I stopped advertising the word-of-mouth eventually stopped working."

Along with the value of brand building, online advertising offers the unique opportunity to put your product or service within a mouse click of potential customers.  Whether you’re selling products or offering your professional services, here are three ways you can make the most of your online opportunity.

1) Offer a Simple, Clear Benefit. Put yourself in the shoes of potential customers. When they make that split-second decision about a commercial message, only one thing is going through their head. It’s the question, “What’s in this for me?”

Since that’s the only question a potential customer cares about, it pays to answer that question clearly and quickly. If it takes more than a glance for a reader to see a clear benefit, their attention will be gone in the blink of an eye.

For instance, while your company name is important and should be prominent in your advertising, by itself your company name offers no benefit to a busy reader.

When you sketch out your advertising campaign with your account executive, ask yourself, “What are my customers really looking for?” Here are just a few possible benefits you might offer to potential customers:

Convenience. Will your product or service save customers precious time? Will you your service make life easier for your clients?  Then by all means, let them know how they will specifically benefit from what you offer.

Credibility. Are you in a business where the price of making a mistake can be huge? Have competitors left cynical former customers in their wake? Then let people know why you’re different. Let them know why you can be trusted.

Affiliation. I’ve noticed that people at some parties have little ponies monogrammed on their shirt. So the next time I go to one of those parties, I’ll buy a shirt with a little pony on it. In that case I’m not buying the shirt, I’m announcing that I belong to a certain group.

Value. Value, not price, is the real benefit to your customers. I only paid $2 for my last pair of socks, but price alone was not the basis of my decision. The socks  were the correct size, the store was on my side of town, and the quality was reasonable for the price I paid. In other words, price mattered, but what I wanted  most was a good value. I’m convinced that nobody shops on the basis of price alone.

2) Highlight a Specific “Call to Action.” In studies of online advertising, a clear and emphasized call to action is associated with higher click-through rates than ads with no call to action or generic messages like “Click Here” or “Call Now.” Give potential customers a reason to click.

Here are a few suggestions:

Click for Our
Latest Listings.

Call to Request a
Free Brochure.

Print This Coupon
and Save $20.

In our experience, we’ve noticed that ads with “Click Here” messages that appear to be a text hyperlink (typically blue and underlined) produce good results, along with simple gray buttons that have the same appearance as a web page “submit” button.

2) Link to a Great Landing Page. What happens after someone clicks? That’s a question that often gets ignored when developing a local online advertising campaign. The usual answer is that a visitor lands on an advertiser’s home page.

It’s obvious if you think about it for just a moment: If your call to action was “Click for Our Latest Listings” make sure the next thing a potential customer sees is your latest listings.

Remember that by clicking on your ad, a potential customer has taken decisive action — even if it’s only to learn more. If you drop them off on your home page, they may still be several clicks away from what they were expecting to find. Even worse, now they’re on their own to hunt for it. In some worse-case scenarios, we’ve seen call to action messages that can’t be found at all on the website where the visitor lands.

The best approach is to make sure your landing page is consistent with the message of your ad. Your landing page should limit a prospect’s options to the actions you’d like them to take, such as filling in a request form. Links to other portions of your website are only a distraction at this point.