I had lunch with a former customer recently. He had started a business earlier this year and had contracted a new web firm to design and launch his website. It had been up and running since some time in April. His business was still in the early building stages and he wanted me to have a look at his site and provide some feedback.
Rather than go straight to his web address, I decided to go to google and enter the name of his business (which also reflected clearly what the company does) and the town the business is located in. What I found was a surprise and a lesson. He wasn’t on page one, or two, or three…or page ten. That’s when I stopped looking. Ten full pages of competitors – most of which were not located in the same city as his business – came up, but not his business.
His site had been up on the internet since April – over four months and he didn’t even make the first ten pages – with his full business name – which is also his web address – and city. Not a good sign.
What went wrong and how can he fix it?
Well for starters, he needs to make sure that his site has been submitted to all the popular web crawlers. After submitting his site to these pages, he should be searching for any industry specific directories and add his information there as well.
These are the sites he should start with:
Google Local Search: http://www.google.com/local/add/
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Local.com: http://advertise.local.com/
Open Directory Project: http://www.dmoz.com/
Superpages.com: http://www.superpages.com/
Yahoo! Directory: http://dir.yahoo.com/
Yahoo! Local: http://local.yahoo.com/
Next time: Are you selling what they are buying?
