How to market your local business with Google My Business

If your business serves clients locally in Brisbane or perhaps a smaller part of Brisbane then you’ll notice that the Google map listings feature prominently in search results related to your business.

For any business, but particularly for a small business serving local clients, the Google map listing is an important signal for location and relevance to a local search. These listings are managed in Google My Business (GMB).

It’s actually pretty easy to follow along the steps that Google provides to claim and set up a Google My Business listing but here is a quick ‘how to’ with pictures so you feel a little more familiar with it. You can then ask someone to help you claim your listing or have a crack at taking care of it yourself.

You might also want to take a look at the Google My Business app which makes ongoing management a breeze. Continue reading →

End of Financial Year 2020 – Growth despite the challenges

It has certainly been a year. Trying to come up with an appropriate adjective in that opening sentence – I decided to just leave it out altogether! I’m sure you understand where I’m coming from. At the end of the 2020 financial year I am grateful that although I did lose a couple of clients during the Coronavirus lockdown period, my business sustained significant growth for the 2020 financial year. I know this is due to the focus and consistent work I put into planning each quarter and ensuring I did everything I could to help my digital marketing clients continually improve.

I’ve helped a number of new clients realise their digital plans with new websites this year and learned a lot in the process particularly when working with clients who were start-ups (not projects I usually take on) or had established businesses but were new to marketing in the digital space. Those client situations highlight areas where I can be more effective. For example Continue reading →

Is there a search market for what you do?

Your business goals may be well supported by a search marketing strategy … or, they might not. But how do you tell and why does it matter? Well, it matters because small business digital marketing budgets demand efficiency and with that comes the need to focus on what will deliver results. You need to know the size and competitive nature of your ‘search market’ because this informs your strategy and determines both the level of investment needed for online advertising and the time you might need to spend chasing top of page one results in Google.

Let me explain what a search market is, where to find the information on your search market and how to use this information when planning your digital marketing. A single keyword phrase will be used to demonstrate. Please be aware this is not an actual plan because there’s a lot more that comes into play.

So let’s get started. Continue reading →

Digital Marketing Overview – Part 2

In my previous post, I gave a quick overview of the basic framework for digital marketing to give you the general process and reasoning behind spending time on this for your business. Today I will talk about activating your website with advertising and promotion to drive traffic and conversions. You’ve probably heard this as a phrase many times if you’ve done any research on digital marketing recently! Important to understand though. Whilst a website is a great tool for marketing your business, relying on that alone will generally result in a very slow path to growth. The real fun begins when you leverage your website for better results and that requires promotion. This is where most of the questions that small business owners have around marketing come into play because it’s the visible part of marketing I guess. Although there are a gazillion options I’m going to talk about the top one’s that I’m personally using for my clients. You won’t be surprised to learn that promotion mostly happens in Google, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. So here is part two and a little on what I think about the social media and search channels for online promotion. Continue reading →