This post will explain some getting started techniques, when trying to get your local business website, or any local site, ranking in Google. When I mention, Local, I am referring to Local business results, in Google, as well as the organic result rankings, below the Local business results.

Goals

At the start of any project I am involved in, I list my goals for the project and sketch out a rough timeline. For now, let’s focus on goals. In this project, we want to get a local business organically recognized on the web, without paid clicks.  What are our goals?

1. Get listed in Google Local business search results.
2. Rank for local keywords based on location and niche.
3. Get listed in other local business directories.
4. Direct local traffic to fill out a form, resulting in a quality lead that can be sold to your clients or used for yourself.

5) Analyze the data to calculate estimated clicks and conversions per day or week, giving yourself or your client a clear view of the conversion rate and how many conversions to expect per week.

Let me tell you that businesses will be more interested in number 5 than the others, but it is the others that help get you to 5.

Getting Started

Let’s get right to it. We will be using Jack’s Beauty Salon in Pennsylvania as our example throughout this series. Jack’s is a made up business and not one of my clients or sites.

1) Choosing a Domain. Note that this step is needed only if your client does not currently have a site or you are getting a new site up. If your client already has a domain, it still might be a good idea to get another one and rank both sites. As long as both sites lead to the main money site, you are good. When picking a domain, I usually go for the main keyword that I want to rank for and make sure that is in the domain.  So, if we are aiming to rank a beauty salon in PA, let’s call our domain Beautysalonpa.com.

2) Design Layout. Your site design is key, and I am not talking about graphics or logos here, even though those can also be important. What I am talking about right now is your layout. You have to think about what you want to accomplish with the site. We are looking for leads, plain and simple. That is why the form must be placed where it will not be missed and can be easily filled out. I have one layout that works well for quite a few local sites and I tweak it to use on lots of projects. The layout can be done in Wordpress or basic HTML. It is a matter of whatever you are comfortable with updating.

3) Design Art. For the most part, this one is up to you. You have the choice to do it yourself, outsource it, or download a Wordpress theme. The thing to remember is that layout dictates design, not the other way around. Keep in mind what is important, which is usability and a natural visual progression. Do not go messing around and put white text on a black background. Keep it simple.

4) Content. Content is king, right? In my book it is, along with links. In this series, we are talking about Jack’s Beauty Salon in PA. For local businesses, reviews make great content, but before we use reviews as content we should get some general information up about beauty salons in PA. I usually outsource this step, so contact me if you are looking for some good content writers, because there are plenty out there. Start out with 5 posts. When giving instructions to the writer, be sure to include:

• Title
• 1 Main keyword
• 4 Secondary keywords
• 500 words

You can Use the Google Keyword Tool to search for your keywords. Include at least one keyword that you are trying to rank for in each post title. We will use these keywords later as anchor links to these posts, so we must remember everything we are doing. It is crucial that you stay organized. You can do anything if you are organized. I use an Excel sheet to remember this information, with the following as column headers:

• Post Title
• Keyword
• Traffic
• Current Rank for Main Keyword
• Incoming Links for Main Keyword
• Outgoing Links
• Leads Article Generated

This will help us keep up with what is happening in our quest to rank for these keywords. I touched on links in this step only because it is needed for the Excel sheet. I cannot repeat how important it is to stay up to date on the sheet. If we do not keep up with the sheet, it will be useless. A little trick that works well is to set an alarm on your phone for once a week to remind you to update your sheet. The sheet will also come in handy for your client once we get to reporting.

5) Links. SEO gurus will tell you that this is the single most important part of optimizing. Your budget and goals will dictate how much work you will have to put into this. For the less competitive keywords, it will take much less work and links to get you ranked. I will be supplying you with a few ways to get some nice starting links, and talk about a service I have used before, with no affiliate link of course. An older post I wrote on where to find links can be found here. Here is a quick list of link sources as well:
i) Web 2.0 Directories (Squidoo, Hubpages, etc.): These are free ways to submit articles and can be linked to your site. That is a double bonus. When linking to your post, remember to use your main keyword as your anchor text. You can either post an article from your site or a unique one from your content writer.

ii) Blog Commenting: Make a list of dofollow blogs and start leaving comments, using your main keyword as your name, as long as it doesn’t sound too spammy. The link will pass some juice regardless of what the anchor text is, but it is best for it to be the keyword.

iii) Link Services: There are plenty of link building services out there, and these might be much more beneficial if the keyword is tough to rank for. Red Virus from WickedFire has a great service going, just take look at the dude’s itrader ratings!

iv) Local Directories:  Below is a list of local directories and links that you should familiarize your own and your client’s sites with. Eventually, you can outsource this part as well like I do.

A List of 56 Local SEO and Search Resources for Business

6) Analytics. Since we are going white hat on this project, we will be using Google Analytics with conversion tracking. This will show us what keywords people are coming to the site from, so we can focus on those keywords as well as find new longtails. You want to focus on the keywords that are bringing you targeted traffic by analyzing where you rank for these keywords and whether more links would raise those rankings. Not only will this raise your search rankings, but it will also help you find and rank for longtails of that keyword. Don’t forget to use your excel sheet. When you see a keyword that is gaining traffic, make note of it in your sheet as a higher priority.

There are just a couple more tips to cover before wrapping up for now. One is to make sure to sign your site up for web development tools on Google. This will allow you to upload your sitemap XML. You can create your sitemap on a few different sites and there is also a Wordpress plugin that does it for you automatically. We want our sites to be indexed even if we did not submit it to Google as a new site. What should happen is for Google to crawl one of your incoming links and find its way to your site. Your site should then be indexed fairly quickly if you have some good content and initial links up and running.

Remember to keep your Excel sheet updated and you should be on your way to getting your site recognized. The next part of our series will be on reporting. What do you or your client need to know about your traffic, and how much information should you give them? Look out for that.

Recap:

To start out, set goals to get an idea of what to aim for and expect in terms of traffic and conversions. Choose a domain name with your main keyword in it, and design your site only with your user conversion goals in mind. Build up content yourself or through outsourcing that focuses on keywords, and create an Excel sheet to organize those keywords. Use a variety of sources to get links with your keywords as anchor text, and use analytics tools to track which of these keywords are performing best. Build on your strongest keywords and keep your sheet updated!

Whether you are new to affiliate marketing or have just been busy, you might be missing out on what is now an industry standard tool. We are talking about AffBuzz.com here. If you have not heard of it, you need to check it out right now.

Put simply, AffBuzz is the CIA of affiliate marketing. All the essential information and intelligence from the best affiliate blogs are collected and organized there, ready to be implemented right away. To best understand how to use AffBuzz, it is important to first look at how it developed and gained features over time.

Development of Features

AffBuzz started out as a way for its founder to recommend blogs to friends instead of email. It went from a few blog feeds originally to the dozens it presently has. Now, the more popular blogs rise to the top of the page and the most popular posts of the day, the previous day, and the week are listed at the very top. Today, AffBuzz is pretty much THE place for affiliate news.

What can AffBuzz do for your Business?

You might find your next big traffic source and also a step by step guide on how to use it. In the last month alone, there have been extremely useful explanations of PPV, Facebook, and Plenty of Fish advertising. If you have been in the game for any amount of time, you know the key is volume and traffic, and anytime you can instantly plug in a new source with a how-to guide it is very valuable.

Time is money in this business, plain and simple. Sure you could visit these blogs individually, but having everything in one place lets you cherry-pick the juiciest nuggets and skip the rest. Use the time saved to implement what you learned.

The value of having all the top guys give their opinions in one place makes AffBuzz your own personal mastermind group. The diversity of ideas will spark your own creativity and get you thinking outside the box. Plus, you can network by commenting on the blogs and tweeting back and forth with the authors. These connections and personal conversations might be the single most valuable thing to grow your marketing skills.

How to Best Use AffBuzz

Be selective. You do not want to get caught up in the posts about affiliate comedy and drama. This might entertain you, but it will not help your business. Before you click on a post hover over it with your mouse for a preview and ask, “How will this help my business?”

Subscribe to the RSS feed so you can passively get the top posts on your reader or your phone. This saves time and can make good use of your time away from the computer. There is also a Twitter feed for the site to further streamline things.

OfferBuzz

OfferBuzz, the affiliate offer aggregator, is the most recent addition and might be the best part of AffBuzz. Basically, every affiliate network that matters has a feed of offers going straight to the site and this can be a huge benefit in two major ways.

First, you can browse OfferBuzz to see what the most up to the minute offers are. This can let you be the first one to get a foothold on a new offer or niche, or you can watch for pattern to find general trends in the industry.

The second way you should be using OfferBuzz is the search feature. This lets you find that campaign you wanted to test but forgot about, or find all the offers in a particular niche so you can split test and crank up those EPCs.

There are so many ways you can use AffBuzz to help your business. Whether looking for specific techniques or just industry news so you stay up to date with FTC compliance, there is a ton it has to offer. At the end of the day, like any other affiliate tool, the way you use it will be what works best for you personally. The bottom line though, is that you should be using it. Now get out there, learn some things, and make some dough.

Affiliate Marketing is all about testing. Testing your way to a profitable campaign is your only way to do it , unless you got the secret sauce, or get lucky on a few campaigns, but in reality, test until you got data, and test some more . This brings up a question …“When is it time to quit?” Generally, if I get 100 clicks to the offer page, from my landing page, I will count that as a sample size. I’ll stop everything at 100 clicks, and analyze my data. This maybe too soon, but you will only be able to tell by looking at your tracking. Okay, I got 100 clicks! Time to analyze. I am looking for 3 things.. (or 2, if you are direct linking)

1) Click Through Rate for Ads

2) Click Through Rate from Ad to Lander

3) Click Through Rate from Lander to Offer

4) Conversions

5) ROI

This should give a general idea if you should dump it, or keep pumpin. If you think your deal needs more clicks, take another sample size, there’s no right answer. Looking at my data, I can see which combinations worked best, and use them, and ditch the others. For example, for the ads, I can look at which ad is getting the better CTR, keep that one, and ditch the other. The next thing, which lander is performing the best? You should be split testing all your landing pages, and offers, using prospers, landing page rotate script found here. It is all trial and error. Think of it like solving an equation like (x – 2)(2x – 3) . There is no explicit way to solve this problem, but to try numbers in x, and see what works. There may be ways, but if you took Calculus, you would understand what I mean. So, after a few tests, . Money Made > Money Spent? Good find ways to improve campaign, and keep kw’s converting, pumpin till they die out. Money Made < Money Spent? This part is up to you, you could ditch it, or take high performing elements of your campaign , and change out things you feel need improvement. If your getting high CTR on ads, but not landers. You may have good ads, but need some work on your landing pages. What do you do with a failed campaign?

My signature Wickedfire has gotten me some leads in the past, but nothing quite like this. Some member submitted this picture that was found on my signature , and just look at the response it got: http://digg.com/comedy/Money_Talks_Baby_Hell_Yeah_PIC.  I kept the link, so you can see what category it was submitted too.It was very unfortunate he didn’t put diggalive.com in the URL, or we would for sure have some more readers by now.  There was also a lot of comments, where I could of gone back and left replys.  This at least will give you an idea of images users are Digging. This one must of ended up on the first page, it also has a ‘tag’ associated with it, which is for the higher Digged entries. What are some ways that you could monetize this situation? If I was in control of the URL, which I wish I was in this case, I could of pointed it to DiggaLive, and hoped to get some subscribers, or I could of created an offer page, or jumper, and linked it to that , with an offer. This could have been 2043 potential clicks, and definitely missed out. I would probably stick with something like an email submit, or 1 page submit. Dig traffic is not going to convert nearly as high as targeted traffic, but what’s the harm in testing. What kind of deals would work? I can answer that the same as almost any other question having to do with affiliate marketing, and that is …T E S T.

Have you found ways to monetize Digg Traffic? Let us know!