I study and write about these things.

In fact, I write for Entrepreneur magazine, Huffingtonpost, SearchEngineJournal and several others.

I've written a number of blogs. I have a new book that just came out just a while ago that's in the bookstores now, on SEO and social media and pay-per-click.

The truth though is this is not about me at all. This session and this webinar is all about helping you to make some changes. In some cases, perhaps even some small changes to make some pretty good in-roads in terms of new clients, acquisitions of those, on-boarding those clients but also creating more revenue, right? It's a win-win. We're going to take you through here today.

While I do speak about social media and other tactics, we're going to cover Facebook briefly, I'm not going to go too deeply on any of all of these.

As you probably have figured out, marketing has gotten complex, right? There's so much you can do. There's so many strategies. Every time, it seems like somebody has some new program to sell you.

We're going to make some assumptions here. I think I'm going to be pretty dead on this slide here. Your ultimate goal is to attract more clients, right?

Not just any old clients. You want quality clients, you know? These are clients that pay, clients that keep coming back, clients that refer out, clients that talk about you and clients that pay.

The worst thing we know of in this industry or any industry is whiny clients. I personally don't like them. I like to stay away from those. I know the same is going to be true for you. More money, well, that's the benefit of having more clients.

If you have structured your business well and you don't have a massive amount of overhand, and you have basically set up financial systems and income streams to support it, well, not only can you make more money but your profits will increase. That's consistently over time.

Have more fun. You know, when we were children, right, growing up, what was it all about? Just fun, fun, fun.

As the years went by and we got a little side-swiped by real life, right, things started to change. Perhaps some of you on this call, yes, you've lost a little bit of the dreaming, the fun. In some cases, some of you, yes, I'm in my profession. I have my own business, but I hate it. I need to change something.

Glad to take those questions and thoughts as well, but really, this is about local search marketing. In fact, since I mentioned questions, there is a form there. If you have questions along the way, take some notes on your notepad or paper but feel free. Send them in through the form there.

I'll be glad to answer you and help you out there. No worries at all. This is an assumption that we're making, and if I can hit these marks here today, then I think ... Well, I hope that I've done a pretty good job.

If you know all of this stuff and you're not applying it, well, you're just as good as your neighbor who's doing very little as well. You need to actually take these and implement them. The way that you do this is by assigning certain tasks to your self, right?

Goals are going to be very important to establish in terms of A, what are they? B, when can I get them done?

If you can assign yourself 30 to 60 minutes weekly, and by the way, these tasks are not complex. They're not tasks that all of a sudden, you're going to be thinking about trying to get these completed in your workday. No.

These can actually be done on a weekend. I talked about taking time off and have fun with your friends and family. This, as you're building out, might be just one of those, "Hey, guys. I'm going to go here and take some time because I need to take care of some tasks that Jon has described for me."

This is a great starting point. Of course, if you have more time, hey, the more, the merrier, right? If you can do more and it's strategically aligned with your business, then I would advise you to take a look at that.

Local SEO Business case for a dentistry

In scenario one here, I'm using the dentist as an example. You're out of dentistry school. You know all there is to know about dentistry, of course. You know, you're a cum laude and all of the credentials that you need to get out in the field. You've established an office, a name for yourself. You have your chair, right, equipment. You have the license with the city, with your local town. Whatever it might be. You're all set, but there's something missing. The patients, the clients, of course. You need that. You don't need just an initial seed but also long-term. We're going to talk about that long-term throughout this webinar. Initially, it just may be referrals, the word of mouth, WOM that you see there. Perhaps you took out some local newspaper ads or articles that you had pushed out there, posters, brochures, business cards.

My favorite example is I'm a guitar player. Well, if I'm playing in my basement and I'm not promoting myself, and I'm not talking to people, then I'm just a guitar player playing in the basement. That's not very helpful. What we need to do is we need to get you out there. I'll talk about how you can do this for a small business, as you can in scenario two, a larger business. This could be now you, as you have progressed from school in those earlier years into maybe larger dentistry in this example. Perhaps you even have offices at east and west or expanded out in several regions in Los Angeles, well, now you have a different problem perhaps, right?

I talked a little bit about that, just a minute ago. That's your code. That's your content, so text, simply text. I mean search engines read text. Not images, not videos, not flash. They read the text and so it's the text that you see plus the code behind the scenes, and that is what renders your site. That is what displays our site. That's called HTML, right?

You don't have to worry about these technical aspects too much. In this course, we're going to cover the tactics that help you bring in more leads.

Off-page factors.

Incoming links, referrals, references, reviews, citations. You'll hear many different terms for this, but just suffice to know that those are important factors for ranking and for trust and authority-building.

Users, visitors, prospects, straightforward.

If you had searched for the recent global events in Google, you'll see real-time search. Reviews, references and timely updates help yield immediate results.

You hear the word citation in this local SEO, local search game because they are references and citations from local directories, from specific directories that work in your marketplace, from data aggregators, et cetera. You'll see how we build these out, or rather where you should get those from in this webinar.

That's going to basically be referred to quite often here. It is the listing itself. It's the descriptions and the profile. Everything that goes into basically, your profile. Let's call it that. Universal search, blended search, you'll hear that. You know, this is common now. This has been out there for a while, but universal search is very powerful. Pictures, videos, news, books, products, everything blended into the search results. This is quite an opportunity for you. We're not going to cover that in this webinar today, but send me questions on it if you have it. Location-based search, cellphones, big deal. In fact, the VPO products local at Google, Marissa Mayer, stated just two, three weeks ago only that over the holidays, Christmas, new year's, the Google Maps rendering, meaning how many times the maps were shown bypassed desktop. People on cellphones out there during the holidays were finding restaurants and pizza places, local places from their cellphones.

Business listing in search city. This is simple. Go to google.com. Enter your business name. Question, "You there?" Okay, if you are there, does it look right? Does it look like the entries are correct? Well, you may have already registered, if not, I'm going to show you how to do that, but here's an example of where Google would have pulled data from InfoUSA today and ACXIOM and they've set up a mini profile already that's not certified or set up from you yet. You want to take a look and see if you're there, and then scan across Google, Bing, Superpages, Yelp. There's others and I'll share those with you, but just take a look. Are you there? Well, that's a great first step.

Remember I talked about those data providers? You need the correct data sets across the board. They need to be consistent. Now, I mentioned UBL.org. That is actually a paid service. I think I should probably reverse that, but check the basics with getlisted.org first. That's a free service. All you need is your name and a ZIP code there. They will start scanning across Google, Yahoo! and Bing and also, I think, BOTW which is best of the Best Of The Web. Basically, not only will they sort of through a wizard step you through it, but it will tell you very quickly how deep your penetration is in terms of existence with those. For your local dentistry office, since I'm using that example here, you want to make sure that you're part of local niche directories. I'll show you an example of that later, but many of those are free.

Number three here is okay, go to google.places.com, or sorry, places.google.com. I mean really just go to google and search for Google Places. Go in there. Make sure that you have set up your profile and assign the categories and associations. I'll show an example of this later, but you want to make sure that you belong to the right categories and have that rich, full, valid profile of everything that can have in there, plus the videos and photos. I mean you do need, essentially, to tell Google what you are all about. The more, the better in this case, you know, just like as you're building out the pages for SEO. The more skimpy and thin the pages, the less useful it is both to users and search engines. Now, everything that we do works in that way. I should make a side note here. Users first, search engine second, right?

Just make sure that when you fill things out that you do it across the big three. Google and Bing and Yahoo!. When you do this, think in terms of getting all the data correct, you know? If you do this right, and depending on your marketplace, you may actually, within a week or two, actually see yourself from seemingly nowhere to page two or squeezing in on page one just from getting this right. I mean it's pretty powerful.

You're setting yourself up for a longer term course where you can build trust and authority, which is certainly very key.

I'll show you an example of that, but if you're John Smith, don't just put John Smith DDS, but spell out the keywords. Make it a full rich title without spam. It's an accurate definition or description. It's not something where you go in and stuff keywords.

Now, people have tried a lot of different things here in terms of tweaking for the search engines. You may have done it and wow, it really works well. Only to 30 days later, a week later or three months take a hit. Again, don't chance it. This is not where you want to play.

We talked about the links, the citations. Where do you get those from?

Are they trusted sources? Is it spamming networks where they come from adult sites, porn sites?

Well, it just is common sense. It's not going to make sense, right?

Those citations from the directories, from the local directories, from the data providers, from even regular websites, it's going to be very important and to build those over time and not spike them, right?

Build them organically.

For example, Local Chambers of Commerce, I'll just mention it. I don't think they have a link per se. It's a paid membership, but you have a chance to show your face there, to join up in a professional network. I talked about that earlier.

You need to be out there and as an active member of your community or at least be part of it. You don't have to be necessarily the lead of that, but you need to be part of it.

If there was one thing that I would probably urge you to do quickly, it's this: customer reviews.

Keep in mind, reputation management is a big, big deal. If you have 20 reviews, and 15 of those are all bad meaning this dentist sucks, to be honest with you, well then that's not great for you. Google doesn't care as much. That's 20 "good reviews," meaning that's reviews back to your site. The more you get reviewed, the better it is. The spiders will pick all these up. It doesn't have to be all from Google, right?

This could be Yelp and Superpages and other places where people have left reviews, local at Yahoo!, for instance, so volume is the key there and social proof.

UGC is just a fancier word for user-generated content. I talked a little bit about it. People who actually submit comments about you. I mean this is getting probably more advanced than you need to, but you can actually assign a username and have people actually add to your blog.

Another is to put a review URL back on your business card as you hand it out. Put it right in your office on a big sticker somewhere on the wall, right? Don't be afraid to do this. People want to hide. I think it's actually a great opportunity to show that you care and that you can share, and you're not afraid of it. If you are afraid of it, well, maybe you're doing some behind the scenes in your visit to your entire office procedures and the way you deal with business and clients. We're not going to go there because that's just way too negative, right?

This just expands on what I said, but I needed to add this. Trusted reviews that goes to Yelp, Superpages, et cetera, these are going to be extremely valuable for you to get there. In fact, when you do this, don't just set up an opportunity to go up and review on Yelp alone. Everything needs to happen organically, is what I'm trying to say. Everything should look natural and common sense. If you have no reviews today, and all of a sudden, you have 50 reviews by the end of this week and they're all on Yelp, well, something is weird about that pattern.

This is what I call the regular ‘old’ SEO.

This is the code behind the scenes. It's the text, the tags, the title, description. All of those things that SEO is the cornerstones of SEO and synonyms and keywords. Basically here, we are not doing an SEO course. Only to suffice us to say that if you're searching for Dentist Los Angeles, and none of those keywords exist on the page, well that's just dumb, right? Makes sense. Get them on there and synonyms, you know, related terms. That's going to be very important. The contact info on the page, full numbers, geo site maps, site architecture. I'm not going to dive too much into this, but link are important. They ease on navigation and access and engagement. Our people just liking your site.

Don't hide that in text. Don't try to be cute here. This is the full name of the business, the address, phone number (local, no 800), all of it.

This is very important. This is not the place to list just three, four, five, six different offices. We're thinking in terms of segmentation. Silos is another term we use. You know, black and white. We don't want to go gray here. We want it to be very clear what is it that we're trying to optimize for. If it's one office, one location, then have a domain for that, a top-level domain. Have the content in text. Support it in that local environment. There's a little bit of money. It depends here if you are in a franchise network, but we're not going too deep on this now. You can send me a question on this if you have one.

You need to get yourself or to moz.com/local, localeze.com, UBL.org.

Those are paid, those last two I mentioned.

InfoUSA has some great services as well. Here's one.

Go into Google and just type in Google Keyword tool. The first result there is going to be that tool.

Just go ahead and type in your keywords for your business. You'll discover very quickly many, many keywords that are listed, that are associations for essentially, that main term that you typed in. It will give you some ideas for pages you can build out, perhaps even more keywords you can add to an existing page. Also, just expand your mind a little bit about how incredibly big this keyword space is and how important it is. I advise you to go and check these tools out, okay?

Dentist Los Angeles, right, in this example?

You see the top three listings first in the yellow highlight. On the right, you see the map and the paid listings, right? I guess that would be a ... Well, I don't know what carrier that would be, but it's top and right. In the middle there, it's organic. This is the local listings that are showing up with the phone numbers. You see the place, pages, et cetera. Actually, if we scrolled further down on this screenshot, which it is, so I can't scroll, but you'll see the natural organic listings. This is a blended result here that we're looking at in the paid organic or paid local and organic, but this is what we're looking at. Being in the top placements here is going to be more important then further down, of course. I mean it's basically people who are above the fold, you know, where you can actually see it right away.

If you look down at the code here, and I know several of you on the call is not going to be on the code, but just look at the code for a second with me. It says HTML and then head and then title, Los Angeles Downtown Endodontics, Dr. Alex Parsi, AA tech design.

What is that? Well, it certainly has nothing to do with his website in terms of trying to speak to keywords and relevancy. It's the firm probably that did this for him.

You don't have to do all of these, but it's important that you know. Plus, there's going to be someone new here who have perhaps done a lot of the things that I just spoke about, missing a few but then need some more ideas. Well, I'd like to extend that here. Facebook places, are you there?

Well, you should be.

Facebook.com/places, Gowalla, foursquare/.com businesses. That area allows you to deal with special mobile deals. Six million plus users, I believe now. Nothing to sneeze at, right? Review sites. I'm going to show you that in a second. Hotpot, that's another Google property. Groupon, collective buying power.

It's not a huge cost. Places.google.com/tags, special promos, et cetera, you want to check that out. Yext, business highlights, similar to what I just described. That goes into Yahoo!, Yelp, Map Quest, et cetera, Facebook ads, awesome. I mean you talk about the holy grail here. This would be it in terms of the demographics targeting the psychographics, the technographics. All of this stuff that really builds down to the most core of marketing. Who's your audience? Who could you target?

Localeze, Yelp, you want to be here and make sure that your data is consistent. The same with the review sites, and remember how I said spread them out, right? Not just one particular site. Well, go to Yelp. Use Yahoo!, Google, CitySearch, et cetera. If you're into JudysBook, maybe you should be, right? That's one of those particular review sites that maybe doesn't come up too often in your world. Well, I should also mention that when you're doing some of this, and again, not a lot of time here, but you're going to come across your competition. It's very easy to go out to some of these properties in Yahoo! and CitySearch. Type in their name. is Bob, Bob Smith and his dentistry showing up? See what he's doing and get a sense for it, right? Especially if he's ahead of you because you'll see that he'll probably have reviews from a wide variety of sources, including these review sites. Not just one.