Local Marketing for Professionals

There are so many professionals out there looking for guidance on how best to market their services - but simply don't know who to start.  When thinking about a local marketing strategy for your professional services firm, knowing where to start can be one of the toughest parts.  In this post I'll share some key areas that local businesses, specifically professionals like Dentists, Doctors, and Attorney's should consider when promoting their business locally.

The first step is focusing on your Google My Business profile.  Google maintains the largest local directory on the planet and there are tons of professionals that either don't know how to verify their listing or simply don't understand the positive impact of having a verified Google My Business account.  When users search for a local professional, your profile will appear in search results and serve as a huge billboard promoting your practice. These listings also include a link to your website, hours of operation, and reviews.

The second step is to optimize your own website.  With the advent of do-it-yourself website builders like GoDaddy, Wix, and WordPress, making your own website doesn't have to be difficult or expensive. You can easily find a freelancer who can quickly and easily develop a good looking website for your firm. Make sure it is easy to navigate, is optimized from a search engine optimization perspective, and gives users an easy way to get in touch with you to set an appointment.

The third step is to think about local search directories.  Local directory services like Lizard Local can help to optimize your business information and distribute across large, powerful local directories like Yelp - improving exposure and helping to build your online reputation.  Professionals that invest the time and effort in expanding their online brand not only grow their practices faster, but increase retention among existing patients and customers.

The final step for increasing you local presence is to "keep it local".  Work with your community and encourage online coverage for your office.  For example, a number of my customers do free screenings or provide a day of free legal advice. This type of promotion can easily be picked up online from local newspapers and radio stations. These connections bode well from a local optimization standpoint and help you increase your reputation.

Don't make local optimization harder than it needs to be.  If you create, optimize, and verify your Google My Business profile, you'll be ahead of about 80% of businesses who fail to see the value in the verification process.  Once you've set up your Google profile, optimize your own website and then begin promoting it using local online directories.  And lastly, start making local connections that can help you and your business rise above the crowd.

Optimize Your Videos For YouTube

One of the most popular search engines online today was actually started created by three former PayPal employees back in February 2005.  It’s not Google, Yahoo, or Bing – it’s YouTube.  The site attracts countless viewers every day and is considered to be the largest video based website on the Internet.

Developing and promoting videos is a great way to generate traffic and promote your products, services, and special offers.  The question everyone wants answered is how to get your videos ranked high on YouTube and even appear in organic search results too.  The good news is that by following a few basic optimization principles, you can quickly and easily optimize your videos for YouTube.

Let’s start with some basic YouTube ranking factors. This search engine works differently than other search algorithms.  From my experience, where you appear on the platform and in relation to specific search queries depends on a few factors. 

1. Relevancy. Metadata is exceptionally important on YouTube because of the search algorithm itself as well as the role that related videos play as part of the overall video viewing experience. Your video title, description, keywords, etc. are heavily weighed as part of search queries. 

2. Ratings. YouTube, just like Amazon, puts a lot of weight on user ratings.  The rating and quantity of reviews indicates the viewer’s approval of your video and tells the search algorithm that your video is ideal to promote to the rest of the YouTube universe. 

3. Responses.  YouTube is also very interested in the comments and responses that others are making. When individuals take the time to submit video responses in addition to comments, YouTube gauges the additional interest as a key indicator of popularity, thus moving your video higher and higher in search results.

Optimizing your video is based on four simple, yet powerful steps.  True video optimization begins with the video itself.  It’s then followed by properly formatted titles, tags, and descriptions. 

Video

When you produce your video, keep your video length longer than one and a half minutes but shorter than eight minutes.  Videos that seem to rank well both on YouTube and organically follow this general rule of thumb with regard to length.  Also, be sure to speak clearly when producing your video, using keywords in the first 10 seconds of the video and last 10 seconds of the video.  It’s believed that Google is actually indexing some of your audio. 

Title

Title your video like you would a pay-per-click ad.  You want users to click through on your title to improve interactivity and views.  It's certainly believed that having a strong title and good click-through-rate can boost the rankings of your video.

When creating your title, include your most important keywords at the beginning of the title and keep the title brief.  The shorter the title the more weight you're giving to your keyword phrases.  However, you want the title to be powerful enough to encourage clicks.  Remember to use your keywords first, branding last, and encourage click-throughs. 

Descriptions

When creating your description, again, be sure to use your keywords in the beginning.  You definitely have more room than you did in your title or even on conventional search engines to describe your video.  Keep in mind that you can use the description to include information about your video in general and provide specific info on products or services.

I always like to place a URL to a site I’d like to promote at the very beginning of my YouTube video description. This ensures that the URL is visible and clickable next to your video.  It’s a great way to promote third-party sites, passing authority and link juice of significant proportion. 

Tags

One of the best ways to optimize your tags is to again begin with your chosen keyword phrase.  The second step is to do some research in the channel that your video will likely fit into.  What types of tags are being used by the top ranking videos?  You should integrate some of the same tags into the tags associate with your video to ensure a good ranking among similar videos that have already been posted. 

Just the Beginning

Optimizing just a few features on YouTube such as the video itself, title, description, and video tags is a good starting point for improving the ranking of your videos.  There are a variety of additional techniques to further optimize videos for YouTube that deal more closely with the social aspect of the video site itself.  Views, reviews, etc. are all significant factors designed to manipulate video rankings on YouTube.  I’ll be sure to cover these additional factors in future posts.