Not surprising to me though, Google has recently stated that 20% of all searches are related to location. That translates to approximately 2.6 billion searches a month, and that number is increasing by about 50% per year.

But how you can take advantage of this local search trend to generate more qualified leads to your website? There are three steps you can do about it.

First of all, find out the geo modified keyword phrases for your business. What is Geo-modified keyword? Simple, it is the best word to describe your business or professionalism plus the city, town or even postal code of your area. For example, if you are a real estate agent who specializes in selling West Vancouver properties. The best Geo-modified keywords for your business are “West Vancouver real estate agent”, “Realtor in West Van”, “selling properties in West Vancouver” and so on.

Secondly, you will want to optimize those geo-modified keywords in your website (if you have one), which I call it “on page SEO“. How to do the optimization job? Easy but could take relatively long time. Technically, you will want to mention the keywords almost everywhere and as often as possible. (But don’t overdo it, otherwise Google could think it spam.) What I mean by “everywhere” – In the site meta keyword, site description, site title, blog title, blog content, footer, deep linkings and so on.

Thirdly, you will need to hire local marketing company or professional to do all kinds of search engine marketing, which I call it “off page SEO“, to push your website to rank for those Geo-modified keywords. Although nobody (including Google itself) could guarantee the rankings of your site for any keyword, meaning you will find your website’s ranking will be up and down for any keyword, the overall ranking of your website can be improved in the long term if that marketing company or professional use the correct and most efficient marketing strategies.

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Pretty much like to SEO any web content, the first step to SEO your APP no matter its a iPhone, iPad, Android App or Blackberry App, always starts with proper keyword research.

Ask yourself the following questions before you will come up with the primary keyword term:
1. What’s the best category of your app?
2. What OS platform is your app good for?
3. What problem does your app solve?
4. What’s the uniqueness of your app? Comparing to similar ones in your category.
5. What is the name of any related app which ranked on the top?

When you have your primary keyword term to your best knowledge, put them in Google search to find its competition level, which is how many search results do you get for that primary term? Add modifiers to that primary keyword till you will find some variation keyword phrase whose phrase match search result is less than 100k in Google. At the same time, you’d better find out the actual search volume for that variation keyword phrase. If it comes up with decent amount of search numbers, you want to use that one for your app marketing.

I suggest that you should come up with 3 to 5 keyword phrases to put in your app title and description. And when you promote your app, use those keyword phrases as the anchor text links to your app download url or to your app review links.

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For most of the experienced internet marketers, we are quite familiar with the general rules of SEO. But not quite the same when SEO a mobile site.

Considering having 10% of search volume from mobile searches in 2010, and expected to reach 16% from mobile queries by Sep 2011 (according to Performics), it is really a must to SEO a site both for desktop computers and mobile devices, i.e. iPhone, smartphone.

Keyword research is always a key for any type of SEO and/or SEM job. Thanks to Google Mobile Keyword Research Tool, we now can accurately figure out the monthly searches for any particular keyword phrase from those mobile devices.

Remember, the bouncing rate and average time length that every visitor stay on the site, are still playing an very important role for search engines to decide whether to rank a site to the top page or not. That’s why it is so important to direct each mobile queries to a mobile formatted site, also known as mobile friendly site.

iPhone and Android App Marketing

We Generate QRcode And Track Performace

We Do SMS Marketing And Track Performance

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According to the local Vancouver news today (Oct 18, 2010): Joseph Luk’s Movie Finder app has rocketed to the top of its category in the Android market. And why would a mobile application like that movie finder be so popular?

In order to answer this question, you got to know about Android first. Android has exceeded iPhone in American’s mobile operating system market share in 2010. And Google is that big hand behind Android.

Google has made tremendous strides in mobile, including mobile search and the development of the Android operating system powering phones such as the Motorola Droid and its own Nexus One. Google‘s increasing presence in mobile is reshaping not just the mobile business but also marketing in general.

Why mobile?

Because We should be looking at mobile across the entire world as a global play.

Two-thirds of the world‘s population has a mobile phone subscription—4 billion people—and there will be 5 billion wireless subscribers worldwide by the end of this year, according to some estimates.

According to Google, mobile will soon have more reach than TV, radio or the Internet and mobile is the access point to the Internet in the developing world.

Google also claimed that “Search has been our core business for many years now, and we actually receive many more searches on mobile than we do on desktops in developing markets.”

Morgan Stanley recently predicted that more users will access the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years.

Market researcher IDC is even more bullish, predicting that this is going to happen sooner than that—by 2013.

As you can see, Google has realized this mobile marketing trend and is taking massive actions to welcome the internet future. Android is one of its mobile marketing strategies. By far it’s very successful.

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The following are the most popular mobile search business types according to Google stats.

• pizza
• restaurants
• bars
• taxi
• car service
• limo also limousine
• auto repair also car repair
• auto insurance also car insurance
• tire repair
• oil change
• car wash
• used cars
• car rental also auto rental
• car towing also auto towing
• bike shops also bicycle shops
• bike repair also bicycle repair
• bike rental also bicycle rental
• flower delivery
• delivery
• nail salons
• hair salons

Obviously those businesses are reaching the most consumers on the go. If your business type is in one of them, you’d better have a mobile ready website which works perfectly under both traditional internet browsing and mobile browsing.

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Why? Because organic search engine still reigns.

Natural search results, which are also known as organic search results, are critical to be successful in marketing online. After all, people are easily giving up after just one or two clicks when searching for something on the internet.

According to iCrossing, of all the organic search visits, 95.8% were on Google’s first page and then left for other search terms; only 2.5% of them went to the second page; and the remaining 1.7% might go further to third or forth pages.

That was true across the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing), with at least 95% of traffic from each originating from the first page of results after a nonbranded search. Less than 2% of search-referred traffic came from clickers persistent enough to look for results after the second page.

That’s why businesses owners are willing to invest big in search engine optimization so they will appear in those results and benefit from the huge portion of clicks that go to the top hits.

Note: The market share of organic search visits between three major search engines: Google 74%; Yahoo 13%; Bing 13%.

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Canada’s Internet population continues to grow – by 2013, it will hit 25.9 million, or nearly 75% of the entire nation. That’s is really impressing. The total population as of January 2009 is around 33.5 million, while 69.2% of them (23 million) are internet users.

70% of Canada population use internet

Many of these people are among the world’s most committed Internet users, spending 45 hours or more online each month. Since over 70% of the internet users are searching for local related content according to Google, local business marketers should be adapting to the online search surge.

While nearly 65% of consumers in the country own a mobile phone, they do not prize them as highly as Americans do. And the majority do not feel compelled to pay for a data package to surf the Web while away from home.

But traditional media isn’t dead — television still dominates, especially in the highly desirable over-35 audience.

(resource: emarketer)

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Small businesses using search advertising have sharply increased their search engine advertising in Q3 2009, according to data from WebVisible. Average spending by small-business search advertisers was up 91% year over year and 93% quarter over quarter in Q3. While Google still got most search spending, it lost 5% of the spending share over over last year. Bing gains 2.9% of the spending share.

More and more local small to medium businesses have concluded that over half of new customers are ‘referred’ by the internet. According to Google, more than 70% of the online searches are for local products or services. Remember, we are talking about billions of online searches everyday.

Stats show that 90% online commercial searches result in offline purchase; 82% of local searches follow up via online store visit, phone call or purchase. However 90% of local businesses have no clue of what to do to take advantage of those online local searches to benefit their local businesses.

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When I read the news that WhitePages.com will soon allow people to edit information in their listings in the online directory to help attract more registered users. It proves that there are more and more competitions for local businesses into the online marketing exposure.

Listing your local business on WhitePages

Local businesses are looking for more online exposure as to refresh its online presence and expand its services beyond basic listings. Actually WhitePages is not the first one to take initiatives to involve local business online. Google always leads the online marketing campaign that Google local business profile is the perfect example for its intention.

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As I showed in my last marketing journal post, there are over 20 million results for the search term “real estate agents vancouver bc”. At first glance, it seems impossible to beat all those 20 million pages in a few weeks or months. But when you look it closely, you will find:

real estate market Google search details

The top 10 listings are from local search results by Google map. Below that Google map result, you will find another 10 website search results on page one. Number 1 through 6 are different directory listing sites. The sites with an arrow mark beside that are the sites belong to 4 different realtors. On the right hand side, there are 8 Adwords ads where your site could be listed if you can afford $$ per click.

Those four realtors sites have page rank 3 or 4. One of them have around 48 backlinks while others have much fewer backlinks. All of those stats tell me one thing: there are many possibilities to beat those 20 million pages and get listed on Google page one.

However, I wouldn’t mind beat them at first, because there are averagely 200 searches per month for that particular search term. I would rather find some terms with higher search volume.

But it’s nice to have your site listed on the first page of Google when someone is looking for a real estate agent located in Vancouver, isn’t it? And it’ll be even better when you own listings number 1 through 6, won’t it?

Well, that’s exactly what I am doing for some lucky real estate agent right now. However it won’t happen overnight. And there are way more things to do for real estate marketing. Did you see those 20 million pages results? That is a really competitive market. And I bet any realtor be multiple listed on page one of Google will make a fortune.

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