Video, accompanied with the appropriate long tail tags, can really cover a lot of ground. The SE’s absolutely love video, giving great rankings right from the start, and with some moderate back linking those vids will have some sticking power.

I would think that in the restoration business, having a video that shows the craftsmanship and covers all the different variations and possibilities in one quick video would do wonders for driving traffic. I’m know that I’m always drawn to the little video boxes when they show up. Restoration is something that is going to be thought about and researched. Getting the searcher to your site with a video is just step one. Converting that person into an opt-in to your email list with a great offer, guide or report on things to look for in a good restoration will then give you an opportunity to build trust with that person.

They may call someone in the maps listing to get a quote or the like but they will remember you if you provide them with valuable information that can save them time, money or whatever. Plus, with an auto-responder system, you can get several chances to put your service in front of the potential customer.

Most local business’ don’t market their business from a position of servicing the customer before they ask for the sale. Most have an attitude of “Thanks for stopping in or calling, what do you want to buy.” Instead of, “Thanks for stopping in, here is some great information to help you make an informed decision, let me know if I can be of further service.”

@Zebedi

Before heading off and trying every great idea you read here:
-assess how it fits in the strategy you have defined
-Measure how well you are doing on your current strategy and whether it needs changing
-Pursue only those that offer the opportunity to improve your situation now and save the others for later
-Analyze, analyze, analyze your results for return, jettisoning those that are not cost/time effective and working the ones that are.

Sometimes you are already doing well enough in a particular area and you don’t need to change now. You only know that if you are tracking those things.

Saving things for later can save you effort now and leave some of the options open to you in the future if you need them for competitive reasons

@EarlPearl

In the dashboards that I reviewed, between 5 and 25% of all actions were for driving directions.

Your strategy of having a location in a closet would work for some industries but would you want a well heeled client driving to your location only to find it doesn’t exist?

The risk does not seem equal to the reward as loosing only one of those clients could be incredibly costly. And angering them would be doubly so.

You guys have been terrific. Hopefully others will follow this blog and be assisted also.

Regards Zebedi

Further up you had asked what PPC meant. That’s the abbreviation for Pay Per Click.

ha ha, at your hunters joke. Same joke floats around these parts (Western Canada), except it’s Grizzly Bear, not feral pigs.

And don’t fear the blog. Your webmaster should be able to set you up with WordPress easily enough (if not, find another webmaster). In fact it can be used as a complete content management system to write and edit all your static content pages as well. And managing the conversation in the blog comments for most small businesses is far far less than for a blog as active as Mike’s here. Many of your posts won’t receive comments from visitors, except maybe some spammers, but some filters can catch most of those.

I went straight to linkspiel this morning and instead of feeling wonderful about all the ideas, I thought, OH NO! Another pandoras box! So, I quckly shut that door before all the nasties got me. Oh boy! I have links, don’t get me wrong, but not like that! Ours are with industry associations, and similar, and going from one page to another and off to the huge number of published articles in PDF that we’ve written (each one could be used to start off a blog – she thinks). I don’t actually know how to start a blog, but no doubt my webmasters do. I think the chatline would drive me nuts with interruptions to work. But now I know this is a whole new world, these links, and I’ll get onto that, ……. later, much later….

Fortunately for me though, the old hunters joke has a grain of truth in it:
One hunter saw the other hunter put on top of the range running shoes, as they went into the scrub to hunt feral pigs in the top end of the Northern Territory. The other hunter laughed at him saying, “You’ll never out run a raging feral pig, even with those shoes on”. That’s okay, drawled the first hunter, as he rose up again, from tying his laces…”I only have to outrun you!”

What is the longtail that everyone talks about? I just thought you used the term metaphorically but am starting to think you mean more specific technical stuff.

Re: Stever

I enjoyed checklisting your website ideas against what I was doing and coming up trumps – at least I’m doing something right. Except those blogs… hmmm. Well at least with the research I’m getting practice with them .

Thanks

Zebedi Verbose!

Zebedi, as Mike mentioned, capturing the long tail of organic search terms is easier than you think and one page can cover a lot of variations of keywords.

Looking over your first comment where you get into services and products I would suggest you have a page for each material type. Pages for leather, veneer, pages for major wood types (oak, maple, mahogany, pine etc…). Also some pages for your most common, easily categorized, product types… a page for clocks, page for music boxes, page for antique furniture, custom interiors, etc…. Then interlink the product and material pages. On each of these pages you can mention some of the more specific items, such as an antique leather sofa. Your antique furniture page should target that well. Later you could add some sub-pages for more precise targeting for items that seem searched often enough, like maybe a sofa page off the antique furniture directory.

For location targeting you should go after those 2 or 3 bigger centers you serve by including their names in your page titles and in body of text. Because you are a specialty service catering to a higher income clientele you may find that most are searching in those bigger centers because even if they live in one of the surrounding smaller communities they may recognize the specialty service they need is not likely to be located in their smaller town, so they will search in the bigger city nearby instead.

As someone above mentioned, trying to target every community, suburb, or neighborhood in a larger metropolitan area is just not feasible, nor entirely productive, except in certain niches.

Include a blog on your site. You seem to be a prolific writer With the blog you could then do a write up about each piece you’ve just finished working on, with pics and description of work done, etc… This way those individual blog posts then help to target some very specific searches related to that and similar products. You keep adding these over time, as you complete the pieces, and the site grows and grows and covers more and more longtail search phrases.

Another thing Mike mentioned that I will expand upon is having a very professional looking site, when working with a high end product and clients. Nice photos and good text, as he mentioned, but also a very clean professional looking overall design, layout and template for the site. No free templates you see everyone and their dog using. Should be custom designed to better reflect your business. This on its own will not get you more traffic, but it will help to convert a higher percentage of the traffic you have into qualified customers.

Also recognize that search marketing is an ongoing process. Baby steps. You can’t do it all at once. Add new pages to the site as needed. Obtain new links here and there where you can. Build on it as your time and money budget allows.

And I thought (and have been told) that I’m longwinded.

Seriously, lots of indepth commentary. Very interesting. A couple of thoughts come to mind:

In trying to get to an overwhelming web visibility for your website, my mind wandered to the advice of a link building expert who also blogs, Debra Mastaler http://www.linkspiel.com/

Go through her blog. Get some ideas. Contact her. She has been working on creative ways to expand website visibility for years.

On an organic basis, I’d want reference to my business in as many quality places as possible wherein my potential clientele may be reading. I’d want it on topic (antique restoration and a myriad of long tail phrases) I’d want it in media where my clientele in Australia might be perusing.

I’d want a local address. A couple of things I might do is see if you can “rent” an address from a centrally located former client in each of the market areas. Bam…if you can arrange that, you have the maps thing beat. Alternatively, if “virtual offices” in those cities are too expensive, try something different. Instead of going to the existing virtual offices, advertise for free in something like craigslist for an office address. See if someone with a centrally located office will respond to your requests. See if you can reprice the “space cost” by having those w/ space come to you, rather than you going to them. If those in the market in your areas are pricing at a rate that is high…see if you can get address owners to respond to you w/ a lower price that works for you. All you want is an address.

Finally, I was thinking about something sneaky …but frankly I think the above suggestions specifically about location would get you into maps and probably at a lower price and with definitely far less effort.

Zebedi: As a business operator I agree with you. Google has supplanted many of the more traditional sources of marketing/visibility. It accounts for a disproportionate amount of visibility. With it being the big gun in town, it makes effective marketing far more difficult for situations like yours and that of many other businesses.

Good luck.