We have a business that is over 30 years old (we have owned it for over 20 years) and in the last few years we have seen the source of business/sales through the web grow to over 50% of total sales (last month it was about 75%)

What I'm looking to do is share ideas and methods that can continue to grow the internet side of marketing.

Over the last 2 years we have dramatically improved organic rankings for our main keywords, both nationally and locally. In that time period web traffic has tripled and the web now contributes over 50% of business from about 25-30% over 2 years ago. We continue to use most of our non-web sources to the same degree.

national terms exclude location. Local terms include the national keyword phrases with a local description. While we have many 1st page rankings (including some #1's in the national rankings) our local terms are the key money terms.

Some other sources of web strength include links from niche topical directories (that identify our service and location) and importantly local web visibility in local web advertising, directories, and associated services.

I can expand upon this quite dramatically. I'd love to hear from others to share experiences and learn from one another.

Dave

Thanks for the post Dave. Good stuff there.

Do you have physical locations in the localities you advertise? For SEM / for SEO?

Thanks for the post Dave. Good stuff there.

Do you have physical locations in the localities you advertise? For SEM / for SEO?

We have one location within a major metro region. The business attracts customers from 2 states and a major city. We've done all optimizing in house. The site is well optimized for the industry and for geo locations i.e Blue Widgets, striped widgets and blue widgets Chicago, Illinois striped widgets, Indiana blue widgets etc.

Of interest; SE traffic is roughly 60% international 40% with local phrases. Conversions are about 3 to 1 off of local phrases.

Dave

We are trying something new for us. Love to get feedback on this from other local web practitioners.

We identified another local website with an audience that significantly with our target audience. We have different agendas.

We met with the webmaster and have agreed to try and create some co-promotional connections beyond trading links.

Without being very specific our business provides a service for a certain industry and the other website provides information, a forum, and an opportunity to write reviews.

We are both looking for ways to generate more business and synergy off of one another's sites...could be like...buy my service and get $0.50 off the pizza from the pizza place down the street.

Right now we have only traded links.

Any ideas?

Dave

Hope some of you may see this and respond.

After 4-5 days traffic between the sites is way less than 1% of either site.

This is off of links pages links. Clearly this is not a way to effectively interact off of another local site with mutual interest.

We are discussing how to interact off of 1st page links/banners to see how that will impact traffic flow.

Of interest; I've linked w/one business/site that mutually advertised in some special interest local media. We haven't gotten huge traffic from the site but we have gotten conversions.

I like this local/overlapping kind of interaction off the web. It seems like it creates greater local visibility.

Dave

After 10 days we switched to front page links. I recall the other site received 3 visits off our links/resources page and we received 2 visits from their site. Pitiful, especially since the viewership very much overlaps. 5 cross visits from several thousand overall visits.

The other site gave us a huge banner with a link into our conversion page.

We gave him a link with anchor text directed into the main keyword phrase of his site from within the 2nd paragraph of content on our site.

We will see what happens.

Still searching for comments or experiences like this.

Dave

After 10 days we switched to front page links. I recall the other site received 3 visits off our links/resources page and we received 2 visits from their site. Pitiful, especially since the viewership very much overlaps. 5 cross visits from several thousand overall visits.

Dave - Just to play devil's advocate, I'm not sure that that is so bad. I'm not a statistics marketing guy, but here are some top of my head thoughts.

Thinking about conversions, eg (which are very different from cross visits, to be sure)... a 2% conversion rate isn't necessarily awful. Just to make the numbers easier to compare, let's say that your "several thousand" = 2,500 visits. So, that's roughly 50 conversions at 2%. I don't know that 1/10th that number as cross visits is necessarily that bad.

I don't know how well the sites dovetail, and how likely someone who goes to one site would want to go to another. I also don't know what the normal click-through rates on a semi-targeted banner ad would be. It doesn't seem to me that this is such awful performance. Need a regular marketing type to comment.