What does Graph Search mean to Local Business Owners?

As many of you know, my passion is to help local business owners to think strategically about their businesses in the online world. I started helping local business owners back in the early days of the Internet when I built the first website for my local bank in Elk River, MN in the late 1990’s.

Zuckerburg’s announcement today means that the “mom and pop” local stores, building contractors, real estate agents, beauty shops, electricians, HVAC contractors, plumbers, carpet cleaning companies and many more need to totally focus their marketing money and energy online. No one is going to look you up in a paper phone book. No one is going to call you because your name and phone number is on a billboard next to the freeway. And few people are going to care even if they find you on Page One of the Google SERPs.

If your current customers, most of whom are probably Facebook users, don’t have good things to say about you or your business their friends will quickly find that out and your business will begin to drop like a rock.

Surveys last year found that 78% of those surveyed said that they trusted what they found in online review websites like Google, Yelp, Foursquare and others… as much as they did recommendations from friends and family members. So, what do you think will happen to your business if Facebook users don’t have good things to say or, say bad things about your business??

If you don’t have a strategic online business blueprint for 2013 you better take some time to work on one or you won’t have a business. That is the bottom line.

Smartphones, mobile websites and online reviews better be at the top of your list of thoughts as you plan to expand or maintain your business this year.

Your Customers Have Gone Mobile, and they are getting more and more connected with their mobile friends. Your business needs to be Mobile Friendly and Facebook Friendly so that your customers will be able say only good things about you.

If you need help with building your companies Strategic Online Business Blueprint, Contact Henry Griner today.

News Links for Facebook Graph Search

Forbes Business News

CNN Finance News

Market Watch

Gizmodo

I first started using WordPress simply as a blogging platform personally in about 2004 or early 2005. I found it way better to work with in those early versions (it came out in May of 2003) then what I used to build my first websites for business clients back in the “dark ages” in 1995. I built the first website for my local bank here in Elk River in 1996 using FrontPage by Microsoft. Back then all we had for a web browser was Netscape which had just released a new version that gave us options besides just the original grey background.

I did a little fresh research on WordPress, who is using it for business and what are the functions that it can bring to any size business or organization. I would like to share them here for anyone asking the same question that my client did about why I only want to work with WordPress.

“WordPress was first released on May 27, 2003, by founders Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little as a fork of b2/cafelog. As of December 2011, version 3.0 had been downloaded over 65 million times.” You can read more about WordPress here on Wikipedia where this information came from. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress

According to Mashable, one of the top rated online resources for business news, “It’s no secret that WordPress is the fastest growing content management system (CMS) platform on the web. As of this writing, WordPress has a 54% market share of all websites that use a CMS. As users continue to flock to WordPress, we in turn see massive demand for WordPress’ products and services.” http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/wordpress-business-models  (Date of this article is June 1, 2011)

Here is where you can see the reference information regarding that 54% market share. http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management/all

Another article from Mashable says… “Thirty-five percent of U.S. congressional races, 40% of U.S. Senate races, 44% of U.S. gubernatorial races and 41% of state political parties rely on the WordPress platform for their website, according to Automattic, which powers WordPress.com.

Why is WordPress so popular for politicians? It’s simplicity and ease of use, according to Peter Slutsky, director of platform services at Automattic.” http://mashable.com/2012/09/17/politics-wordpress/ (Date of this article is September 17, 2012)

Do you know what CMS platform powers Best Buy, OnStar and many other Fortune 500 company websites and blogs? Check this out: http://wordpress.org/showcase/tag/fortune-500/page/2/

And if you don’t want to believe Mashable and the other resources listed above, I know you will believe Martha… right?

“In order to have a blog, you need to enlist a blogging platform, which supplies all the necessary tools for getting your photos and text onto the Internet. As my blog has grown in popularity, we realized we were ready to switch to a platform offering more programming options. After careful research, that new platform will be WordPress…” http://www.blogherald.com/2008/09/04/martha-stewart-moves-to-wordpress/ Marha Stewart uses WordPress (Date of this article is September 4, 2008)

Here are a few last points that I want to make about WordPress as a website system:

• WordPress is scalable with over 22,000 plugins, small software programs (many good ones that are free to use) that you simply add to your website. [that doesn't look to me to be "too limited in features and functions"]
• WordPress websites tend to rank higher in Google and other search engines because WordPress is well structured and websites using WordPress are often updated. Google loves WordPress too.
• WordPress is easy to add content to. If you can type a MS Word document you can add content to a WordPress website.
• WordPress allows you to easily add content and linkage to Social Media websites with easy to install (plug-ins) tools.

And my main reason for offering WordPress to my clients is… I don’t want to hold them captive to me for all their future work and updates. I want to give my clients freedom to continue on with or without my help after I build their website and get it moving forward for them. I hate the term “Webmaster” as it means, at least to me, someone who wants to control and master another person. I’m for freedom for local business owners. I want to help and not hinder them in their marketing and sales efforts. There are 10’s of thousands of people all over the world who can and do work with WordPress and build wonderful websites with it.

If you are looking for a new website for your local business I would highly recommend you look at using WordPress before any other system out there. If you want to learn more about how I can help you, give me a call: 612.234.1685 or use my Contact Form.

When talking about responsive design and responsive WordPress themes, we are talking about utilizing cascading style sheets or, CSS and JavaScript, to resize a website’s layout to the user’s view-screen.  The view-screen is basically the visible portion of the viewing area inside a web browser.

Responsive WordPress themes designs finally solve the problem of making your business website work for the endless number of devices coming out all the time and the resolutions being used to access web based content. The growing popularity of searching and viewing websites on mobile devices needed responsive designs to make it possible.

Today everything from iPhones, iPads and tablets, Android based mobile phones, video game consoles, Flat Screen TVs, Amazon Kindles and other e-readers are used to access the web. Using Responsive WordPress Themes for our clients websites means they don’t need to spend money on creating additional “Mobi” websites or paying more money for special add on software to make their new websites mobile friendly.

If you are interested in a website upgrade to this new technology, or you are looking for a new website designed with responsive design in mind, please contact me today to discuss your needs.

Because Google wants to help make Google Searches return the best results possible for people doing searches for local businesses they will help to drive traffic to your store or office when people do a search from their computer or Smartphone like iPhones or Android phones. With so many people now using their phones to find information when they are on the go, Google is constantly working hard to build and upgrade mobile tools that help us find what we are searching for in our communities and surrounding areas.

By creating a Google+ Page and optimizing their Local listings, business owners can have greater control over how they appear in the local search results returned by Google. And did I say, this is Free if you do it yourself? So here is an example when I search for a “restaurant” leaving my default location as Elk River, MN.

Certain businesses like restaurants attract more reviews than other types and Google loves to give preference to those with more reviews but, that is not always the only factor for getting into what is referred to as the Google Seven Pack, the top 7 listings for local businesses like you see in the image above. Many times people will decide where they will eat or shop based on what they read on a review posted to the Google+ Local listing. For restaurants this can be really good or really bad news.

I will not say which restaurant this came from but you can see how easily it is to get bad news out when a local business does not provide great customer service. We could help this business with our Reputation Services product as well as other services. We can not fix the primary problem with staffing but, if they have made the needed changes internally we can help manage what people will see online get them more traffic and more business into the store.

If you have a local business in Minnesota I would like to help you to get more business online and off-line, customers into your store and money into your bank account. Using Google+ Local is just one of the many services we offer at Mission Springs Marketing LLC to make that happen.