I came across a great example of online marketing and offline marketing working together over the weekend. We often see traditional marketing driving people to the web, but I found something different going on. I found online marketing elements being put to use offline.

I’m old school on Sunday mornings and almost always head out to buy the Sunday paper (Star Tribune) to read while having breakfast. As a gadget and tech guy, I usually look forward to the Best Buy insert.

As I flipped through the first pages and entered into the TV section I was intrigued by what I saw. A main focus of the TV’s featured were their customer review rating from BestBuy.com.
Below is the newspaper insert.

You can see as circled above that each of the three TV’s highlights a review quote and their average customer review rating. Online reviewers are supplying a piece of the feature/benefits for these products. Best Buy is leveraging the mass approval of these products having a 4.7 star or higher average to win trust and product confidence.

Small Business Review Idea
It also started me thinking of how local business reviews could be leveraged by small businesses. An auto repair shop could communicate their “Over 50 Positive Reviews on Google” to build instant credibility. The ability to position the consumer opinion to sell for you is an interesting one. The crew at Precision Auto Repair out in California could use customer quotes and their 5 star rating to it’s advantage offline (and on their website!).

Have you seen other examples of this? This Best Buy use is the first I’ve seen and I think it’s pretty cool. I would guess a few others have done it too. It really speaks to the change in marketing we continue to see as consumers and marketers.

Local search & web design gurus Pat Sexton and David Mihm delivered simplicity and value in the launch of their new small business tool GetListed.Org. The website allows a business or their marketing partner to verify their main local search listings in Google, Yahoo, Best of the Web (BOTW) and MSN Live in one easy step. Just type in your business name and zip code to get your local search listing report.

The press release for the GetListed.org site offers a great quote from co-creator David Mihm.

“The search engines rely on so many different providers for their Local business data, it’s hard even for experts to keep track of where it’s all coming from,” said Mihm. “This tool really puts the power in the hands of the business owners and helps make sure the engines provide correct data to people searching for these businesses.”

Mihm shared with me that the site has already done over 10,000 business look-ups in just the first two weeks of being launched. They’ve also received very favorable feedback from users and other SEO consultants using the site.

Making the complexity of search a bit easier and empowering the root of correct business information, now thats a great thing.

As an Internet marketing professional this alleviates the multiple site checking and verifying we would normally do for a client. The site also offers tools to make our job easier with a Local Dashboard to track clients data.

Below I ran a report for one of my favorite Minneapolis pizza joints, Pizza Luce. As you can see they have not correctly completed their info in Google and Best of the Web.

The screenshot above shows you get the direct links to get your business listed if you are missing from any of them.

When you add on the value of their local search resource center and even a trusted listing of Local SEO professionals (we’re proud to be listed), the site offers so much more then just the tool.

The future for GetListed looks strong with improvements and additions coming for the site.

“We’re also going to be making it easier for small businesses to understand the transition between SEEING what search engines are returning about their business and actually CHANGING or VERIFYING that information–a couple of small, but important usability tweaks that we hope will solve that.” offered Mihm when asked on the next step for the tool.

Small businesses, I suggested you “get smart” for 2009 and work GetListed.org to the top of your websites to utilize.

If you want to follow David and Pat on Twitter you can find them at @davidmihm and @yummyman .

On Tuesday, January 20th I had the opportunity to present a 3 hour Internet Marketing seminar on Search Engine Optimization and Email Marketing to a great group of attendees in Buffalo, Minnesota. Here is a short summary video with some of the slides (77 slides in total!), photos from the event and a video clip.

Internet Marketing Seminar – Five Technology from Five Technology on Vimeo.

The majority of the seminar was focused on the basics of SEO and the concept of building trust within your website and it’s content/pages. We covered a lot of ground, answered many questions and even reviewed some of the attendee’s websites to offer up suggestions.

I personally had a blast with everyone and learned a lot in preparing a 3 hour seminar and presenting it. I think that everyone there walked away with some great takeaways and tips no matter their level of understanding coming in. I met a lot of really cool people too. Thanks everyone!

Last week when I posted about online reviews being used as a marketing strategy, I didn’t grasp that my post would push one of our customers to take action.

Shortly after the blog post hit, which our client Sparkling Clean Window Washing subscribes to via email,  the owner headed off to one of our local pages and left us a great review.  It turns out that Ryan has been nudging clients to use online reviews for his business as well and in loving what Five did for his website wanted to shout out his happiness to others.  Thanks Ryan!

This also shows a nice little process that took place from blogging and interacting with our customers:

1.  Five blogs about online reviews, local search and the positive effect they can have on creating new business.

2.  A client is a blog reader / subscriber and reads this post.

3.  The client realizes they should give a review to help other users looking for a great Minnesota web design firm!

So even thought I didn’t consider this to be one of the outcomes of my post, it shows what business blogging can produce. It can produce reader action and further marketing for us.

It shouldn’t be news to you that you need to write web content that engages and informs your website user / visitor first and foremost and attracts the love of the search engines second. It can be very easy to accomplish both user friendly content and search engine friendly content when you consider that visitors to your website these days are more like the search engines than ever.

1. Be basic and straight forward. Users appreciate less marketing jargon and more answers on today’s Internet.

2. Use a good mix of your main keyword term, but also mix in related or secondary keyword terms. Try to use both the industry or professional terms (if applicable) but also consider how the general public might understand your product or service.

3. Apply these basic elements to your page header, beginning paragraph, supporting information or bullet points.

You want an example? Ok.

Here is just a simple example of what I might write for a steakhouse in downtown Minneapolis. Lets consider that their downtown location and the fact that they are a premier steakhouse are the big keyword factors.

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page header (H1):
Award Winning Downtown Minneapolis Steakhouse

intro paragraph: Peter’s Steak Palace is a downtown Minneapolis steakhouse and offers the best steak and food for your Minneapolis dining experience. With prime rib, filet mignon, porterhouse and our famous Pete Cut Steak, you can enjoy our award winning restaurant atmosphere and menu of steaks, salads and more.

supporting (h2): Visit Our Minneapolis Restaurant

• View our steak and menu items (list items)
• Make reservations online or call
• View our dress code and other helpful info
• View a map of our downtown location

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As you can see from above I would also recommend finding a way to present your top keyword terms in anchor text to supporting pages. The “downtown Minneapois steakhouse” link can go to the “about page” and the other link to the menu page. With a bit more content, a photo or two correctly tagged and page meta data completed, you have a very well optimized page for the search engines that also helps the user (the main goal!). Mix in a few links pointing to the site and you’ve got a good SEO process starting to work.

Take a look at your content, is it basic enough? Does it clearly address what you do or offer? Where? How? If not, you would benefit from giving it a basic tweak or two that will benefit both your website visitors and search engines.