Five is pleased to announce the release of GW Transportation’s new web design.  GW Transportation is a national logistics and trucking company located here in Minnesota.  GW provides a complete logistics and freight service including truckload freight (TL), less than truckload freight (LTL) and specialty trucking.

GW Transportation sought out Five’s web design services to upgrade their website’s design, content and usability.  A strong focus was placed on building a search engine friendly website that would allow GW to earn more trust and traffic from the search engines.  In addition to the website redesign, Five will also be conducting ongoing search engine optimization (SEO) for GWtransporation.com.

The website also features an online quoting form to get potential customers up and running fast with GW.

Five is excited to get GW Transportation to a new level and we’re looking forward to helping develop more business for this outstanding trucking company.

I was very fortunate to get to speak at the Buffalo, MN Chamber of Commerce Quarterly Luncheon today.  I presented on some ideas to help a small business website succeed, search engine optimization (SEO) and web analytics. I think I only put one person to sleep and the group had a lot of great Internet marketing questions in the follow-up.

There were some great Buffalo and Wright County businesses / organizations in attendance and I enjoyed the 45 minute presentation. Getting to share my knowledge and passion for the web is one of the best things I get to do at Five. Thank you to the Chamber for the invite to speak and present!

Speaking of presentations, we will be announcing a business blogging seminar soon for late May.  We should be getting the details out next week.

Thanks to Five web programmer @travisneids for taking the photos.

Our last post looked at the new Google search features incorporating local search results into regular search queries.  For many search terms you no longer need to apply a city and state to get local results.

A New Top Keyword
I thought I would update that post with how this new Google search feature has effected our search engine traffic.  Prior to this local feature, our top terms of referral traffic were our company name and then “web design MN”, “Minnesota web design” and other variations.

In the past week we have a new top term for bringing traffic to our website, “web design”.  Prior to the Google change, we would have never even dreamt of competing for the term of web design without a location or another term attached. In doing just some minor research, we appear in the local search results for 11 different zip codes.  With our office being rurally located, we bleed into other areas results from as far as 20 miles away.  If we were right in Minneapolis this wouldn’t be the case, but the search volume for “web design” would be much higher.  Not too bad of a trade off.

This new local search feature creates a lot of opportunity for small businesses to attract more buisness from Google.  It also shines a much brighter light on local search, a focus we will see increase in the coming months for sure.

Google is looking to help users find more local information by placing local search results in non-local search queries.

Instead of having to search “Dentists in Delano, MN”, you can just type “Dentists” and get local results on page one. Google is using the location of your Internet provider (ISP) to determine where you are, so there will be some variables and inaccurate results, but local search results are there.  Google is trying to improve your search results, feeling that your search probably has local intent.

Local search blogger Paul Jahn weighed in on the new local search feature and the change location ability.  Having an ISP that is local is one hurdle, but Paul points out the “change location” feature to help correct that.  As my example above shows, my results are for Maple Plain which is 10 miles from where we actually office in Delano.  There are still a few Delano results though.

Matt McGee also put together a great post over at Search Engine Land on this and gave some examples, the positives and the challenges.

Local Search Is Important & Improving
The biggest takeaway here is that local search is getting easier for the user.  Google is working to understand what you want.  It is also going to become even more important for the small business to make sure they are represented in the Google 10 pack of local results.

Small business now have the chance to compete for popular one keyword or two keyword searches.  This opportunity shouldn’t be ignored.  This addition is great on many levels and I’m sure we’ll be posting on it more in the coming months.

Five launched a new web design project this past week for the Minnesota and Wisconsin law firm Hansen, Dordell, Bradt, Odlaug & Bradt, PLLP.

HDBOB.com now has a new interface design, content management platform, enhanced attorney profiles and a search engine friendly website.

HDBOB’s past website was focused on the firm’s strong history, but didn’t offer a clear view to their current capabilities and offering. The old site also had some technical obstacles for search engines like Google and Yahoo to correctly index and understand their content.

Web Design Project Features:

• Custom, progressive web design
• Content areas to push more firm services & news
• Clear & clean navigation/sub-navigation
• Easy to update content with our SMC solution
• Enhanced attorney profiles with pictures, contact info, bios and links (Example below)
• On-page search engine optimization & analytics
  

The final website project result is something both Five and HDBOB is proud of. If we’re charged with “reckless creativity”, so be it. We figure the HDBOB law practice areas can cover getting us out of trouble.

Check out another great site from Five! http://www.hdbob.com