“You showed us how to have the website we want and one in which we can make the changes on our own time table with no costs involved.”

“The phone is ringing and we are busier than ever. “

“We have more than made back our investment in new, high-quality paying clients.”

“We’ve had 100 guys come in here to talk about our web site, but no one gave us the kind of useful information you did.”

“This is the kind of follow-through and communication I thought only happened in dreams.”

“Thanks for trying to help us with all our computer problems. I finally feel we have someone in our corner.”

“Your involvement in our project saved us $150,000!”

“I would never have gotten it done by myself!”

To read more detail in their comments, go to my web page showing some client benefits.

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Good web site design incorporates many features that only people with the right experience bring to the job. To be fair, some marketing firms or graphic designers have that experience, but, in my experience, they are few and far between! When you get the wrong person or team on the job, they will make choices that make sense in a different environment, but can cause serious problems on a web site. Those problems can range from costing you a lot more money to fix, up to and including making your site non-functional from a marketing perspective. To be specific, a good marketing web site is intended to attract traffic from the Internet, and if it doesn’t do that effectively, it is failing in its principal function!

I won’t go into the specifics any further, because Kristine does it so well in her piece, but keep the message in mind. I don’t know how many times I have had people tell me that everyone who sees their new web site loves it, and I look at it and see immediately that it will never produce any traffic from the web for their business! If what you really want is a site you can send people to because it is beautiful, that is all well and good, but most businesses are not really investing in a site for that purpose. most really intend that the site will produce a return on their investment for them by bringing in new business leads.

What the call was about, as it turned out, is they are promoting their local business center. This is the place where you can enter information about your business so it will come up on Google Maps when people search for your products or services. I have had a listing for years and recommend it to anyone with a web site and any kind of local business. It is a free service from Google.

I guess the reason for the call is that they are offering enhancements to the listing that you can pay for and they are actually informing people of that by phone (seems a little retrograde to me, but, hey, whatever works!)

I went to the site (click here for Local Business Center information) and found some new features that I had not seen before. Most interesting to me was the statistics that they provide on your listing, so you can see how many impressions you have gotten and how many clicks from those impressions. This is all available on a dashboard where you see other sites that you may have entered, say, if you have multiple businesses, or have entered site information for companies you are supporting.

Anyway, this is good information and worth your time to review just to update yourself on how the whole thing works. If you don’t have a listing for your business yet, this is a great time to set one up. Remember your keywords when you set up your business description, because that is what it is all about. This is one more way to give your business an edge that others (like your competitors) are not so astute about.

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