Ego Geo

Ego Geo

Orlando Web Design & Developing A Solid Web Presence In Orlando

When it comes to marketing, Orlando is really a segmented town. At its core, you have businesses at the east end of town that predominantly cater to the local community including UCF & Research Park.  The metro landscape is dotted by smaller municipalities such as Winter Park, Maitland, Oviedo, etc. Downtown Orlando is your typical business hub creating a skyline of a dozen or so tall office buildings fragmented around Lake Eola. At night, much of downtown comes alive with a fair number of nightclubs, especially along the famed Church Street Station. The west side of town is Orlando’s alter ego. Here the tourist industry rules the roost with Disney, Universal Studios, Sea World, and International Drive & Kissimmee at the helm.  For small local Orlando vendors, going after the tourist market can be an expensive endeavor and for most should be a secondary venture.  As I’d like to focus this article on the local customers and local businesses, I’m not going to really spend much time discussing marketing to tourists in town.  Considering the economy, it’s a rough business to be in and I’ll probably devote a second article to that later. I will suggest if you insist on going after the tourist market, the only tourist business any local vendor will want to go after are tourists already here.  TOLS Multimedia has clients in the tourist area right now and almost all of them are struggling.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Well, with respect to marketing, Orlando is not your average city.  We are very tourist heavy on one side and Local Business heavy on the other.  It’s unique in the sense that you can literally draw a dividing line between both sides.  Here, you need to keep your marketing compartmentalized. Know your target market and let your marketing focus geo-target accordingly.  Most of your local business will be driven from the Central and east side of town.  Personally, I feel John Young Parkway can be considered the prime meridian.

Having explained my thought process, I hope the following Orlando web design and web marketing ideas TOLS Multimedia is going to share in this article, are going to help you build a solid web presence.

Your website design must follow specific design criteria that cater to the local Orlando community and their search habits.  83% of searches in our area looking for businesses want a local business.  Human nature is funny like that.  All things created equal, if a person can purchase from a local vendor versus a vendor far away, they will purchase from the local vendor.  This even holds true when the purchase is done online.  So, build your business around these principles and watch it flourish:

- Provide local images of Orlando.
- Know where locally your target market shops and network with those businesses.
- Incorporate the word “Orlando” into your website content, specifically your H1 headers on your website.  It’s also a good idea to put the same information into your metatags, even though for Google it is pretty much useless.
- Create a descriptive domain name that includes the word “Orlando” and your service.
- Link with other local businesses.  Especially those that complement your services.
- Make sure your business shows up in the Google Local Business Center.
- Make sure your Google Local Business Center has you mapped properly.  Orlando has many suburbs (Cassleberry, Maitland, Altamonte Springs, etc) and you want to assure a person searching for your type of business finds you.
- Verify your Google Local listing with Super Pages and Info USA.  It gives you better credibility with Google Local. Also, ask your friends and existing clients to rate you.
- Make sure your Google local listing includes coupons, especially mobile coupons.
- Make sure you are listed on Yelp.com and have your customers rate you again.
- Write a press release and submit it to the Orlando Business Journal.  We have worked with the OBJ for years and their entire team is wonderful.
- Blog.  Then blog some more.  It can be very powerful on a local level.  Make sure you include local keywords in your blog.
- Get involved in your local Orlando community and make sure you send out newsletters that talk about your involvement.
- Refer business to other local Orlando businesses.  Nothing shows your support more than other businesses benefiting from your presence.  Of course you can always ask them to rate you on Yelp as well.
- Start a social network.  Nothing extravagant, just something that local Orlando customers can appreciate.
- Make sure your website can be read by mobile devices (IPhones, Palms and Blackberrys).  This holds especially true for any ads you combine with roadside marketing.  Restaurants: Listen up!!! Make your menus mobile!!!!
- Market specific products.  Don’t market your whole store.  Especially if you have a “Brick and Mortar” location.
- If you are still in the phone book…..you are simply living in the Dark Ages!  GET OUT!!!!! Consider a localized Pay-Per-Click Google Ad campaign instead.  At least you won’t pay unless you receive traffic. (If you are a phone book ad sales person you are definitely going to want to brush up on your resume.)
- Don’t forget to have an analytics tool connected to your website so you can fine-tune your local marketing.
- Make sure your web designer follows the guidelines laid out in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

In closing, I want to let you know, we do teach many of these principles in our Skyrocket Marketing workshops.  We usually rent a conference room at the downtown Marriott or the Crown Plaza at Colonial Dr and I-4.  If you want to find out when the next workshop is, just perform a Google search for “Skyrocket Workshops Orlando” and we’ll surely come up.  If we don’t show up, then we are a terrible web marketing company and I encourage you to call someone else.  TOLS Multimedia is a local Orlando web design, internet marketing and social networking company who wishes you best of luck in your future business endeavors.  Let us know if you are ever interested in networking with us.

About the Author

Stephan Boehringer, is a managing partner at TOLS Multimedia.  TOLS Multimedia has provided internet marketing and web design services to 2200+ clients since 1995.  
All projects are built around a common goal, to be on the first page of google. In 2008, the company added a social media marketing team. Visit http://www.tolsmultimedia.com/ to receive your own Internet
Marketing Tricks Of The Trade guide book.

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