At Promote Globally/Tom Stier Web Development we enjoy working with our long distance clients. We have clients in the New York and Boston areas, and as far away as Los Angeles and Hawaii. We believe that clear communication is the secret to success for any project, especially if distance is a factor.
As Berkshire residents, we also advertise and promote our web business locally and we are proud to provide web design and web promotion services to our clients in the local towns of Alford, Great Barrington, Egremont, Sheffield, Stockbridge, and in the nearby New York and Connecticut border towns. A good portion of the local economy depends on getting noticed by the New York and Boston area second-homeowners, so a website that shows well in Google searches is essential.
For 3 recent local clients, we were able to help them acquire quality “Berkshires” targeted domain names for their site projects.
Berkshirecontractor.com is a site that has just recently launched. A gallery of images shows the depth of their services – from building entire homes to custom furniture design. We were able to quickly setup the entire site design and structure, which was timed to coincide with a promotional mailing blitz. Plans for the future are to increase traffic to the site by having text content directly on the site pages that contains the keyphrases potential customers are searching on. Knowing what are the best keyphrases (and realizing they change) requires knowledge of where to research and how to find out what is working best for your competitors and related businesses. This is a time-consuming, painstaking process, as is writing content that contains those key phrases, but that’s the way to get more traffic to any site.
Another site that we set up a few years ago is berkshiregallery.com. This site uses an open-source shopping cart software as a cataloging system to display art and pricing information as an online gallery. We trained the gallery staff so that they are able to add the items and update prices as needed. The site software would also support direct purchases of the items, and the system for adding postage and accepting payment directly, if the owner decided to market the works in that manner. This is one of our embedded blog shopping cart projects. It’s worth mentioning what that means.
The advantage of an embedded blog is that visitors never leave the shopping cart to view your posts. A visitor can read posts in the shopping cart, place a product in the cart, then read more posts. With embedding, the cart items stay visible during this process. With blog linking, the visitor ‘leaves’ the store, cart status is not visible and cart session variable (what remembers whats in the cart) could be lost. With embedding, your blog adds important information inside a shopping cart. With blog linking, your blog is an advertising vehicle to your shopping cart.
Berkshirepainter.com is another construction related local business, in this case an artisan run painting service. As they state on their site “When you use our services, you not only get a great paint job, you also help support the ‘real’ arts community of the Berkshires.” This is an instance of finding a niche within a broader service for your business promotion.
For this project, the focus was on getting the site up quickly (in two days) and populating the site with keyphrase-rich text content. Google was listing the site almost on the same day.
