I often look at local businesses and how their websites perform. I have actually had a hard time finding sites in Ashe County, NC that are even ranked in Alexa let alone have a good ranking. I have found one though…

Ashe High Country Realty, located in downtown West Jefferson is a very “findable” website. They also have a blog which is a great way to drive traffic to a website. They even have a Twitter account!

Ashe High Country Realty rates a 92 on HubSpot’s Website Grader and an Alexa Ranking of 1,256,933 which is pretty good.

Looking at nearly all of the other real estate sites around the local area, it is no wonder that AHCR is ranked #1 on Google for the search term “ashe county real estate”. There are currently 82,100 results on Google for that particular term.

How is your website performing? In the links above, I have given you a few tools to go and have a look.

See, here is the proof!

In my last post, some time ago now, I said that I would significantly improve my traffic rank…

In fact this is what I said on April 23rd: Here is my starting point: tomallinder.com has a Google Page Rank of 3 which is not great but not bad either. My traffic rank is 6.79M according to Alexa which is not good at all mostly because I have been too busy with my primary business to keep my site updated.

Today, my traffic rank is 1,528,364 according to Alexa. So, with minimum effort, I have dramatically increased my traffic rank…

So, does it not make sense that the more traffic your business gets, the more customers, clients and if you are publicly traded, SHAREHOLDERS. It works, near and far…

Can your Ashe County biz be found on Google and other search engines? How is the traffic to your site?

In talking with a few local business owners, it seems things could be better…

In order to thrive, your business must be able to be found online. The landscape of the Internet has changed completely over the last couple of years. Has your business kept up?

Marketing off the mountain is an important part of local businesses seeking to sell services and products to the weekenders, part-timers and summer people that come here with money in their pockets to spend.

In all likelihood they has scouted the area via the Internet and have decided where they want to visit and shop before they even hit the road to come up into the high country. Some will even be carrying one of those iPhone or iPad things to search while they are here.

For this example, I am going to use my own site as a test to see how well I can do with regard to marketing off the mountain… I will use social media platforms, news releases and a few other clever ways to “promote” my site.

Here is my starting point: tomallinder.com has a Google Page Rank of 3 which is not great but not bad either. My traffic rank is 6.79M according to Alexa which is not good at all mostly because I have been too busy with my primary business to keep my site updated. Believe it or not though, my Alexa rank is better than most in this county… I have even put a widget in the sidebar to watch the number decrease over the coming days and weeks.

Also over the coming days and weeks, I will be posting more resources here for local businesses to use to improve their ranking. This should be a fun project!

Ashe County Politics season is opening early. Looks like it should be a full season. Pick your best man or woman!

This one is of particular interest: (From the Jefferson Post) Incumbent Democrat Cullie Tarleton will be defending his representation for District 93 of the N.C. House in the November General Election from Republican hopeful Jonathan Jordan of Jefferson. See the entire article.

Maybe these people can get together and work toward getting our weather back to normal? HAHAHAHAHA

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), your local SEO expert is likely still using meta-tags for your

Use HubSpot's Website Grader to Check Your Company's Website SEO

SEO. This is a very antiquated method of doing SEO because most search engines ignore them. You should still put your keywords into the code of your site but they are far from the most important aspects of Search Marketing.

Here is a good way for you to find out how good your SEO is: Go to HubSpot’s Website Grader and put the url in of your site. It only takes a couple of minutes. You will instantly see where your site is deficient.

If you are not an expert in websites or do not know what many of the items on the report mean, there is an explanation that can be looked up right from the report. The last thing you might want to do is take this to your old SEO/web expert. They are likely to steer you down the old road to nowhere; a place you have already been if you are reading this.

If you spend enough time on this site and my other websites, you will see that I am a shameless promoter of HubSpot and their resources. Awareness of modern marketing methods is severely lacking at the small company level in this country and around the world. All the tools you need to greatly increase your company’s visibility on the web are readily available.

As time goes on, I will be publishing my own resources on this site. So, check back soon; some new tidbit of useful information will have shown up!