The BetterBook

Drive traffic to your business with the local search power of The BetterBook.

Marketing your business used to be easy—put an ad in your local paper when you had a special promotion and make sure you had a presence in your local directory.

Those days are past.

In addition to traditional marketing platforms, your clients are now actively using search engines, social media, blogs, mobile devices, tablets and online reviews with more being added weekly. With so many choices, where to put your marketing dollars can seem overwhelming and confusing—it doesn’t have to be!

Where to begin?

It starts with a search. You want your business to be found when users are actively searching for products and services your business offers. Where is that?

Offline search. Local directories—the original search engine

Contrary to online marketing, local directories such as the BetterBook, are still the main way many customers are searching for and finding local businesses.

Online search

Searching online starts with getting indexed and listed on Google (and other search engines including Bing and Yahoo). Where do search engines get their information? You may be surprised that they rely on accurate information from trusted local directories such as The BetterBook.

“Getting listed into local directories will bring relevant traffic to the business website and increase the conversion ratio. Most of them have good authority and value and tend to rank in search engines. This will help to get more traffic and value addition.”—Hotel Online Marketing

“In the same way a newspaper might consult more than one source to verify if a story is true, search engines look to multiple sources to make sure your location data is accurate.”—Ruth Burr, a data-driven marketer and lead SEO at Moz.com

Here are three ways that a BetterBook web presence will increase customer traffic to your business.

1. Tell your story with a content-rich web profile page on The BetterBook.

Search engines index and pay attention to the words—content—about your business. What you say matters. Using the right keywords in the right context is the first step in getting a high placement on search engines.

That’s why The BetterBook provides every advertiser much more than a simple listing—The BetterBook offers every business its own content-rich web profile page such as this example of a Cranbrook restaurant.This web profile page allows you to tell your story while working hand-in-hand with your own website to improve your online brand on search engines.

The BetterBook web profile page is much more than text, it also includes:

• A photo gallery
• Business at a glance
• A Google map displaying your business location
• An embedded YouTube video
• Social media integration including Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, Pinterest, Google+ and more

2. The BetterBook works behind the scenes for SEO.

What is SEO? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization.” You may have gotten unsolicited emails from companies touting their expertise and guarantee they can get your business on the first page of Google. Beware of such claims.

SEO isn’t about tricking the search engines into sending you bucketloads of traffic. Instead, it’s about improving and promoting your business so that more people can find your business using search engines.

Search engines—such as Google—continue to change their algorithms and thus constantly update how local businesses are ranked. (Have you heard of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates?)

The BetterBook team is working behind the scenes to keep on top of the trends and automatically include those changes into your business’ BetterBook web profile page. That, in turn, can help you build your own website traffic.

3. www.betterbook.ca is mobile-friendly.

The BetterBook web profile pages are responsive which means they can be easily read on smartphones and screens of all sizes. Why does that matter? Because it matters to Google.

“Is your site not doing a good job for mobile visitors? Better get that fixed. Sites with mobile experience issues won’t rank as highly in Google’s mobile or smartphone search results in the future.”—Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land

Even more importantly, it means that users can easily read and engage with your BetterBook web profile page. If you have a smartphone, view this business web profile page to see for yourself.

The BetterBook is your simple total media solution.

The BetterBook makes it simple to cover both off-line and online searches in one convenient package. Everything is trackable and able to generate a strong Return-On-Investment (ROI) for your business.

This total media solution is affordable and effective—driving increased traffic and exposure to your business via print, web and mobile applications.