How to find Personal Advocates for your Local Business

I love helping Local Businesses find new ways of increasing their bottom line. With Social Media and all the data-mining tools out you can market till your hearts content. I have allot of local businesses that follow me on the various Social Networks and they e-mail as well call me asking many questions  from Marketing to SEO. 

Since I usually blog about my local market that I live in which is less competitive as its a small area, I would help out a Local follower and their business in a more populated area in a more competitive industry. One of my new Followers on Twitter is Jason Brusewitz @BranchOutShrubs and I immediately took a look at his website: http://www.branchoutshrub.com/ 
He is in the Shrub Trimming/Landscaping Business and it looks pretty competitive in his local market.

He is on the Right Track Socially, However I do not see any link for Google+ or any +1 button. He has A Google+ Business page located here Branching Out. See my post on Increasing Citations using Social Analytics and Strategies on how to data-mine Google+ and Facebook. Increasing the Citations helps boost your local business rankings in the serps with Social Integration. I also recommend adding Authorship to help increase the CTR's and give more credibility.

I'm going to use a couple of social data-mining tools (Followerwonk & All My Tweets) for the tools  too help boost his bottom line by finding personal advocates that will spread the word socially and help his business out in the search rankings.Props out to Anthony Pensabene for showing me these tools in some of his guest articles on various blogs.

Landscaping Woodbury, MN

Lets check out his rankings in Google. I chose "Landscaping Woodbury, MN" as its a more competitive search term and not as targeted as Shrub Trimming.
You can see his business does not rank on the first page for the query at hand.
I suggest Adding Geo-Tags to his website and pictures, also adding Alt-Image descriptions to every picture, I think I found 3 on his home-page that did not have any.
Add a Video to YouTube and link it to home page as well upload it to your Google+ business page. 

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Now that a little basic SEO is done, we can focus on data-mining to find personal advocates to spread the word and increase his links from social networks and websites to improve his local business  ranking in the organic listings.

Followerwonk Map

The first tool we are going to use is Followerwonk, this cool tool lets you analyze twitter Followers. Click on the tab for Analyze Followers and put in his Twitter handle. Next in the drop-down menu select "Analyze Their Followers" and give it a minute to populate all his followers. Since I'm looking for Local Advocates you can click on the Map and Zoom in to his local area and see who is following him.
There is one Follower in St. Paul and two outside of Minneapolis. I click on the 2 and chose Tim Ryan @SeamusPicMcGee and clicked through to twitter.

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Tim Ryan Twitter Page

Tim Ryan has a website he can add a link too, He tweets allot and has a good amount of followers.

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Tim Ryans All My Tweets

Using AllMyTweets we can see Tim also Mentions @BranchOutShrub.You can search using Ctrl+F.

I would Thank Tim for the Mention and ask him for a citation on Google+. Offer him some services at a discount, and he may just tweet about it again or share on other social networks.

From here you can go back to Followerwonk and analyze his local followers and find ones that have the greatest clout and influence to spread the word.

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There is much more data you can dig into by using these tools. I would say a few times a week he should reach out to past clients and potential clients using these social tools to thank and ask them to spread the word. Social links will follow helping boost his rankings in as little 3-6 months possibly sooner.

Use the Map in Followerwonk to target local followers and engage with them on all social platforms. Use AllMyTweets to search the tweets of followers if they have mentioned other services you may provide.

Become the expert, share and re-share on Google + and other social networks, while staying in contact with your followers by engaging in a timely manner.

I hoped this help a little in helping out your Bottom line, this is tested, tried and true!