Questions created by Imageco
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Going from a national to local marketing strategy
I started my graphic design business (imageco.com) after the dot com industry collapsed in 2001 and there were virtually no jobs to be found, I focused mainly on logo design and ultimately figured out a way to drive quite a lot of traffic to my site by the means of creating directories for printers in every major city in the US. It worked exceedingly well for many years but eventually I had a lot of copycats use this technique and ultimately it pissed off quite a few designers around the country and I was reported one to many times to Google and was forced to make some changes. So I dropped the directories and redesigned my site and stuffed as many place names in the site as I could so I wouldn’t lose all my traffic, it worked for a while but ultimately my site has drifted further down in the serps and with the advent of Google Local my traffic pretty much disappeared. Furthermore with the surge in crowdsourcing businesses like 99designs the value people placed on my logo design services dropped to a point where there just wasn’t much reason to go after a national market anyway. I’m not proud of how I built my business but I don’t make any excuses for it, I had a mortgage and a family to feed so I did what I needed to do. I’m now at the point where I’ve decided my best option is to move away from logo design and redefine my business as more of a visual identity/graphic design company and go after the local market. I live in the Seattle area, Bellevue to be specific and the economy is such that I know there is a ton of local opportunity that I'm missing out on and I want to focus my marketing efforts here. My question is what is the best way for me to do this? I focused mainly on logo design for nearly 20 years and my keywords are built around logo design for which I still hit fairly well on but I need to expand my offerings and want to redirect my efforts at turning up on local searches for other terms like graphic design, web design, print design, etc. I don’t necessarily want to instantly drop all of the landing pages I created for logo design because that is still where the majority of my business comes from but I’m fairly certain that these landing pages have me Pigeonholed as just a logo designer. Do I need to delete everything and start completely from scratch or is there a less extreme approach to making this kind of transition? And once I do make these changes what might be the time frame for turning up better locally? I’m in the process of redesigning the site, updating my portfolio and writing all new content and could really use the advice of this community. Thank you!
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