May 24, 2010 Posted in Marketing Ideas

The Importance of Local Search for Small Businesses

Local search is the term we use to describe the action that people take when they turn to the Internet to find information about local businesses.  For the first time in history, people are more likely now to search for your business on the Internet than in the Yellow Pages.

What this means to the average business owner is simple.  If your website or information about your website shows up on the first page of Google for search terms related to your business, it is very similar to having your business situated in the prime retail area of your town or city.  People will find you.

However, if your site does not appear on the first page of Google, you’ll have to rely on different methods of getting visitors to your website.  Most of those methods require payment in one form of another.

So is getting on page 1 of Google difficult?  That depends on your particular market but for most businesses the answer is a resounding, “No”.  It really isn’t that difficult.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I noticed that over 1700 searches were being done per month on the term ‘vancouver dog boarding‘. To me that is a lot of searches for a local service and it represented a huge opportunity.

So what I did was build a very simple site and promoted it properly. Within two weeks, my site was at #7 in the Google search results and it was already generating sales leads.  Of course, I don’t know anything about dog boarding so I now need to find a partner to follow-up with those leads or work with me in some other capacity.

The point is that getting on the first page of Google is pretty easy for most local markets.  Contact me if you’re open to looking at different ways of improving the results of your search engine optimization efforts.