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Wednesday, 8 of September of 2010

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Local Search is your Friend

This guest post is part of our ongoing Micro Business Experts series, and is written by Kai Rostcheck, Founder and Co-Creator of Free Marketing Made Easy.

Does this picture look familiar to you?

It should, if your business sells primarily to a local clientele. The illustration displays Google Local Search results.

“Local Search? What’s That?” You might ask. It would be a good question.

Local Search is a service that is common to the three most popular search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing). In the graphic above, notice how there are two results to the right of the map. (“A” and “B”). These results are critical for local businesses – this is prime real estate in Search Engine World.  But you can’t get it through paid search, or even very well optimized Organic keyword optimization. You only get listed here by registering with the local search engines.

Here are the links:

  • Google Places
  • Yahoo Local
  • Bing Local Listings

Registering with these local search engines not only improves your visibility on the Search Results pages, but it is also FREE.

Some local business owners don’t yet understand the extent to which online search has replaced the traditional yellow pages and newspaper classified ads. If you are one of those who are unsure about the importance of online visibility, just ask a room full of people the last time they looked for something in the yellow pages. Then ask how often they search online – even for local products or services like massage therapy, landscaping, musical instruments or yes, even strawberry picking.

You’ll see for yourself how important it is for people to be able to find you online.

I recently cut out a few advertisements from a local newspaper, and did a bit of sleuthing. Here are a couple of critical, and perhaps surprising things I found out:

  1. Many of the advertisers don’t appear in the local search listings at all. They are spending significant money for print ads, targeted toward a small percentage of their potential customers, while ignoring the free advertising I explained above.
  2. Some of them didn’t even list their website on their ad. An ad leaves very little room to explain your products and services. Most of the time, when prospects are interested in your ad they will check out your website for more information and then decide whether they should call/email. (When I sold advertising for a magazine we conducted several objective studies that proved this).

If you read my posts regularly, you know that I am a proponent of free advertising. There are tons of things that we, as small business owners can do to dramatically improve our visibility with little difficulty and for practically no cost. Local Search is one of those no-brainers; now that you know about it, I hope you will take 30 minutes to get your company registered.

For those of you who are over achievers, here’s one more bonus resource: make sure that your business is registered on Yelp, a popular site (currently ranked #47 in the U.S.) which allows contributors to review restaurants and other local services. Not only can positive reviews on Yelp improve your visibility, attract new customers and retain existing clients, but you can also check in to see whether people are saying negative things about your company – and do some damage control if necessary. We’ll get into greater detail about that use of social media in a future post.

*Image taken from a local Google search

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