Local Business

An online presence for local business is no longer an option.

We all know that the Internet is growing at an astounding rate.
Let’s face it; no one goes to the Yellow Pages to find a local business any more. They simply jump onto their computer and do a search in Google.
The question that you need to ask as a business owner is, “Am I there to meet them when they’re looking for me?”

The Wild Wide Web

Sometimes even I, as an expert in Internet related subjects, and search engine optimization, find the World Wide Web more of a Wild Wide Web!

In the online world there are so many new things happening every day, and sometimes it’s difficult to keep up to speed with all the latest developments. Figuring out how to best use the Internet to promote your business, and position yourself before potential customers can rapidly become a full time job!
The great thing is though, that with a little education, a bit of patience, and some expert help, the Internet can become the very best friend of local businesses just like yours.
Yes, there are new developments all the time, but there are also time-tested methods that have worked for many years, and still work today. With new and old taken together, you can befriend Google and Bing, and their whole crazy posse, and make the web really work for your business.

The Big Players and You

We are all aware of the big players in the Internet world; Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and many others who have become household names.
All of these have the possibility to be used to benefit your business in powerful ways. Even up until only a few years ago, many of the opportunities that are open to us today as local businessmen and women were not available.
Today, there are opportunities, and avenues to present your services to the world that are astonishing.
Honestly, you can harness the power of the Wild Wide Web and ride this new technology right into your customer’s home. And once you are there, you can present them with the information, the services, the products, and the satisfaction that they are looking for.

The New Yellow Pages

Many years ago, if I needed a business or I was looking for a service, the first place to go was the Yellow Pages. It was the one stop shop for almost every business wanting to advertise their wares. Now, the Yellow Pages are used more often as a doorstop than a place to find a local business!

The new Yellow Pages is Google search.

That is where our customers are going to find what they are looking for.
Fortunately, we are able to utilize the latest technologies, and technological commonsense, to make sure that we are there when they are looking.

It All Begins With A Search

People are looking for you. You have the very services, the very answers that people are looking for. There was once a time where a business would go looking for its customers. Now the customers look for the business, and we just need to position ourselves to meet them when they are looking.

One of the very encouraging statistics for local businesses is that the majority of searches that are conducted in Google are very specific, and they are often geographic. People do not just search for a plumber, they search for a plumber in their town, their city, or their district.

What this means, is that we’re not competing with 10 million plumbers to appear on the 1st pages for that search, but with a handful of savvy plumbers in our area who understand how the Internet works.

Local search is becoming more and more powerful as technology progresses. Google now delivers results based on where people are searching from. It can recognize where the computer is that someone is using to search, and send them information that is relevant to that geography. What this means is that when people search for your business, in your area, it is now much easier, and much more likely for you to appear in the search results than ever before.

What we need to learn to do as local businessmen and women is to work with Google, and the other search technologies, so our presence is really felt, not just on terra firma, but also in the virtual world of the Internet.
Optimizing our presence for local search is one of the most powerful ways to accomplish this.
And thankfully there are many ways to do this, and this is what we are going to briefly look at over the next few articles.

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