Search Engine #1 Tool to Find LOCAL Business

This may be news to you, especially if you’re not in the marketing business, but yes, the Search Engine has finally established its dominance as the top tool to find LOCAL businesses.

This chart pretty much says it all:

What is the significance of this? It means that local businesses need to focus on what they need to do to make a top ranking in Local Search listings, rather than continue to throw their money away on untargeted ads in the traditional media.

If less than 10% of your customers are looking for you in the newspaper or magazine, why would you emphasize advertising there? TV and radio ads can be costly, and are also to a non-targeted audience.

It’s good to have a listing in the yellow pages, but unless you’re marketing specifically to older people, there’s no point in running costly ads there, when you can clearly see it is being taken over by Local Search.

The best thing about using Local Search listings to advertise, is that it’s basically FREE, to anyone that knows what they’re doing. It’s not really advertising; rather, it’s just being there in the listing when a customer looks for your type of business.

To get to the top of those listings is indeed the tricky part, particularly for those new to the game, but its importance is vast: 90% of searches don’t go past the 1st page of the search. So if you’re not on that page, you’re invisible to 90% of search users.

But most small businesses simply don’t have the expertise to manipulate their local search rankings, in fact they don’t know where to start.

That’s why most smart business owners will outsource this function to a knowledgeable internet marketer that does this type of marketing on a regular basis.

You don’t need to pay a full time IT staff just to manage your local search rankings, it costs much less than that.

For more on how to improve your local internet search rankings for your small business click here.