Local Search Marketing Vs Offline Marketing
SEO is Important! Internet Advertising Is Important Too!
For most local businesses, the world of marketing has changed over the past few years. In the past, you could depend on a combination of Yellow Pages ads, newspaper ads, circulars, and direct mail to deliver a fairly reliable stream of new and return customers to your door. But that's just not the case anymore!
Your customers are looking for you…can they find you? If you don't have an internet presence and maximize your local search results, the answer to that is no…they aren't finding you! Here's why.
The Yellow Pages are ineffective
We're a country of people on the move. Everyone has cell phones now. And, depending on who you listen to, about 7 – 16% of homes no longer have a regular phone in their home…they rely solely on their cell phone.
So how often do you think people with no home phone look in a phone book? Do they even have a phone book?
Mobile internet access is nearly universal
I was reading the February 2010 Popular Science magazine and found an article about a new mini-laptop that's built around a mobile phone chipset. It's got the computing power of a netbook (or more, actually), but can last forever on a battery charge and can access the internet anywhere through its cellular service.
It doesn't take much imagination to see where we're headed…in the not-very-distant future, your customers will be able to Google information from anywhere and instantly get their phone/computer to give them GPS directions straight to your store…or your competitor's if you're not there!
Newspapers are dead
To make matters worse for local business owners trying to reach their customers, the old standby…the local newspaper has been taking a beating over the last 10 or 15 years.
So if you've been advertising in your local paper, you've undoubtedly seen increasing advertising rates and decreasing response rates. And it's only going to get worse. Our mobile society has, by and large, stopped taking the time to read the papers.
U.S. newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier. – October 27, 2009, Washington Post
Personally, I still have a Sunday-only subscription to my local news because my wife clips and uses enough coupons in a couple weeks to pay for a couple months of the subscription! But our family's not "normal" in that regard anymore!
Local Search to the Rescue
Let's face it. Unless you have a ton of time and/or money, getting to the top of the search rankings is tough. And buying ads on Google, Bing, or Yahoo! is nearly useless for local businesses.
To do well in traditional search, you have to know Search Engine Optimization (SEO) well or pay someone to optimize your web site. Then you have to monitor it to make sure you stay at or near the top.
That takes even more time and money. Which you don't have…but local search changes that!
Little known fact: There are tons of businesses that show up in local search that don't even have a web site!
That's right! No web site and yet they show up before all the regular search results! That should give you a pretty good idea the power local search has and how spending some time crafting your presence can pay off big time.
Of course, you still have to convert the visitors once they come to your web site or call your store, but at least you've got a chance now…and it's simple. It takes some time, but nothing like traditional SEO. And you don't have to pay for it either! The vast majority of the things you can do to get yourself at the top don't cost a dime.
Best of all, you can almost guarantee your competitors aren't doing this so you'll have practically no competition in Google or Bing or Yahoo! Of course, that depends on the size of the city you live in and how competitive your market is, but the vast majority of small business owners will be behind you instead of in front of you for once!
local internet marketing blog posts
http://marylandwebmktg.com/2010/07/26/preparation-for-local-internet-marketing/
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