Do you know why your business is not prospering? Basically, there are two reasons. First, you have no web presence. You are so hard-headed that you still believe you do not need it because your business is operating locally. Second, you are not listed in any local search listing.
In these times when the Internet eats most of the people’s time, you cannot say that you do not need to be on the Internet. You must realize also that you cannot possibly ignore local search. You will be in deep trouble like you are experiencing now. It offers benefits that your old-style advertising cannot. Here are some of them:
Local business listings open a lot of advertising and sales opportunities to small businesses. It brings you to your potential customers by giving you the web presence that you need. This will make you much easier to find. Without a properly set up local SEO, you will have to compete with every company online that is in your line of work. A multinational conglomerate will have much stronger SEO than you do since they simply have better resources, and the need to go global. But, what they most likely don’t have is locally set up SEO (they don’t have much use for it).
By setting up local SEO, you won’t have to fight for your customer’s attention with huge international companies. It will get you much closer to them easily, with less hassle. Think of it as holding a large neon sign over your head.
Why spend when you can have your advertisement for free? All you have to do is to enlist your business to Google Places, CitySearch.com, Yelp and others. It will not cost you anything like an ad placement will do. This is the great benefit local search SEO gives you over bigger businesses.
You won’t have to invest thousands of dollars into hard-core SEO. Local bossiness cannot compete, in this manner, with multinational corporations. However, you don’t need to compete with them anywhere but on the local level. The initial marketing investment is, simply put, much smaller and less serious.
Because you are listed to almost all local search listings and local maps online, you have no idea on how far they have created awareness about your business. You will be surprised to receive inquiries and quotes (or orders). Through this visibility, your satisfied customers will also be encouraged to write reviews about your products or services. This will then contribute more to improving your web presence, which will subsequently increase traffic for your website.
People will find you more easily, they will leave reviews, comments, and may even mention you on forums. Word of mouth travels like wildfire, online and offline. These things tend to snowball, to grow exponentially.
It is not only the global market that is now on the web. Even the local market is now making its way. It looks for the things it needs over the Internet. If a person wants to hire someone to repair tiles, he looks for information over major search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing. By only typing words or phrases in the browser, he receives a list of businesses in nearby cities or towns in an instant. More importantly, he gets to choose the one that is accessible to him.
Traditional advertising is not being useful to some extent now. Today, people have more control over the things they want to know. For instance, television advertising cannot be as effective anymore as some people prefer to watch movies and personal videos over the Internet. And even if they do, they can always change the channel once the advertisement appears.
Essentially, local search is here to stay. With a poorly designed and optimised website, you will seem unprofessional, and even cheap. When a potential client sees an ugly looking website, their trust in you doing a good job will falter.
Yes, people now purchase online. Using their credit cards, they do not have to leave their homes to buy what they want. In just a few clicks, they have completed their purchase and will wait until it is delivered. Of course, they will prefer to transact business to someone or to a company near them. It’s just so convenient.
Even if your company is down the street from a customer, they will still prefer to order online. It’s just human nature to be as efficient as possible and to waste as little time as possible as well.
Will you allow your business to be left behind? The technology is ever-changing. You have to do what most small businesses are doing. Today, local search is something that they give importance to. Hence, you cannot just simply ignore it. In fact, you cannot afford to pay any attention to it because it is where the financial stability of your organization relies upon. Just remember to be thorough. Set everything up properly, work on your information. Avoid spelling and grammatical errors, be certain you placed the right number and address in the appropriate fields, and you will be good to go.
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