Small Bizz Internet Marketing: Optimization for Local Search

Many small business owners believe that a cheap site can ensure success online. Not only that, but some of them feel entitled to have all the business that they can possibly get from the internet just because they built a web site. This sense of entitlement is not limited only to small business owners. Its is perhaps more prevalent among corporations with huge marketing budgets, but that's another subject.

Small business owners get bombarded with web design and internet marketing offers all the time. Almost all of them are "website centric" in their core. Almost every offer they get revolves around site development, web design, and lately, search engine optimization. But this is not enough.

Don't get me wrong, strategic importance of a website is immeasurable,but it was never as important as it is now to treat your website as a live and dynamic entity that serves as a hub of all your online efforts.

"If you build it they will come" does not really apply anymore because "they" no longer care the same way they cared years ago. There is too many sites and too little time in a day for your prospective customers.

Small business sites, just like any other type of sites, need to be promoted the right way in order to succeed.

What makes them different is the approach that has to be taken.

Brick and mortar small businesses usually have geographically limited markets and corporate competitors with seemingly unlimited marketing budgets.

Apart from the need to be remarkable, this makes utilizing every web traffic acquisition channel and business generating internet service crucial.

Your efforts should start with an optimized, usable, accessible and credible site, but must span across all applicable verticals of search (organic and paid), social media sites, online classifieds, local and vertical business directories, community message boards and so on.

Local search

Local search is the fastest growing segment of search. In addition to that, all search engines recognize that a huge part of search queries which aren't local semantically, have local intent. That is the reason why search engines show local results in universal results for queries that aren't local when it comes to semantics, like "pizza", "lawyers" or "dentists".

Local search has many benefits for small business owners one of which is its price - it s free, at least when t comes to the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Another benefit is the fact that having a website is not mandatory, which makes local search de facto free and somewhat simple.

But it is not a walk in the park, either.

From my experience, local search is not without pitfalls. Some platforms, such as Google, suffer from lack of spam control and over-reliance on purely algorithmic approach. The verification process can be grueling. For example, complete "10 - packs" can be taken over by a single spammer and Google would take weeks to react despite dozens of people reporting the spam issue.

However, Google is by far the largest search engine, which means that no one can give up on it.

Yahoo, on the other hand, has strong editorial review, and it's much harder to spam than Google and Bing, but its categorization system is more rigid than Google's and its review process is sometimes sluggish and slow. Fortunately for all of us, there is a set of principles that, if applied, will lead you to success in local search.

Creating a great listing.

Believe it or not, Google and the other search engines want you to have a great listing. It is a necessity as it helps protect user experience.

But what makes it great?

Completing your listing to the fullest is the first step towards greatness.

You should categorize your business very carefully. If it's available (Google Local) don't be afraid to use custom categories to describe what you do better.

Add images and videos to make your listing stand out and to establish credibility.

Pay attention to details.

It might not seem very important to fill out the "hours of operation" nor "payment accepted" fields, or to specify details about your business but it is certainly very important to some of your prospective customers and all the major search engines.

Keep your web presence strong consistent and accurate.

Make sure that your business information can be found in as many trusted business directories, regional, and industry specific sites, as possible. This is needed to help the search engines determine that your business is real and active and that it can be shown as a result for a wide variety of search queries. To accomplish this you don't have to be an seo expert .

Providing out of this planet customer service and making sure that your customers review you online is something of crucial importance as reviews not only help your listings rank better but also provide social proof of value for the quality of your services or products.