Local Search Gets Really Promising For Small Business Owners

April 7, 2009 by Cara

As the leading search engine, it’s important to pay attention when Google makes changes. And this recent change is huge for local small business marketing! Google’s latest changes brings local results up in the search – without geographic modifiers like city, or zipcodes.

What it all boils down to is that getting listed in Google Maps is more important than ever, because now local search will be shown even for wider searches, like pizza, restaurant, and hair salon. With local search you can appear in the first page of Google organically.

This is significant because consumers are already coming online are performing local searches. Local search accounts for about 66% of online searches and in a recent study by TMP Directional Marketing, 82% of those searches lead to offline action, including in-store visits, phone calls, e-mails or purchases. Why not take advantage of a free way to attract some of that traffic?

To see how this works, simply visit Google.com and enter a search phrase for dentist. You’ll notice at the 4th or 5th result is “Local business results for dentist near…”. This could be you!

There are few businesses out there that couldn’t benefit from getting listed in Google local, even if you don’t have a website. Use Facebook or Squidoo in the time being while you sort out what you want in a website. If you don’t have plans for a website, then you and I should talk, seriously.

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