Remember the days when you would be in need of a service or item, you could pick up your local phone book and search by category? You simply flipped through those yellow pages that listed various businesses and locations by their alphabetical category. If you needed an automotive mechanic, you opened up to the letter “A” and searched. Then you found the listings to local automotive mechanics and gave one a call. How you chose was entirely up to you. There may have been a reference from a friend. Perhaps you had called a particular business before but never took them up on their services. It was most likely that you called the one with a nice corner ad on the page you’re looking at, though.
Gone are the days of searching through the pages of phone books. Most of the big companies that once pressed them and would leave them on your doorstep no longer even distribute those books anymore. We are in the information age and people search differently. Everything is done via the internet and on their computers. They search on their personal devices and with smart phones that use search engine databases to find what they’re seeking. For any type of business, at any location around the world; all the information they need right at their fingertips and ready to dial.
SEO Benefits in Your Community
Local internet marketing is a big deal these days. Where advertisers would once pay money to place ads in the phone book, they now utilize key words on their company website that attract their target market. The reason for this is that it provides for the best in search engine optimization, or SEO. Search Engine Optimization allows those who are searching your local internet market to optimally connect with your business. It means increased exposure to clients and generates business.
How this works isn’t particularly complex to understand. Just as with the phone book, potential customers will be searching for a particular businesses that provides a service or item that they need. They will do this by using the internet and their favorite search engine, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The internet is a big place, it is called the World Wide Web. In the phone book days, the location was often a given. You searched a phone book in the area which you needed. Sometimes that meant having several lying around. Today, people will usually include this in their search.
How Does it Work?
When the searcher types in the pertinent information of what they’re looking for in the search engine, it then immediately pulls everything with those key words and places the results in your search. Searching for “automotive mechanic” on Google rendered over 16 million hits in less than a quarter of a second. This includes everything from local businesses to online articles and discussion sites pertaining to those terms. This is what makes detailed searches so important.
The more key terms one uses, the better the results. Where local internet marketing and search engine optimization come into play is where a particular business ranks on the search page. The higher the rank on the page, there better the business is in getting noticed. In a sea of results, it’s usually the first three pages that get looked at. Those that get looked at are often clicked and in this, moves the page up in ranking as clicking is a sign of related interest. So it goes without saying that ranking is important for any business and having the right key words create greater rankings. This is the optimization part of SEO.
SEO is more than just a buzz term. It’s a critical part of marketing and should be included in every business that has an online presence. Without it, a business can loose potential customers that they didn’t know where out there. If you haven’t optimized your website to include local internet marketing, then it’s time for that change!
