Following Online Local Searches
I was reading an article today on MarketWatch.com that exposes the Findings of Consumer Online Local Shoppping Habits.
Gregg Stewart, senior vice president of interactive, TMPDM. “Our 2008 study again confirms that consumers do a majority of research online, but continue to make purchases offline with a phone call or in-store visit. Additionally, marketers need to pay close attention to mobile search and sites that offer consumer user reviews, as they are growing in popularity.”
If you have a local business and do not have a online presence you are losing business. During these economic times small businesses need to use the power of the internet to help consumer easily find them. Right now on the local internet climate is fairly simple to rank well if you know what you are doing.
One of the first things all small businesses should do (if they haven’t yet capitalized on this) is to sign up for the free local listing the search engines offer to local businesses. Often these listings are placing in the organic search engine results pages and usually on page 1 for local modified keyword searches.
Second strategy is to get a blog going. Blogs tend to rank well organically too, especially for the local marketplace. I suggest using a self-hosted blog using wordpress. WordPress is the mostly widely used blogging platform by serious SEO’ers. Also wordpress is open source (which means free) and is as easy to use as a word processing software. So if you can use word, you can learn how to use wordpress. So basically your only costs are hosting and a domain. Doesn’t get any better then that.
I have been thinking of putting together a free video series on how to start a blog, but don’t know if anyone would be interested…? If you are let me know below in the comments and I’ll put one together.
