Buyers want information on where to buy, online and locally. Most small businesses are local by nature and serve people living nearby. Their clients found them using traditional methods, such as Yellow Pages or newspaper ads. Until now, the Internet has not occupied a prominent place in their marketing efforts. This will soon change as local research methods become mainstream.
Even buyers who expect to spend their money close to home are increasingly turning to the Internet to find the products and services they need. They rely on search engines to find the right vendors in the quickest and easiest way possible. A local search combines a keyword or phrase with specific geographic terms, such as a city or postcode. Thus, the search results will only include companies in the area.
Instead of losing small business information among millions of search results pages, it is found in a small group of local vendors. It’s good for them, but also for the person who is looking for what it offers.
Small business can easily be found by a whole new group of buyers. Consumers don’t just watch Yellow Pages when they want to buy like they used to. Studies show that 36% of Internet searches are done to search local businesses. About a quarter of all Internet users are already conducting a local search. They would have done even more if the requested data on small businesses had been more complete.
Local businesses need to prepare to change customer habits. The first simple step is to place your company in the “Yellow Pages of the Internet” (IYP) with the printed catalog “Yellow Pages.” This puts your business on the radar screen.
You’ll find expert advice on the yellow pages and from local search experts to get more out of their advertising dollars. Start by reading the concept of search and increase your chances of being found when people search the internet for what you offer. You don’t even need your own website to use the yellow web and local search.
Explore the appropriate conditions
A search engine is a method of searching for information on the Internet; program that searches the web pages for requested keywords and then returns a list of documents that have been found search terms. Google and Yahoo, the world’s leading search engines, have switched transmissions, making local search a priority to get relevant results.
Spider (also called “stealler” or “bot”) – goes to every page of each website and reads the information to make it available to search engines; “explore” a site that collects and indexes information
Specialized search engines – a limited concentration of scanned and indexed information, such as medical, business or retail sites.
Keywords are words or phrases used by search engines to search relevant web pages; words chosen to improve the position and ranking of the site in search engines
A query is a query that the search engine compares to the elements entered and then returns the results to the search engine.
Search results are an aggregated list of web pages returned by the search engine in response to a query; the number of articles returned is usually huge (in millions), so search engines only care about the results on the first few pages
Relevant results – checking a good search is whether the results match what the person wanted to find, without a lot of irrelevant links.
Local search is a combination of geographic terms in search to find suitable vendors in a particular area.
Pay per click (PPC) is a method of creating traffic, in which site owners place bets on search queries (keywords) that lead to their site.
Geographic terms – information for a specific area that can be included in a local search: postcode, city, county, geographic region, state.
The best rating – sites that appear on the first pages of search results.
Search engine optimization (SEO) – Clarify the keywords and contents of the page to keep the website at the top of your search results.
Tags and headlines (on web pages) – provide search robots keywords and site information for indexing the site.