Locally Grown Traffic: Use Local Search Marketing to Attract Real Customers to Your Small Business

For small businesses, all business is local. But how are your customers actually finding you? The phonebook? Forget it. Recent polls published online have shown that over 75% of people never use the phone book for anything, and if your target demographic is say, under 50, there’s a good chance not a single customer of yours has ever found you in the yellow pages.

There’s a much greater chance that the people you’re trying to reach are looking for you by searching on Google or another search engine. These are people who are ready to buy your products or services right now. Over 82% of local searchers follow up with a phone call, or show up in person to your place of business. This means that if they can’t easily and quickly find you, they’re not coming, and they’re not buying from you. They’re buying from your competition, and they will more than likely continue to buy from your competition.

The point is this: If your business isn’t actively and aggressively engaging in local search marketing, you are actively and aggressively losing money.

Consider these facts:

• 97% of Internet users in the US gather shopping information online
• 51% of those consumers explicitly characterize their behavior as “Shop Online, Purchase Offline”
• 73% of all online activity is related to local content

The statistics above should be sobering to you (and your balance sheet) if you aren’t actively targeting local search in your marketing strategy. The consumers who are typing (your product) and (your town/zip code/etc) are the ones who are ready to spend money now, and more importantly for you, they are highly influenced by how easy it is to find you in the list of search results. Your position in the search rankings has more to do with your success than your physical location in your city.

Why it’s good to be Number 1

• The first item listed on Google’s search results gets 36% of the clicks.
• The 2nd item gets 12.5%
• The remaining items on the first page of search results get 9.5%, 7.9%, 6.1%, 4.1%, 3.8%, 3.0% and 2.2%.
• What’s left? Not much.

If you’re local business isn’t showing up on the first page of results, you’re essentially not even in the game. And even then, if you’re not #1 or #2, you’re essentially fighting for scraps. As shown above, the people doing these searches aren’t just window shopping. These are customers you’re missing out on because you’re business is essentially invisible to them.’

As you can hopefully see, there are real customers to be gained by using the techniques and services available to you to optimize your local search engine marketing. Local SEO and small business search engine marketing should be a primary focus as you look to gain customers and improve your bottom line. If you’re not doing local search engine marketing, you can bet that your competition is. Don’t let your business become invisible to the people most likely to become your next customers, or you’ll soon disappear.

I have taken a look at a few of the small businesses in my local area lately to see what they were doing and not doing.

To my surprise a lot of small businesses are still using print marketing.  So I asked the question do you have a website and about 90% off them did, but were not informed of the importance of online marketing.

The problem is that after doing a search none of these businesses I had visited were on the first page of Google in there service area for the keywords that they were  advertising via a print marketing campaigns. In my opinion this is a broken sales funnel and will not provide the most optimized ROI.

The underlying issue is that when a prospect receives a printed solicitation for a service or product, 80% of the time  the prospects are going to do a search on Google to see reviews and other competitors as part of their research.

So here is a online marketing tip to help create successful sales funnel.

Now since prospects are doing there due diligence online and looking for reviews. its more important than ever to have a great online reputation.  So staying on top of their businesses online reputation is key in today’s business market.  Every business needs to understand that today’s word of mouth is online; from the positive and negative reviews, blog posts, and social mentions are all key factors of today’s online successful sales funnel.

Now out of the approximately 80% of the prospects that do research the internet approximately 90% of them never leave the first page of Google. So with that said,  if any business is investing in offline marketing, it’s essential  to complete the sales funnel by investing properly to ensure their businesses Google Places profile and website should be on the first pages of Google in the local area for the particular keywords advertised offline via print, TV, radio, mailer, etc.

Most businesses today can take advantage of a Local SEO company that can help in local search engine optimization.  LocalSEOSites.com is a company that can help with achieving front page placement on Google in the local area as well as Reputation Management.