You may have heard the saying that “All politics are local.”
For the vast majority of businesses, the same thing is true la vente du viagra. Local success is what it’s all about. And although they call it the “world wide web,” it’s really the local power of the Internet today that’s flexing its muscle and proving its value to businesses.
There are many reasons this is true, and we could spend a lot of time on the subject and we want to move on to two specific topics. We’ll just say that the proliferation of mobile devices has really helped fuel the power of the Internet for local businesses.
Step One
With this background, the obvious first step is your need for a professionally designed website. Internet users today are far more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago and they won’t spend much time on a site that doesn’t look good and deliver the functionality they are used to experiencing.
In other words, the days of spending an evening at home using an website hosting service’s “do-it-yourself” website design app are over.
With a well designed and fully functional website, small businesses can make major inroads into the local marketplace.
The next steps
Once you have your website, there are many ways to promote it, some of which would demand several articles to cover in full. But since our emphasis today is on growing your business by improving your market penetration locally, we’re going to touch on the importance of local business listings.
Back in the days before the Internet, the Yellow Pages almost had a monopoly on local business listings. To say that the Yellow Pages was a cash cow in its heyday would be an understatement. But the important thing to realize is that the Yellow Pages were profitable because businesses recognized how critical local listings were to their ultimate success.
Local listings in the Online Age
No one has a monopoly on local listings today like the Yellow Pages did a decade or so ago. There are several important websites that specialize in local listings and the nature of your business will determine which are critical for your success.
Some sites that have local listings, such as Yelp, also publish user reviews. You can imagine how powerful positive reviews, with accurate information about your business can be. Further, sites like Yelp are very popular with mobile device users. They are often used to inform last minute buying decisions.
Google, Yahoo and Bing are all very important in local listings. It’s critical to get your business listed in these three and to be sure that all the information is correct and updated. For example we have heard many stories from local business owners whose location is incorrect in Google maps. That’s a major problem. Further, Google takes the inclusion of your business in local listings into consideration when it decides how highly to place your business within search results.
However, when all the details of your local listings have been taken care of properly and you have a great website, it can have a large positive effect on your business.