How to Use Search for Your Business - Part II

The best chance of a regional business to win customers comes from the population within driving distance of their business. That can be a city, an area or a state. But it is geographical. The marketing and advertising tools are entirely different for national markets. Yet I find so many of you spending money trying to capture business outside the area where you add value. That is not a bad strategy if you have done the necessary work to be number one in your home market.



Consider this; Google has one customer....you. When you search, the product they deliver is the search result and they do everything in their power to give you what you ask for. They attempt to discern your "intent"....what you are really looking for. About a year and a half ago Google started really developing tools to localize search. Here are some statistics that are pretty fresh;

When people (companies) qualify or search for a vendor 97% use search. 80% use Google. 50% regionalize their search. That means that almost half of all searches done have geography as part of the string. So a search for "casters" becomes "casters Detroit".



Think about that for a minute. Most of you have brick and mortar businesses. This is good news. Google assumes that an interaction between their searcher and your company is of more value than if you were located elsewhere. It starts to take back some of the ground lost to the Internet phenomena.



When Google started....Yahoo and MSN (now Bing) followed with "Local" search results...see below.....

This is what you see for this string. It is high on the screen and commands attention. It is not perceived by the customer to be a paid listing and in fact it is not.

If you have not registered your company with the major search engines you have not done the easiest, cheapest thing you can do to promote your business. We can help you get listed and manage this interaction with the customers in your market for a very modest amount. Hopefully, that would be so successful for you you will ask........ "what else you got?"