Local Business Profit from Local Search

I often get business owners asking, "Why should I have my business on the Internet?" In the past these business owners pulled new customers from places like
The Phone Book
Print Ads
Traditional Marketing
These business owners have had success in the past with traditional marketing and do not understand why they need to move into the 21st century and get thier business online.
There are many reasons to get your business online but the most important reason is your bottom line. Weigh the cost of Phone Book Advertising, Magazine, TV or Radio Advertising against the cost of having a website. The Return on Investment (ROI) is mush higher with a website and Internet Advertising.

More and more people are turning to the Internet to find services instead of having bulky phone books. According to Internet World Stats 73% of all North American citizens use the Internet. ABC News conducted a survey of online users - 47% of Internet users make purchases online. If 73% of your customers are using the Internet to get information and make purchasing decisions, and 47% are actually making purchases, then you need to be represented on the Internet.
Let's look at this with real numbers; You get 100 potential new customers each week. Of these 100 potential new customers 73 use the Internet to get information and 47 actually purchase or make a buying decision from the Internet. If you are not represented in the websites that come up when these 47 people are making thier buying decision they will be going somewhere else. You have now lost 47 of your new projected customers. Can your business afford to "give away" 47 buyers every week?

Companies that do well with local search results are service based industries and local retailers. With people moving into metro areas they need to find new service providers and are turning to the Internet to find and compare services that are available in their new location.

Two Types of Internet Advertising
The first type is paid advertising through a company like Google. Google's paid advertising is called AdWords and is known as Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. The concept is simple - you define your best keywords (through keyword research) then bid on the keyword phrase. When someone types in your chosen keyword phrase then your website will come up in the listings for that customer to click on and go to your site. The cost of this type of advertising is industry specific meaning that is varies by industry. Keywords can sell for pennies or well over $50.00 per click. For business targeting the local market it is possible to take a costly keyword like "Web Design" and put a city or area behind it and get a much better price on the keyword. For an article on Google Adwords for Beginners read here.

The second type of Internet advertising is called Organic Placement - these are the sites that are listed in the main area of the search results page. The goal is to get placed in the top half of the first page. There are many variables that come into play for the search engine to decide who gets prime placement. It is all based upon relevancy of the phrase typed in by the searcher to the websites listed. Some factors are:

Keywords in the title of the website
Keywords in header tags
Keywords listed in the text of the page
Keywords in the URL
Keywords bolded or emphasized on the page
The Keywords in the text of inbound links
How many inbound links
The PageRank of sites that are linking to your site

That is a short list of considerations made by the search algorithms - but all of those items are in control of the owner of the website. They should all be taken into consideration when optimizing your site for organic placement in the search engines. This is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
For more information on Link Building and Anchor Text read this article.

Making these simple efforts while creating your website content will help your website get ranked higher than your competition that is not making any efforts online.