Local Search Approach

This kind of search is becoming the hottest advertising medium for small businesses and consumers alike; it is not something new but is a growing trend. Web site traffic is the name of the game.

Google Local search – says 70% of household use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services. Every year, the yellowpages and whitepages are carted straight from our doorstep to the recycling bin in the garage.

Allow me a moment to enlighten you with some premiere information about local search portals. As I mentioned earlier this type of search is not new. People want as worry-free existence as possible. The digital revolution is helping to make that possible. Are you aware of http://www.whitepages.com and reverse lookup?

WhitePages is not owned by or affiliated with any phone company, it is a privately held company located in Seattle, WA. It should be noted that WhitePages do not print or distribute phonebooks. To obtain a copy or make changes to your local phonebook, you should contact the publisher of the phonebook, which is frequently the local phone company that serves that region.

WhitePages do not operate a 411-phone service, but 411.com is one of its websites. That website is a source for free, online people search. That is different from calling 411, which connects you to a directory assistance operator and generally results in a service fee. 411.com is not affiliated or associated with 411-service or your local phone company in any way.

WhitePages was designed to help you find a person by their phone number. Say you get a call on your mobile from an unknown number. Enter that 10-digit phone number into reverse search. If available, whitepages return the name, address and other identifying information for that phone number. Results will include both home and work listings. If no results are found, whitepages return the "type", "carrier" and "location" of the phone number. But sometimes information simply may be unavailable or has been removed from WhitePages.

Whitepages are very useful in tracking landline phone numbers, but not very helpful in identifying cell phones users. You can find a lot of online services that will perform a free reverse phone search for you, a reverse phone directory. Whitepages are among the most sought after if you are looking up a residential number. Whitepages are passionate about building awareness of the waste created by the white pages books and providing them only on an opt-in basis, but I think it would be a mistake to draw similar conclusions for the yellow pages.

Superpages, infoseek and whitepages are just a few of the websites available where you can do a phone number lookup. Google is fully Internet-ready for mobiles, while Telstra products such as WhitePages are apparently not.

Local search to get increased market share for your small business

Say for instance, you have a franchised Laundromat on the corner of your block, but there are also four other Laundromats within a five square block radius of yours.  So how do you insure that you will get the lion’s share of the community traffic?

More and more, your potential clients are forsaking those heavy YellowPages paper books for Google and other engines. It is easy and fast to do a search for " Laundromat Covina" -- and if you do not find one in the town of Covina, widen the search to " Laundromat Iowa" -- try widening your search with YellowPages!

Local search promoting is now the better way of reaching target consumers. Increasingly small businesses are becoming aware of the shift in the way consumers search for things. Seeking high business website rankings from sites like Google and Yahoo depend on the quality and quantity of the content which is available for the consumers. And it's not just the clients/consumers. Faster and faster, local businesses are coming online to take advantage of local search. They are using the Net to...

• Build trust and deepen relationships with existing local customers by providing friendly, personal information about the business, great content (ex., valuable "do-it-yourself" articles), "web site only" specials, etc. (but this is only the first and most obvious step)
• Raise their local profile above that of competitors

• Continue to stay "top-of-mind" and deepen relationships with customers through an e-zine (and build sales, too -- ex., "It's spring, which means it's time for aerating and fertilizing your lawn." - OR - "Announcing our Web-site-only-10%-off-your-next-oil-change coupon")

• Build targeted traffic to find new customers, even add entirely new income streams (ex., as a chimney sweep, your articles on fire safety not only endear you to local customers, but will attract global ones too -- you can monetize this traffic through Google AdSense ads and affiliate programs, as we will see below)

• Leverage their local expertise and knowledge for global clients, selling their goods online, even through online auctions (see monetization article below). 

It's time -- develop a solid Web presence, generate targeted traffic, build loyalty through a newsletter for customers, get the edge on local competition, and add new income streams.

Think Of A Web Site As A Super-Yellow Pages Ad

This "ad" delivers 100 times the results... at 1/10 of the price. People are searching less and less by the offline  and more by the online ...

If your small, local business does not use a Net presence to promote itself, keep in touch with its customers, extend its reach, and take your competitors' customers, your competitors will do it to you.

Since the emergence of global business and the Internet, business owners began campaigns to advertise to the global market and began neglecting their local markets.

As time went on the larger advertising mediums began doing some business research of their own. They found that people prefer purchasing locally. This neglect was a lesson in futility. We have been literally tying our own shoelaces together to each other.

Armed with this new business knowledge they went to work building new portals. Now Google has two search portals, Google search and Google local search.  With the advent of this new portal, business owners now have another excellent business promotion avenue to secure more traffic to their virtual online businesses as well as their brick and mortar businesses.

(New traffic business knowledge: Online search engine advertising for your business)

Top Reasons for New Portals like Local Search

The thing of it is, people are performing keyword searches directly related to their local communities.

People who want to know what’s in their nearby area.

People who want to know what's within, roughly, a one hour driving radius -- not the same folks, necessarily, as those in audience #1.

People looking for local services.

Business and other professional people looking for local services.

People looking for local personal services.

People who are interested in content about the local area.

People searching for local people -- not just for socializing, but a wide variety of interests.

People looking for products, and the local sellers of same -- and with the ability to see if they can get a better deal online.

People looking for used products -- Are we all aware that the total money spent on local classified advertising exceeds the money spent on Yellow Pages, which is itself many times greater than Google's and Yahoo!'s combined revenues?

People not from the area, but who plan to visit it.

Local search has other benefits. As of the time of writing this article business owners can register their businesses at no cost. When they register for local search with Google you can also setup and provide coupons for your visitors. Search portals are growing by the day and Google is not the only one...

There are about 100 million active websites on the Web... where does your website appear? Take this traffic test

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 Page References

Increased Web Traffic

Internet Marketing Plan  

Law of Attraction

Online mlm Leads

Online Traffic Targeting

SBI

Targeted Impassioned Market

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