Local Search Blog

Advertising dynamics are changing. The days when running a weekly ad in the local newspaper and having a sign painter artfully stencil your logo on your storefront were sufficient to assure your spot in the local market place are long gone. Having a small business web site that can be searched and found on the Internet by customers - and potential customers - looking for the products or services you offer in their city is becoming a key marketing tool for small business success.

For the first time ever, spending on TV advertising is set to outpace spending on newspaper ads this year, according to the latest report from market analysts Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private equity firm in the media and communications field. And Internet advertising is expected to surpass even TV advertising by 2011 - in three year’s time.

Local search, the ability to have customers find your products on the Internet when they are specifically searching for goods and service in your city or region, is a key component to Internet advertising for small business. ComScore, a leading Internet research firm, notes that in a recent survey 47% of local searchers on the Internet contacted or visited a local merchant as a result of their online search. The Kelsey Group, another leading research firm, estimates that by 2010, the local search market, which is already competitive, will grow to be a $6.2 billion market in the U.S. alone.

The importance of having an effective small business web site that can be found in a local search for products and services over the Internet has newer been stronger, and if forecasts are correct, the necessity of having a local search capable small business web site will only grow.

“According to industry analysts, approximately 80% of an indi­vidual’s income is spent within about 50 miles of their home,” says marketing expert, Michael Flecishner. “With 95% of the potential local search advertising market today remaining untouched, this is a huge opportunity for businesses.”

As small business move their marketing and advertising efforts online, however, the inevitable problem of overcrowding in the local search results pages of Google, Yahoo! and other Internet search engines is increasingly apparent. It is not enough to merely create a small business web site. Your site needs to be engineered (search engine optimization, being the industry term) so that it can be found and ranked by Google and the like for the key terms that describe your business. Doing so is an art and a science. Effective keyword research, function-based web design, Internet linking structures and quality on-site content all drive the ability of a small business web site to rank on the major search engines.

Starting from scratch, as many local small businesses do, it can take thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours (yours or someone else’s) to design, build, and optimize a small business web site that will allow your small business to compete for its share of the local search market. And the effectiveness of your efforts are by no means assured. Sesimi.com offers an affordable alternative for building and optimizing a small business web site. Sesimi.com offers a unique subscription service that can provide your company with an optimized small business web site that will rank consistently in Internet search engines’ local search results. In as little as 48 hours, the web design and search engine optimization specialists at Sesimi.com can design, build optimize and host an effective one page small buiness website on their unique small business web domain that will rank in local search results - converting web traffic into foot traffic at your storefront for as little as $39 per month for optimization and hosting.

Properly marketed, a small business or small business web site can dominate the local search results on Google, Yahoo! or the other Internet search engines. Improperly marketed, and no one may ever find your local, small business web site. As illustrated in a recent article on local search in Canada’s National Post, something as simple as omitting to register your small business with Google Local may mean that your potential customers are finding your competitors, but not your small business web site from their Blackberry or laptop.

While something as simple as registering your small, local business with Google Local will get you some limited search engine exposure, ensuring that you small business web site is ranked well on Google and other search engines will depend on a number of factors, as the National Post explains - particularly if the person searching for the products or services you sell is searching the INternet from a Blackberry or similar mobile device, which is an evermore frequent occurrence.

“Google itself explains that all of its search results ‘are based primarily on relevance,’” says the National Post. ” But Google Maps also ranks business listings according to geographic distance from the requested starting point. But that’s all the help you’re going to get. ‘Sometimes our search technology decides that a business that’s farther away from your location is more likely to have what you’re looking for than a business that’s closer,’ says Google — which likes to keep these things secret to discourage people from trying to manipulate search results.”

Accordingly, it can be a difficult matter for a small business owner to optimize his or her small business web site for local search, as well as mobile search from iPhones, BlackBerrys and the multitude of new smart phones customers are using to sear the Internet for local products or services. There are a number of costly mistakes that can preclude a local business from being ranked or ranked well on the leading search engines - aside from neglecting to register with Google Local.

Sesimi,com provides a one-stop solution to have your small business website built, designed, optimized and hosted by Sesimi on its unique small business web hosting domain. The domain itself, along with each unique small business web page is optimized and connected to the wider Web in a manner proven to put your small business at the top of the Internet search engine rankings.

“Of course, there are lots of search-engine optimization (SEO) consultants who can help you get better results from standard Google searches,” as the National Post notes, “but they may not be paying attention to Google’s local-business service.” Or to other local search ranking criteria, either.

If your small business is dependent on local traffic - both foot traffic and web traffic - sign-up online for a unique small business web page designed, built and hosted by Sesimi.com. Each small business web page built by Sesimi.com is specifically optimized to dominate the Internet’s local search rankings.

The importance of having a small business web site is underscored by news that small businesses are moving their marketing dollars online as print directories such as the Yellow Pages™, a long-time staple for small business marketing, rapidly lose their market share and effectiveness.

New projections from industry-leading research firm, Borrell Associates, indicate that “by 2010 most U.S. adults will not crack open a Yellow Pages™ book in any given month”, reports Online Media Daily.  Spending on print Yellow Pages™ is forecast to “plunge by 39% in the next five years to $7.8 billion as small businesses increasingly shift marketing dollars online.”

Yellow Pages™ is struggling against this growing trend by focusing its efforts to transitioning itself into an online marketing player.  The trouble with that strategy, however, is that it faces very stiff competition - Google and Yahoo!, the two internet search giants that sit on approximately 80% of the overall online search market.  Moreover, according to the reported figures from Borrell Associates “pure-play Internet companies [such as Google, Yahhoo!, MSN and the other Internet search engines] dominate local online ad spending with 57.3% of the market, compared to 24.6% for newspapers and 7.8% for directories.”

Online Media Daily reports that “local internet spending overall is expected to jump 50% this year to $13.1 billion this year.”  For a small, local business having an effective small business web site that can be used as an online marketing tool on Google and its search engine competitors becomes a business necessity as  local customers increasingly turn from the Yellow Pages™ to the Internet to get information about local products and services.  Relying on print and online Yellow Page advertising may no longer be a sufficient strategy to satisfy a company’s small business marketing needs.

Sesimi.com offers an affordable one-stop solution for local businesses with its unique small business web site hosting domain.  Search engine optimization specialists at Sesimi.com design, build and host smal business web pages that are consistently found and ranked by Internet search engines for local products and services, giving small businesses with a small business web page hosted on the Sesimi.com site a distinct advantage over competitors that rely solely on the dwindling effectiveness of Yellow Page advertising.

Every small business is faced with a difficult question these days: How to build a small business web site that will be an effective online marketing platform on an overcrowded Internet? When the folks at Internet search engine giant, Google, first started keeping track they indexed 26 million separate Web pages. That was in 1998. Ten years have passed and the Internet has mushroomed - to put it mildly.

“Recently,” according to Google’s Offical Blog, “even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days — when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!”

Fortunately, getting a small business web site indexed and ranked from amongst the trillion other sites on the Web competing for attention is not that daunting a task - though it can be both time consuming and expensive - particularly if you are a small local business. According to Google, the first principle that they use in finding and ranking Web pages that are relevant to a particular search is: “Best locally relevant results served globally.” This emphasis on local results give a key advantage to a small business web site that is trying to market local products and services online, Yet it is still necessary for a small business to build and maintain a web site that will be found and ranked on Google, Yahoo! and the other relevant search engines. That can take both a lot of time and a lot of money to learn and implement the cutting edge search engine optimization techniques that will get your small business website ranked on Google.

Fortunately, Sesimi.com offers a specialized small business web site solution for local businesses. Sesimi.com designs, builds and hosts small business websites for local business clients across North America. Each small business web page on the Sesimi.com domain is optimized so that our clients’ products and services can easily be found by their potential customers online, and so that each client Web page will be consistently ranked on Google and the other search engine players. Moreover, each client Web page is unique - as Sesimi.com will only build and host one small business web site for each type of product or service in any geographic area. By giving its clients exclusive rights in each locale, it ensures that its clients will not have to vie with their competitors for a place atop the local search engine rankings.

You can sign up online for an affordable Sesimi.com hosted small business website. For a one-time set up fee of $99 the small business web design specialists at Sesimi.com will design and build a unique web page for your small business, and Sesimi.com will host your small business web page on its specially optimized local, small business web domain for $39 per month. With a built in link structure connecting your small business web page to the wider Internet and page content driven by the latest search engine optimization techniques, your Sesimi.com hosted small business web site can be up and working for you in as little as 48 hours - ensuring your small business web site stands out from the billions (now trillions) of web sites vying for attention on the Internet.

Having a business website and an effective Internet strategy is rapidly becoming essential to retailers who depend on offline sales. “The web plays an increasingly integral role in retail for brick and mortar retailers, even among purchases that occur in store,” says Nielsen Online, a service of leading media ratings firm, The Nielsen Company in a press release issued July 22nd.

“The ability of the Internet to drive offline sales is now rising to the fore,” according to the folks that bring us the familiar Nielsen ratings for our favourite TV shows. “A strong web presence with broad and deep online content is critical for all retailers, including brick and mortar stores,” says Nielsen Online’s V.P. of Industry Insights, Ken Cassar.

Nielsen Online research shows that amongst purchasers of consumer electronics - an admittedly high-end product - 80% bought from a store whose website they had visited first. Even amongst purchasers of low-end consumer goods, in this instance pet food, Nielsen Online found that 44% of consumers had gone online to learn more about the product they had purchased.

For small local retailers, an effective small business website and Internet strategy may consist of no more than having a simple web page that can be found when consumers are searching online for goods and services that are available in their city or neighbourhood. Sesimi.com provides a simple, affordable and effective solution for the needs of such small businesses. Sesimi.com builds and hosts unique single web page, small business web sites which are optimized to be found and ranked consistently by search engines like Google when potential customers are looking for local goods and services online. Each Sesimi.com small business web site is mobile search-capable and has a local business profile that allows customers and potential customers to easily locate the local products and services they are searching the Internet for. Only one business web site for a particular product or service is available in each city or region, ensuring Sesimi.com a unique listing and competitive means of ensuring their products are found by local customers.

Putting up a local business profile on a small business web page built, optimized and hosted by Sesimi.com proved to be a marketing boon for a local kitchen design shop that builds and installs custom-designed kitchens. “We put up a Brampton Kitchen Design web page for our client, says Mike Cloke, Sesimi.com’s co-founder. “The family-owned business was struggling to distinguish itself in a tight home renovations market here in the GTA. Their web page now ranks at the top of Google’s search engine results for that query and our client now has five months’ of work - much of it from web traffic driven to the site by Google.”

Sesimi.com (and Sesimi.co.uk in Great Britain) have rolled out an optimized small business web page domain which hosts unique, affordably-priced and effective local business profiles that are optimized for local search (and are mobile-search capable) for markets across the United States, Canada and the U.K.

Unlike most other business directories, the Sesimi.com domain hosts only one small business web page for each type of business product or service in any one city or region. The local business profile has proven to be an effective marketing tool for small businesses who need to market their products effectively and affordably on the Internet. Clients with local business profiles on the Sesimi.com and Sesimi.co.uk web domains range from kitchen designers, to real estate agents, consultants and equipment rental specialists. Sesimi.com builds each of its clients’ unique web pages with the latest search engine optimization techniques perfected by large corporations and online marketers, providing them a one-stop solution to their online marketing needs.

Mobile search - searching the Internet for products and services from a mobile phone or other hand-held device - will be an increasingly important marketing avenue for small business as new cell phone technology gives customers a better ability to shop while on the move.

During a recent conference call to discuss Google’s second-quarter earning results, Sergei Brin, Google’s co-founder, took the opportunity to promote the mobile search technology that is seeing an increasing amount of traffic on a new generation of mobile search-capable “smart phones” - like the new Apple 3G iPhone that was released this summer. Mr. Brin sees mobile search as a significant growth area for the world’s dominant search engine.

Comparing mobile search to regular Internet search, the search engine giant’s co-founder noted the huge advantage that mobile search has for targettng local business products, despite the drawbacks of a much smaller display screen on hand-held mobile devices. “In some respects, you can’t fit as much advertising on a really small screen but on the other hand the queries are really localized,” Mr. Brin told reporters. “There’s an opportunity for much more fine-tuned targeting, and both of those things are going to balance out.”

Sesimi.com is a leader in mobile search for small businesses, building, optimizing and hosting small business web pages that can be fully configured for mobile search. Each Sesimi.com small business web page can display advertising that is optimized to display local search results for its products and services on its customers’ smaller mobile phone screens while still remaining fully-optimized for regular search from a customer’s laptop or home computer.

The importance of having a web page that can be found and read by customers using mobile search from Internet-ready cell phones and mobile devices was underscored by new research from Internet domain registrar, dotMobi, and AKQA Mobile, the mobile division of AKQA, an international creative advertising agency.

The survey amongst consumers in the U.S and U.K. “indicated a strong consumer desire for practical mobile content on cell phones,” according to dotMobi. AKQA Mobile’s managing director reports that, “The enormous popularity of mobile devices has had a profound effect on the lifestyle of the consumer, unleashing new levels of connectivity and personal mobility.”

The results highlight not only the strong co,lnsumer demand for mobile search, but the necessity of having a website that can be found from a mobile phone and content on that site that is mobile search-friendly. Nearly fifty percent of the survey respondents who said they had a poor experience the first time they used the mobile Internet reported that a “poor experience” made them “reluctant to access” that site, or the Internet, again from their mobile phone or device.

Other key findings from the dotMobi/AKQA survey were that:

• Approximately 90% of respondents are “interested in learning about the mobile Web, demonstrating a need for brands to make their mobile properties findable via mobile search, marketing and advertising.”
• 86% of the respondents “said they were interested in knowing which sites are easily accessible on a mobile phone.”
• 50% of respondents were unaware that there are web sites that are accessible by mobile phone.

One further finding seems key, particularly given all the press about the hottest, new mobile device – the Apple iPhone. “Only 2 percent of participants in the survey who have purchased a phone in the past six months chose an iPhone,” according to dotMobi. “This indicates that brands that don’t optimize their mobile services for a variety of mobile phones will provide a substandard mobile Internet experiences for a vast majority of consumers.”

While the dotMobi/AKQA research was geared towards companies marketing large consumer brands, it underscores how important mobile search is becoming, and will become, for small, local business. Sesimi.com builds and hosts small business web pages that are optimized to appear in the local search queries that customers are using to find local products and services online. A Sesimi.com web page is easily and affordably capable of being optimized for mobile search as well, affording small businesses the same advantage in online marketing that large companies are accessing to get their brands and products in front of an increasingly mobile, Internet-savvy host of consumers.

Online marketing can be the key to offline sales and small business success. Leading search engine industry journal, SearchEngineLand ran a “Small is Beautiful” column by Matt McGee this week detailing the lessons that small business owners have learned taking their advertising and marketing campaigns online. Key amongst their findings from the anecdotal evidence of small business owners who have made a concerted and successful effort to market their businesses over the Internet were:

The Internet can be your business’ primary source for generating new customers and leads.

A consistent effort must be made to keep abreast of the latest trends and techniques in online marketing.

Local search matters, so market to the audience where you do business.

The visual impact of your web page is crucial.

The more you can differentiate your products and services from your competitors to carve out a niche market, the more you will stand out.

“Listening to the experiences of others can be a great learning tool,” McGee notes, “especially when those small business owners have gone down paths you’ve been hesitant to try, or maybe didn’t even know existed.”

The case for the growing importance of local search to small business was nicely made by Brian Wool at The ClickZ Network (www.clickz.com). Characterizing local search as the get-no-respect, “Rodney Dangerfield of Online Marketing,” Mr. Wool notes that Internet pundits have long been calling for the demise of traditional media like local newspapers and the Yellow Pages™ who draw much of their ad revenue from local advertising.

“There’s certainly been no cliff,” he writes, referring to the presumed fate and destination of traditional print that seems headed for a fall as consumers adopt online search to find local products and services, “just steady growth online and constant decline in many traditional advertising media.” The most recent numbers from JupiterResearch, a leading technology research consulting firm, forecast that online advertising revenues will grow 20% in 2008, while traditional media advertising will falter along at 4%.

These trends show that advertisers are recognizing the growing importance of local search to consumers who are more and more using the Internet, and mobile search from Internet-capable mobile phones, to ferret out local products online.

Contrasting the quality of free local search results that consumers are getting on search engines like Yahoo! and Yellowpages.com with pay-per-call search results from traditional directory service assistance calls - and, particularly, the quality of search results he found using Google Maps on his iPhone - Mr. Wool makes a convincing case that these trends will only continue and deepen. His analysis makes it clear that local small businesses will have to come to grips with the necessity of establishing an online marketing profile and a searchable web page that their potential local customers can find online - and, perhaps more importantly, find from their iPhone.