Small Business Web Site Needs to be Optimized for Local Search

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.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under Local Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.