Local Serches
Why is there a need to optimize for local searches?
What is the difference between two guys, one living now and the other living a decade ago, but both were to be confronted with where to buy the cheapest beef steak in town? Now, as you might know if you are aware of life a decade ago, if you had wanted to buy the cheapest thing in town, you would have to go out and make a survey at the various markets, groceries or scan the local papers (if there had been one), or yellow pages to spot the cheapest available in the market. Compared to that, the guy who is confronted with the same problem now will just have to click on the computer and look at the appropriate place and get the answer, even with his pajamas still on! And in another couple of years time (perhaps even now) all you have to do is just find it with your hand phone, probably still lying in bed.
Indeed society is getting more and more efficient and all those wasteful methods of yore will be permanently replaced by just a click away, probably made possible by wires and electricity. With global warming, we just have no choice. We are now driving smaller cars and in a couple of year’s time, we will have to use more renewable sources of energy. People will need to change the way they used to do things and the old methods will just have to be discarded. And as we live a very much wired world now, we can see even more changes in our lifestyles, especially those of the younger generations. One of the important things that we do is to search for something. Be it a long forgotten school mate, or an answer to a sticky problem, or what to eat for dinner, we have to search for it. And now, the natural thing to do is to turn to the World Wide Web from our computers or from our phones for the answer.
Just how significant is doing search in our daily lives? Well, according to researches being done, over 80% of local market consumers visit the internet first to get information, and then buy them locally, using online methods. It used to be the print media that showed us the way, but even that is changing. It seems that over 55% of consumers now don't consult print media at all! And as a result, many media companies are folding their operation, or even putting up an online version to stay alive. So we can expect many other changes coming. There are many companies, especially those old timers who do not sense these changes coming, or worse, who don’t know how to confront the changing times. Some don’t even have a website yet or don’t know what a www.com means!
With people migrating to the internet to seek things out, it would be wise to put up a presence in the internet. It is even critical now that the recession is biting in. Putting up a front might be the easiest of the part. Getting being found on the internet is the hard part. It is called web positioning. That is getting your web site in the first three pages of any keyword category of the search results in Google, Yahoo or MSN. It is a new ball game altogether, one that not many people are aware of yet, and most importantly the business people who should be the one to know about first don’t even know! However, if web positioning proves undoable in the short term, then the other way is to pay for getting to the front by means of paying fees to the search engines to get listed. The reason for getting to the front three pages is that people just don’t go beyond clicking to the other pages.
You might have heard of the cliché that getting online opens you to the world. But what if you are in a business that is not suitable for sale to that guy on the other side of the globe? Suppose you are selling a service like servicing home air-conditioners. Then it would not matter if at all that chap on the far ocean gets to find you. Indeed, this kind of businesses which is locally centric makes the majority out there. Should you then ignore putting out an internet front? Unfortunately, you too cannot ignore the internet. Even though you cater to the local business, you still need to be found, and in this case it is the local results on the search engines. As internet search has matured, the search engines are now targeting local searches, that is, the listing of search results that they think might be useful for searchers from that area. The search engines can now know where you are searching from, using technologies that identifies the exact place where the searcher is located. And they will render a different set of search result for the searcher quite different from someone else located in a different area. With this trend, the search engines are really tapping into the next avenue of growth, and they think that is where the big money is to be found! Your money at that!
If you have a business that is more local centric and you have yet to embrace the internet, perhaps PatentAgentip will be able to help you structure something that will make you easily being found online. This will boost your revenue and ensure that your enterprise can beat the competitions, wherever they are. As a footnote, be aware that there are more than two billion searches every month, and rising every minute of the day! Email us at inq@patentagentip.com now for more insight on optimizing for local searches!
July 6,2009