Two Easy Ways for Local Businesses to Get Found Online

Many small business owners build their websites without understanding exactly how their customers will find it. This can lead to a major letdown after you've put a lot of time and energy into building a great looking site, only to have few if any visitors coming to check it out.

It can also put a lot of pressure on you financially to get people over to your site. You may feel compelled to turn to a search engine optimization service. Or you may learn how to optimize your site for search engines yourself. These can both work very well. But unfortunately SEO costs money, and learning it yourself can be confusing and complicated. Additionally SEO takes time and the results are never guaranteed.

Thankfully, there are a couple of free options that can get your website in front of potential customers without needing any technical expertise. But first, it's important to know a little bit about how people find things online.

Most people navigate the web using Google, the world's most popular search engine. A good local SEO company will optimize your site so that Google can find it easily when people search for the name of your business plus the city or town you live in.

For instance, let's say you run an electronics store in town. If you were trying to rank on Google for the keyword "electronics store", you'd be up against major players like Best Buy and Target. The chances of being able to show up on page one of Google's results would be very low unless you spent a lot of money building links to your site, etc.

But if you are located in say, Syracuse, NY, this should be a lot easier. You wouldn't be pursuing the keyword "electronics store", but rather "syracuse ny electronics store". And there would be a lot less competition and much easier to show up on page 1. SEO is definitely worth it, but it takes time and costs money, and can be tedious. There are 2 easier, faster precursors to local SEO that will help get your site in front of local customers.

When you do a search on Google for a local business, you've probably seen the results on the side that include a map and business listings with star ratings, etc. These listings are not the result of expensive or time consuming SEO.
Believe it or not, these search results are free websites that Google gives away to anybody in the world who owns a business and knows how to claim them. They are called "Places" pages.

Claiming a "Places" page is as easy as signing up for an email accont. Just go to google.com/places and click the sign up button. You may need to create a Google account. Google will ask for your phone number and general information about your business, like its hours of operation, nature of business, phone number, etc.

Then, you will be asked to verify your address. Google will mail you a postcard with a code on it. You should receive the post card within a few weeks. Simply enter the code into your Places account and you are ready to rock! Your places page will begin showing up in proximity to searches related to the zip code of your business!

A Google Places page is a huge asset, especially with cell phone search traffic. Google is activating more than 500,000 Android phones a day, and cell phone searches already outnumber regular internet searches. Most Google searches are local in nature and the top results come from Places pages. This is a great free way to get in front of thousands of cell phone surfers as well as web surfers.

There are also ways to make your Places page show up higher in the results. You can do this by adding photos, detailed information, a link to your website... and most of all Customer Reviews.

If you ask your satisfied customers to enter in a simple rating, or receive them naturally, your Places page will show up higher and higher in the rankings. Also, good Customer Reviews show social proof of the quality of your business, and can help bring in more customers. Here's an example:

Look how the local Best Buy is just a few positions above "Mike's Mattresses". If this local business just got a few more customer reviews, they would likely pass Best Buy. Also notice how the Places results appear above the organic listings. The top result "Ra Lin" is the result of local seo, and they are feature above Best Buy, but it is still below all the map results. And the Ra Lin example doesn't have a places page.

Most small business owners still do not know about this free resource. Make sure to check it out to put your business ahead!

2. Yelp.

Speaking of social proof, that's what Yelp is all about. In fact, Google often pulls data from Yelp for local searches when it can't find enough Places pages.

Yelp is super popular website where people can sound off on their experiences with local businesses. Yelp has more of a social networking feel than Google Places. Experienced Yelpers bring credibility to their reviews, so if you happened to get reviewed by someone who has been on the site for a long time, it can be good news for your business.
Many restaurants in my area have banners saying "People love us on YELP!" right in their store, to encourage people to write kind things about them.

Similar to Google places, Yelp will serve up the businesses with the most ratings first. And those with higher customer ratings are also treated more favorably, and tend to win over the trust of new visitors. You can also create special Yelp only deals to entice customers to check out your business. Yelp also offers special online tools to help track traffic and customer behavior. And like Google places, Yelp is Free for business owners!

Go here: https://biz.yelp.com to sign up you business for Yelp.

You very well may find it beneficial to enlist the help of a good SEO company to help your website show up for various keywords in your area. But as we mentioned before, this process can take a bit of time and money. The great thing about these two options is that they are free and your business will begin showing up very quickly.

There you have it. Two free and easy ways to get your business visible and visitors to you website without needing any technical skills.

Seth Jared is a blogger and SEO consultant. He also blogs about health and lifestyle issues such as how to get abs and online psychic readings.

2011-11-30 | Add a Comment

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Satchell | 2011-12-04 01:49:52 | reply How neat! Is it rlealy this simple? You make it look easy.

Seth | 2011-12-12 22:07:07 | reply It is actually that easy. Just try it out for yourself!

Beatriz | 2012-03-17 05:55:33 | reply . Your favorite raseon seemed to be on the web the simplest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I definitely get irked while people think about worries that they just don't know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and defined out the whole thing without having side-effects , people can take a signal. Will probably be back to get more. Thanks

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