How Local Business Can Win with Search

The article, How Local Business Can Win with Search by David Vazdauskas provides a nice summary of the whole local search picture. The crux of the article is something that I have been talking about, to my clients, for years.  David wrote:

“A lot of entrants in the online local marketing space are concentrating on just one or two [of the marketing prongs]. The real winners might be those who figure out a way to touch all the bases.” AMEN!

Many of the small, local businesses that I have worked with, become hesitant when it comes to website promotions. They get “cold feet”, becoming concerned about money, time invested etc.  Now I totally understand their concerns, because for most, on-line marketing is a foreign concept and they do not understand what it all means.  When I talk with a client, I try to explain that to be successful on-line, we need to come from different angles and that simply doing one thing usually is not enough. You have to use a multi-prong attack.

Regarding local search, David lists the 3 prongs of local to be brand building, traffic building, trust and service. All of these are critical to small businesses and when you use local search marketing to promote and increase your visibility on-line, make sure to take all of these into account. Right now, as David also points out, there really isn’t one “local online marketing space” that takes into account all of these items.  That is true, and it will be interesting to see if this changes in the future. For now though, you can touch all these bases (or prongs),  it just takes a little more work and having a marketing professional (such as myself 🙂 ) showing you how to do it. [Sorry, could not resist the plug!]