For the brick and mortar small business, it’s all about local.
Forget about SEO, blogging, gaining back links, and posting to Facebook and Twitter for a moment. If you want to draw visitors to your physical storefront, you need to focus on ‘local’ first. Get the local part right, and the rest will begin to make sense. All paths will lead directly to your door.
Is your business visible on the map?
Navigate to Google Maps and type your business category and location into the search box. Does your business show up? Is it at or near the top of the list? If so, click on your listing. How does it look? Has it been owner-verified?
Now go to Bing’s Business Portal and Yahoo Local and do the same thing. Answer the same questions.
Those are the big three, but what about Yelp.com, MerchantCircle.com, Angie’s List, SuperPages.com, Local.com, Kudzu, Manta, InsiderPages, and do you know if you’re showing up on mobile and GPS enabled devices?
As a local business owner, you need to be highly visible on ALL the maps. Your listings need to be accurate, consistent, and present you in the best possible light.
Many local directory listings function as external supporting websites – providing not only your business name, address and phone number, but also links to your website, your social media profiles, third party reviews, even image and video uploads, and the ability to post blogs and coupons.
The upside is that the opportunity to increase your online visibility is huge. The downside is that I don’t know of one single business owner who has the time or the patience to make sure he’s listed properly in all the local directories.
That’s why we’ve developed our local directory listing packages. You can be visible wherever your customers are searching, without having to make the time to do it all yourself.
For more information, read What Do Search Engines Know About Your Business?
For small businesses like this SEO is key. They don’t have a ton of competition so if they know how to optimize their site and use some other SEO tools they will go straight to the top of Google searches.
Josh, wouldn’t it be great if it were just that easy? I agree that a good SEO’d website is the foundation, but that alone won’t propel anyone to the top of Google searches.
@ Josh : No, you don’t get it. For small businesses, it is important to establish yourself locally before trying to conquer the SEO rankings. Why? Let’s say that you are ranking number 1 for Google UK, but in your own local Google listing you don’t even appear on the first ten pages, how would that be beneficial for your business? Remember, your customers are in your locality and not in U.K. Establish yourself locally, and as Shari said, you will eventually reap all the benefits. After that you can start owning the web through SEO.