If you do, you can create a website that can expound your benefits and bring a great deal of business to your door. The demise of the tedious-to-navigate mass of paper in the old-style Yellow Pages directory, with the associated mystery about the quality of anyone listed there, has led to a huge rise in searches for services online in recent years. The trouble with the old Yellow Pages is that it was a bit hit-and-miss; you would have no idea about the services you were purchasing until they arrived at your door. With the advent of websites that offer all kinds of information about a service provider or product seller, the power is now back in the hands of the purchaser.
If you create a website that has all the details that at visitor needs to know, presented in an easy-to-find manner and perhaps some recommendations from satisfied customers, you will have already won the hearts of many a site visitor. You may think, “This is all very well if I have plenty of needy people visiting my website! – Where will they come from?” The truth is that when it comes to organic searches, little guys have the same opportunities as the big conglomerates. Nevertheless, local businesses can easily become high-ranking contenders in the Google results pages and this can be a lucrative position to be in.
The truth is that 20% of online searches for local services and products result in a sale. This is a very high conversion ratio in comparison to any other type of website product sale or service. Unlike the normal purchase rate of an online product or service nationally (typically 1%, and even worse globally at usually less than a 0.1% conversion rate of visitors to sales) this is a huge market advantage. The fact that Google places you high on the list is not an accident; if somebody has a water leak and needs a plumber, the last thing they need is a website about a distributor of waste management products from another state. So in line with the Yellow Pages ethos, Google places local businesses high on the list if you create a website, and manually subscribe to them with a description of what you offer. Just don’t use auto-submission software; Google may reduce your ranking.
Now you also need to make sure your website builder can incorporate the necessary keywords for you in the right places to ensure your site can get a high listing when a search is made. If the search engines cannot find words that relate to their queries, you will not be listed - it’s as simple as that!
Another useful tip is to submit your site to a directory listing. They are similar to search engines but their results are human resourced and not software driven. Humans look at submitted websites and assess them for their worth. The Open Directory Project is staffed by volunteers who have no incentive to rate sites better than any other so a local business can create a free website that will convey all the necessary details for someone to find them, and a real person will look at it, check out basic functionality and rate it. For instance a local Dog Grooming Service could make a website that shows where they are, what they do and how to get there etc. with some links to grooming products and pricing details. This would be enough to get your site a good listing in the directory and even better rank in Google as they place a high regard to this type of successful Directory listing. Be careful to write your descriptions accurately – telling them that you are the best in the world is not going to be a successful approach! Be realistic and informative in your descriptions and similarly with your keywords, make sure they have been chosen to make the most of your market.
The future is bright for online businesses that make a little time to create a website that is seen to be useful and has products that local people need; the search engines are actually giving local businesses a market advantage by weighting the search results in such a way. So you don’t have to be one of the big companies to make a success of a local business through online marketing, with just a small effort you can do quite well just as you are!
