You can go ahead and create your slick Flash website and not worry a bit about getting all your traffic from India or China or heaven forbid - New York City. If you have a nail shop in Tulsa you really don’t want traffic from Oklahoma City anyway; you want visitors that can actually get to your shop without booking an overnight hotel stay. The good news is that Google now understands that and wants to help everyone locate services they’ll actually use.
The Yellow Pages are Actually Turning Yellow
Nearly 70% of all searches are related to local content. Shoppers are still letting their fingers do the talking but those digits are now walking across keyboards - not phone books. Google is rapidly replacing the Yellow Pages as the source for local commercial information.
Big name internet research firms like ComScore and the MIT Technology Review have uncovered some pretty amazing facts about search behavior as it relates to commercial sites. For example, MIT found that for every $1.00 of merchandise purchased online through an eCommerce site, $5.00 of merchandise was purchased locally as a direct result of an online search. That’s an amazing statistic considering the business ecommerce giants like E-Bay.com and Amazon.com and thousands of smaller sites do each year.
ComScore found that 42% of consumers interviewed said that they researched their purchase online before buying offline. 52% of all consumers interviewed said that they regularly use online search rather than the Yellow Pages.
One last statistic that you might want to consider: over 90% of US consumers do comparison shopping online and of that group, over half describe themselves as shopping online but buying offline.
Google’s mission in life is to deliver the most relevant return to a searcher’s query. If a searcher who lives in Tulsa enters “where can I get my nails done?” showing that searcher results from anywhere other than Tulsa is pointless.
Try it one time. Enter a product or service like “divorce attorney” or”Greek Deli” or “clogged drain” and see what you get back as a response. Don’t be surprised to see nothing but local returns. You might even see an insert that shows a map and “stick pins” that identify the location of shops and services. Getting on that index isn’t going to happen simply by putting up a website. Google learned a thing or two from the Yellow Pages.
Now try entering a keyword phrase that would be relevant to your own business and see what you get. Do you see your competition in the listings? If the answer is yes, then you need to get your website builder skills in gear and get your site up if you want to compete. If the answer is no…great news! Your site, if you build it right will be the only one there because your competition isn’t as bright as you are. Why not get your share of this free advertising?
So how can you get found on the first page of Google when a local visitor searches for a keyword phrase that you have optimized?
For starters you can include the name of your town in the title of your website. If you run a nail shop in Tulsa you can name the site “NailShopTulsa” or “manicuretulsa”.
Make sure your street address, including your zip code, appears on every page. It doesn’t have to be huge, it’s just got to be there somewhere for Google’s bot to spot. In addition, if you serve an area greater than the town your shop is in, list those other towns as well.
Your content should obviously include the name of your town. In fact think of your town as a keyword phrase and use it appropriately in your text.
Of course you can scale this technique up or down depending on how big or small a community you serve. For example if your shop is in Westwood, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, then you want to use that neighborhood name not Los Angeles. On the other hand, if you live in Hog Bucket, AK then you might want to use the county name rather than the village name.
The lesson to take away from all of this is just because you are a small local business does not mean you can’t rule the roost on the search engines. Go ahead and build a website and get your fair share of these online shoppers.
