Do you have a business, large or small, that has a specific geographical service area? If you do, then you are probably using traditional methods to market your firm right? Have you ever considered using local internet marketing to drive new business?
For many companies the answer is no and the reason for that is they believe that the internet has too broad a reach to be relevant to their service area. And until fairly recently they were correct. However today, more and more resources are being put to use to “localize” the internet, particularly in search, to make it a more useful source of information and that’s important news for internet marketing of local businesses.
Why is that?
Let’s take a look at some very surprising statistics.
– According to the Kelsey Group, 70% of all American households are using the internet to research information when looking for local services and products. That is a huge number.
– If you are in a B to B business, 31% of all businesses looking for local products search for them on the internet.
– And perhaps the most surprising statistic, product information and price comparisons are done online but 61% of those products researched are actually purchased offline. That coupled with the fact that 90% of all purchases are made within 50 miles of the consumer’s home speaks volumes to the importance of internet marketing for local business.
This data is not lost on the search engines, social media sites and cell phone providers. There is a continual effort to bring local data to local users. The more this trend develops, the more users are going to rely on it. Shouldn’t your company be a part of this?
Think about it a moment. With GPS technology, a user can query an application on his or her mobile device asking for specific directions to “whatever”. “Where’s the nearest drugstore?” or “Where’s the nearest Wells Fargo ATM?” The application will deliver specific directions based on the GPS location of the user and the GPS location of the search results. Do you think this kind of instant information technology is going to go away?
If you are still not impressed with these statistics and examples consider this. 43% of all the searches done on the Google network include a geographical identifier. That means hundreds of millions of searches each month have either a zip code, city, state or other identifier to make the results relevant to a specific geographic area. That is pretty awesome.
Try this little experiment. Go to Google and enter [keyword tool] and click the “I’m feeling lucky” button. This will take you to Google’s External Keyword tool. Put in the type of business you are and then add your geographic location and hit enter. What you get back will be the number of searches made each month for your type business in your service area.
For example if you put in “plumber Redondo Beach” you’ll get back a little over 300 searches made. Now Redondo Beach is a town of about 63,000 so those are not bad results. Imagine if you could convert 10% of those searches into service calls. At an average of $150 per call, you would be increasing your monthly revenue by $4500.
Armed with this information, is there any reason you can think of that would cause you to believe you shouldn’t be involved with local internet marketing for your business? Now it’s a matter of laying out a plan and getting your name in front of those local searches.
