Local search is one of the biggest things on Internet marketing in the past year. The Internet is now available in most homes and being used to look up local services. In a time when competition is at its peak and businesses are fighting for every potential customer, getting into the first page of the search results could mean a huge increase in business for local services.
Many local services businesses are not yet aware of this change in consumer behavior is taking place, they are still in an age where a regular business listing in “the book” got you all the clients you wanted, and when a billboard ad outside of town made the business known in the area. When a traditional local service manager or owner gets to negotiate Internet promotion they could be in for a considerable surprise in terms of costs and time it would take to start seeing some return.
What should local businesses expect from local Internet search clients? In short, they could expect everything, a local service could grow its client base considerably by ranking for their services online, the business could also offer deals and special promotions through its Internet site, pushing one particular product to the public, creating value to the client and to the business.
Top local listings will result in emails and contact us forms, telephones and on line quote requests, but this will take time to happen, it does not happen overnight, and expecting it to have an immediate effect might lead to frustration and anger. It is the responsibility of the houston seo consultant to explain that planning the search engine optimization process and executing it can take up to two months, and one that is done it might take another 5 months for solid ranking and consistent stream of visitors to the site.
This issue is even more complex if the local business does not have a web site, or has one page of text that has no contact information or services list. In most cases it is possible to set up a quick blog to serve as the main page for the services and contact information of the business, but both search engine optimizers and business owners should aspire to have an individual site, with a domain name and a unique design, otherwise promotion might waste energy on pushing a temporary page.
Once a site is built and running the next goal will be to take over some market share and create a web name for the services of that local business, the target is to get as high up as possible in the natural search engine results so that potential clients could see and visit the site from the very page they ran the term query on. Achieving first page ranking for a local business could mean much more than just that ego boost for its workers and managers, having a site rank high for its natural services names, or for its products combined with the name of the location it is in makes a serious combination of branding and market power.
For example one of the businesses we have worked with in the past managers had told us a little story that explains how powerful it could be to rank well on the big search engines, after the business had finishing building its website and optimized its pages for search the general manager asked all the workers to stop using their business cards and tell anyone who asked them what is their number or contact info that they could be found by typing the name of the service plus the name of the town, and that it would show up on the first spot, this manager told us his website generated more business than they made through the phone in just 6 months.