Local hometown business owners, such as auto mechanics, plumbers, day care centres, grocery stores, retail shops, veterinarians, and landscaping companies often make a serious mistake in assuming that they do not need to have their own websites. Local business owners who cannot sell their products and services online assume that a directory listing is all they will ever need to find new customers on the Internet. But, if you are a local business owner, that kind of thinking will cost you money!

Local Search Is Moving Online

There was a time when your local phone book was one of the best ways a local business could market itself. But that is no longer the case when shoppers spend most of their free time sitting in front of a computer. It reached the point where, when people want to find a local telephone number, they will simply type in a city name and business type into their favorite search toolbar to find the phone number they want.

If you have any doubt as to this assertion, consider your own experiences. When was the last time “you” picked up the phone book to find a local business? I don’t think I even cracked open my phone book in the last year.

According to Comscore (a company that tracks online usage statistics), 40% of all online searches are related finding to local information. 

Your City, Your Service Type

When people search online for local products and services in general, they will type in (your city or locality) and (your service type) as their search criteria.

For example, to find a car mechanic in Sydney, Australia, people tend to type the following for their search requests: Sydney NSW car mechanic, or Sydney New South Wales auto mechanic. To find a carpet layer in New York City, people will type in a search request, similar to these examples: NYC carpet layer, New York City carpet laying company, Brooklyn carpet layer, etc.

Once we stop and think about how people actually search online, it becomes abundantly clear why a directory listing is such an inefficient method of attracting online searchers to an offline business.

There Is More Than One Way To Say Something

As seen in the examples above, when it comes time to put in the local region where people are looking for services, nearly any city on the planet can be described in multiple ways. Even a searcher located in San Francisco might type in any of the following to describe his or her location: San Francisco California, San Francisco Calif, San Francisco CA. He or she may also type in any of a dozen suburbs of San Francisco.

Even locations such as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma provide challenges to the company trying to be found in the search engines. Locals might type in any of the following phrases to describe Oklahoma City: OKC; Ok City; Okla City; and Oklahoma City. Some will combine the city name with the state name or state abbreviation, while others will think it redundant.

Even when typing in a product or service type, search engine users think in very distinct ways and often type in a range of words designed to find exactly what they are looking to find online. A car dealership can be described as: car dealership; car lot; car sales; auto dealership; auto lot; auto sales; automotive dealership; automotive lot; automotive sales; used car dealership; used car lot; used car sales; new car dealership; new car lot; new car sales; and any of a dozen other combinations including car descriptions and car makes and models.

The Problem With Internet Directories

When you go to an Internet Directory to list your product or service, you are severely limited in what you can expect from that directory. In most cases, you are given only so many text characters, generally 80-100 characters to title your listing. Then you are given a short description from 50-255 characters to describe your company. Even worse, you are limited to assigning the directory’s pre-determined category descriptions to your website.

When you find yourself having to pay $5 to $399 per listing, per year, for your business in an Internet Directory, you have to be very selective about how you choose to describe your company. But, the unfortunate reality is that when you set up your description in one directory, your scope of advertising is strictly limited.

Think about it this way. How many television advertisements would companies buy if the TV station said that the advertiser could only design one commercial and they would have to keep using that one commercial for the next year or for the life of their business? What if the television station went one step further and said that the advertiser could only design their ad to target 5% of their total target market? And, what if the television station said that the advertiser could only tell part of their story in their one commercial?

The truth is that if television stations ran their businesses the way Internet Directories run their businesses, then businesses would not advertise on TV, and we consumers would have much less choice in our entertainment possibilities.

According to a survey conducted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, based in the United States, 85% of users found information through search engines, while only 58% of searchers used web directories. Over the last several years, the search engine companies have done well to integrate their search tools into our browsers, so more of us are using the search engine companies now, than what we did in recent years.

The Power Of Local Search

In a 2007 report on the importance of search engines, Bob Ivins, executive vice-president of international markets at comScore proclaimed, “With the tremendous volume of search activity occurring around the world, search continues to present an abundance of marketing opportunities to companies on both a global and local scale.” Ivins made this statement when comScore announced that there had been 61 billion searches conducted worldwide during the month of August 2007.

According to J.D. Power & Associates, 89% of new vehicle buyers use a search engine or portal at some point in their research, and 94% of used vehicle buyers do so.

SearchEngineWatch.com, one of the leading search engine news websites says that 55% of Internet users use search engines to find info about local firms.

ThePetStar.com goes one step further. In statistics they include on their website, they said, “70% of U.S. households do some kind of search for a local service or product on a daily basis.” They even suggested that during the second quarter of 2006, 47 percent of local searchers visited a local merchant as a result of their online search behavior.

Offline Businesses Need To Be Online

Once again, it should be noted that web directory listings seldom live up to their hope and promise.

According to comScore’s qSearch 2.0, Google accounted for 60% of all Internet searches done in August of 2007. Depending on where you get your facts, sources suggest Google is responsible for somewhere between 60-70% of all search requests made online.

That is why this next bit of information is important. In Google’s never-ending quest to provide users with better search results, Google dropped the guillotine on most web directories in August of 2007. It was at this juncture when Google made the decision that most web directories offered poor value to web users, and as a result, Google began to significantly discount the importance of directories in their search results.

According to those who specialize in optimizing websites for the search engines, there are only 16 web directories worthy of consideration. They list those directories, along with a generous source of additional information about helping a website rank well in Google and the other search engines here: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

Local Companies Need Their Own Websites

Most local businesses do not need a comprehensive website like one would find at Cnet.com or FoxNews.com, but they do need a website.

Given all of the limitations associated with web directories, it should be more than obvious that a local company needs its own flexible, one-page website, at the very least.

Most local companies limit their websites to two or three pages, and often that provides more than enough information to allow a local business to get noticed in the search engines.

The most effective websites for local companies will offer a brief introduction to the company, how to locate or contact the company, and it will permit any web searcher to type in any variation of local neighborhood descriptions to attract the right customers to the local businesspersons’ website.

It simply is not enough to rank well in the search engines for a generic term such as “landscaping”. The people looking for landscaping businesses online are typing in more descriptive terms, such as: My City, My State, landscaping professionals. Whatever search phrase people type into Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine in a quest to find your business, searchers need to be able to type in those terms to find you!

In the end, it is up to you. Don’t buy an ad in the fictional WooHoo web directory or any other web directory. It will make far more sense in the long run to spend a few more dollars to build a one-page or three-page website that will enable you to reach more people online, taking the greatest advantage of consumers’ local search habits.