Many small business owners still think that a website does not apply to their particular local business or niche. WRONG. The simple fact is that a basic five page website (with the proper elements in place) can bring you a fresh new wave of customers. Here are some interesting statistics as of March, 2009.

Pool Builders – 1,300 searches per month on Google
Florida Pool Builders – 320 searches per month on Google

Lawn Maintenance – 6,600 searches per month on Google
South Florida Lawn Care – 75 searches per month on Google

Daycare Center – 4,,400 searches per month on Google
Pembroke Pines Daycare – 36 searches per month on Google

( * source - Google Keyword Tool, March 2009)

Even though the more general term searches have much higher volumes, the search phrases including the modifiers of “Florida”, “South Florida” and “Pembroke Pines” for example, will deliver more relevant, qualified customers. You can see that as you filter down through State, Regional and City subgroups of South Florida business types that the number of average searches per month goes down. However these are much more specific searches from potential customers that are far more likely to be making a purchase.

Now, look at it this way. If 75 people were to open a phonebook (yellow pages) in South Florida and look up “lawn care”, a simple phone number listing of your local business may share a page with upwards of 100 competitors. Whereas, if 75 people performed a search on Google for the phrase “south florida lawn care” and you had a website that was properly optimized for that phrase, you could be on the first pages of Google search results shared by only 9-25 competitors. That is quite an increase in the chances a potential customer’s eye will catch your business listing.  Moreover, the number of people “Googling” instead of opening a phonebook is growing rapidly. From local physicians, realtors, contractors, lawn professionals and painters - to child care centers, plumbers, dog groomers or any small business, the concept applies.

A well advertised, basic website is increasingly affordable as well.  If you advertise your business in local print medium like “The Yellow Pages”, “The Flyer”, “The Home Mag”, “The New Times”, “Red Plum” or other local newspaper, you already understand the importance and value of local business advertising. The World Wide Web is shrinking and coming to a town near YOU. It’s time to develop a local geographic web presence for your hometown business with a locally optimized website.

Mammoth SEO Web Design specializes in search engine optimization for local business websites.  If you would like to learn more about designing a website tailored to your business, visit us at http://www.mammothinternet.com/

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If your business has not taken these initial steps by now,

You will see the impact on your Web generated leads and sales within 30 days.

He then explains:

Many of them however, offer automatically approved listings - meaning that all you have to do is submit your site and it will get listed. Which means anyone else can do the same thing. Which means that there is a good chance that your site will end up among a slew of spammy and just plain poor-quality sites.

I must agree that human-edited directories will provide much more relevant links. This means that there is a person or group of people checking (sometimes editing) every link that is submitted thus controlling the quality of the listings that get in.

“When listings are human approved, there is a much better chance that the internal pages of that directory will list sites that are truly relevant to each other “, Chris adds.

Quality content and relevant links have NO Substitute to the search engines today. Strength in numbers maybe somewhat apply but good content and relevancy will always rule.

Read the Full Article at smallbusinessnewz.com

The article outlines the extremely informative presentation Stewart and Espinosa delivered and touches on the billions that will be spent on Local Search Advertising,
creating press releases and paying for listings/trustmarks from BBB, city directories and category-specific sites. They also discuss the importance of utilizing local business ads (geo-targeted) to capture broader phrases in PPC campaigns. Lewis then includes “Espinosa also highly recommends utilizing social media sites like Digg and MySpace. He recommends encouraging customers to rate and review on social media sites”. Espinoza also outlined a local video strategy. Read the Full Article …