The dream of having a global presence which works for you locally is one that’s as old as the web. As search engines became more refined and their ability to pick up and serve local information became more refined it also became more reliable to look for a pizza restaurant or a hardware store in your neighborhood online than get in your car and drive around looking for one.

Still, the web, as a local search tool, was a little less wieldy, particularly as it grows at the rate of 200,000 new websites a day. This is where Google local business centre changes everything. By registering you gain the ability to leverage Google’s large presence and drive local customers to your door. There is more than that and the video below explains exactly what it is and what it does. By providing you with data based on local searches it gives you an additional tool to refine your business and understand what your customers are looking for.

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The web is changing at a tremendous pace with constant refinements allowing drilling down to your target customer base, provided of course, you are aware of what to do and take the steps necessary to do it. Geotagging for instance and localization are classic steps which require direct SEO action and they have the power to drive customers from the web to your doorstep at an immediately local level.

To win in business today you definitely need a web presence. Once you have it the next step is understanding everything you need to do in order to make use of the tools available to you to help promote it. Way too often search engine optimization (SEO) is seen as a cat-and-mouse game between a website owner and a search engine. Nothing could be further from the truth. Search engines, like Google, have a vested interest in finding and indexing your website and serving it up on the relevant search results for those who are looking for your products and services.

To do this they put in place huge sums of research dollars and new search technology (like localization for instance). What you need to do is keep up to date about it and make sure you use it.

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