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.
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.
Make search something you are good at. Get your website ranked on Google's first page with a tried-and-tested, practical, 20-step method that works. Now updated for Google Panda's search algorithm update. Low on cost, high on value.
My day started this morning with someone sharing an inspiring poster on Google Plus which said: Google was late to searchFacebook was late to social networkingApple was late to the MP3 player
09-01-2012 Hits:1779 Web Talk
The most successful marketing is no different to the most successful business model: you get across the message why you are different and provide a compelling reason for your potential customers to do business with you.
14-04-2011 Hits:1315 SEO Tips
Authors are always at their most vulnerable when they read reviews about their books and those reviews are at their most powerful when they are written by the direct target audience; the reader. Whilst it is easy to ignore critics who...
14-04-2011 Hits:921 WEB View
Pinterest, the social sharing site that allows users to create collages of ‘pinned’ pictures of what they like, gathered 11 million viewers last month and it’s growing at a rate of knots yet there are relatively few mentions of it...
31-01-2012 Hits:844 Social Media News
With the official, global roll out of Google’s +1 Button Google launches its assault on the social web.
07-06-2011 Hits:1287 SEO Tips
Authors always need feedback on the books we write. This is never more useful than when it comes to a non-fiction book, with a totally practical bias, designed to help ordinary webmasters win big on the online...
14-04-2011 Hits:216 WEB View
Google’s president and still very public face, Eric Schimdt confirmed at the Mobile World Congress that personalization is a big thing for Google and will continue to be so, featuring high in its priorities.
29-02-2012 Hits:1357 Google News
Hand up those who feel a nostalgia for the good ‘ol days when optimizing a website meant putting in place some meta tags, adding a couple of keywords and then filling in the phone number which passed for your search...
07-06-2011 Hits:803 Google News
The question of how to get your website to Google’s first page is the one which every webmaster obsesses about. Given the fact that for any given search term there are competitors and there are only ten available...
14-04-2011 Hits:691 SEO Tips
Every week you will get an email newsletter with my personal recommendations on social media marketing tips and crucial SEO advice to help your business succeed faster, at a lower cost.
Subscribe to HelpMySEO via 
email.
I’ve led the discussion on how social media and SEO are changing the processes we use to work and live, online, with the publication of my book ‘The Social Media Mind’. I combine experience in journalism and blue-chip corporate management with a penchant for explaining complex issues in simple terms. Contact me for media interviews, presentations and panel discussions
