When was the last time you searched for a local business in your area on a search engine?

You as a business owner probably haven’t searched for your own profession though, because you have never been in need of that kind of help. If you really think about it, your customers go online to find local merchants, retailers, and trades people all the time. Probably even without thinking about it.

What we are talking about is local search engine marketing and what it can do for your business exposure and lead generation.

How about an example to help illustrate what we are talking about here. Go to Google Local Search or Yahoo Local, which are probably the two highest used search engines for searching locally. Now try to find your business listing. Do you have a sponsored link for your area for example? Do you see your competition across the street even.

By searching for “Boston Dental” in Google Local Search and I got the following listings (click on the images to enlarge):

Next time I repeated the same search using Yahoo Local  for “Dental in Boston” and I got the following listings (click on the images to enlarge):

In both examples New England Dental was displayed in the top spot. Now if I was living in Boston and looking for a new dentist this dental practice would definitely be top of my mind.

The lesson in this example is actually two-fold:

1) Make sure you commit to doing online advertising using local keywords such as town, city or county for your area.
Before your competitors pick up on this strategy to corner the local market.

2) Make sure you have a consistent business listings in both Google and Yahoo which was the case in the example above.
These business listings are free to setup but will help to promote your business locally and maybe even outside of your current advertising budget could reach.

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