Roughly 75% of business owners I talk to in any town or city see little to no need for an online presence. They believe in doing business the way it’s always been done, with local advertising, foot traffic, phone book listings or ads, special promotions, and word-of-mouth marketing, and they assume that local residents will find out about their business in these same places. ways.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with these methods of promotion, but they do create a tunnel vision of marketing today. In September 2004, a Kelsey Group-BizRate.com study found that over 74% of respondents said they had searched locally and confirmed that 20% of all searches among respondents were local. Whether business owners recognize it or not, the Internet is here to stay, and using the Internet to find local businesses has now become commonplace and will continue to grow as today’s children and teens, who have been online almost all their lives, become adults.
I know that when I do a local business search, I’m often taken to one of the local city directories, where I’m given the address and phone number of the business and, if I’m lucky, the URL of the website, if I have a website Most days, I look up a local business website to “verify” them before I decide to do business with them.
One of my most frustrating moments is when I want to place a takeout order at a local restaurant and I don’t have a takeout menu handy. I go online to find the restaurant’s menu and unfortunately, unless it’s a local chain with multiple locations, I usually don’t find what I’m looking for. That restaurant usually ends up losing my business to one where I can view the menu online and order takeout.
If you have a physical business, how much business are you losing because you don’t have an online presence or your website doesn’t contain enough information to help someone decide to do business with you? Or, if you have a virtual business, what if no one can find you when they do a local search for businesses in your industry?
I do not market locally as there is little demand for the type of services I offer in this area. However, I began to wonder if I was missing out on the small local business that might exist for my virtual business, so I did some research to find which websites would help my business website show up in any local searches.
1. Local Portal Sites: Search Google, Yahoo and MSN for your city name and see what comes up. Is there a site on the list that I can exchange links with, buy advertising, buy a membership, submit articles, etc.? If you live in a small city, like me, you can also search for larger cities that are close to your location or search for a regional name that your area may have. For example, I found more portal sites using “Southeast Texas” as a search term, rather than an individual city name.
2. Search Engine Directories: Search the Google directory, http://directory.google.com, the name of your city, and look for a category that ends with “Guides and Directories.” When you click that, you’ll see the directories listed by importance, as determined by Google’s Page Rank feature (you’ll need to download the Google Toolbar to see this information. The toolbar can be found at http://toolbar .google .com The higher the rank (10 is high), the more traffic the site will have, or you can manually search Google as follows: Regional directories (by continent/country): http://www .google.com/Top /Regional/ By state in the US: http://www.google.com/Top/Regional/North_America/United_States/
You can also search the Yahoo directories, http://dir.yahoo.com. To suggest listing your business, please see Yahoo’s guidelines here: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/dir/suggest/index.html Yahoo’s regional directory listing can be found here: http: //dir.yahoo. com/Regional/ and the list of US states can be found here: http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__States/
3. Yellow Pages Sites: There are several larger city options here: YellowPages.com (SBC and BellSouth): http://www.yellowpages.com/guide/cityguides/ Super Pages (Verizon): http:// www .superpages.com
4. Nationally based city guides: The largest of these services, CitySearch, http://www.citysearch.com/, submits content to many other city guides. Other city guides include AOL CityGuide, http://www.digitalcity.com, Area Guides, http://www.areaguides.net, Online City Guide, http://www.onlinecityguide.com, and Associated Cities, http : //www.ciedadessociadas.com/
5. Local newspaper-based sites: If you live in a larger urban area, your local newspaper may sponsor a site for your city, such as Charlotte.com, sponsored by the Charlotte Observer) or Boston.com, sponsored by the Boston Globe.
6. Local City Guides: Again, in larger urban areas, your local chamber of commerce, convention and visitors bureau, or a private company may operate a local portal for your city. Here in Southeast Texas, our local site is SoutheastTexas.com, owned by a private company. Others, like FortWorth.org, are sponsored by the Ft. Worth Convention and Visitors Bureau.
7. Association Guides: Your membership in your local chamber of commerce, convention and visitors bureau, professional association (by industry), general business groups (networking groups, men’s or women’s trade associations, civic groups) may be profitable if the association has an online membership directory where their listing can be found. Make sure the list includes both your contact information and a link to your website.
I have only scratched the surface of the local possibilities available to both virtual and physical businesses. In researching for this article, I discovered that there are thousands of companies that are not listed in these directories. Don’t let yours be one of them. List your business locally so your local customers can find you!
Copyright 2006 Donna Gunter