Most° Local SEO Services

Most° Local SEO Services Get You More Business

Customers are searching for your services on Google, Yahoo, and Bing — are you there?

What’s so important about Google Places?

  • Google wins in search engine popularity, hands-down: over 70% of search traffic goes through Google.
  • 20% of searches on Google are related to location (according to Google) – that represents over 2.8 billion searches going “local”, and that number can only rise with the number of people getting on the internet every day.
  • 40% of searches on mobile phones are location-related (again according to Google)
  • Maps are the new “Yellow Pages”
  • Maps are Mobile

Why Your Marketing Efforts Need to Go Mobile

According to Google’s Marissa Mayer, Google Maps sees 40% of Google Maps traffic from mobile sources. You can’t afford to ignore mobile users when it comes to “being seen” on the internet!

In fact, according to a recent report, 1/4 of Smartphone Users RELY On Their Smartphones for Internet Access! In other words, 25% of the world only accesses the internet from a mobile phone.

Google Places: The Only Marketing Channel That Matters?

Place search results appear automatically on Google when it judges that a person is searching for local information. For instance, a search for “War of 1912″ will almost certainly provide Wikipedia’s page on the War of 1812 as its first link, but “best pizza in San Francisco” will undoubtedly retrieve a list of businesses that are listed on Google Places.

That’s why getting your business on Google Places has suddenly become tremendously important to your online marketing — which, if you’ve been paying attention to all other marketing strategies, is poised to become very nearly the only marketing channel that matters.

All Other Local Advertising Methods are DYING

  • Phone Directory – where is yours?
  • Newspapers – Declining rapidly
  • TV – do YOU watch ads? (TiVo anyone?)
  • Telemarketing – Bad publicity + Do Not Call List
  • Direct Mail – 1% to 2% Yield, Post Office may not last the year…
  • Print Ads – rising costs
  • E-Mail – Goes direct to the Spam folder

Having a Google Places Page is More Important Than Having a Website!

In the past, all you needed to be “on the web” was a website. Whether anybody found you was a matter of search engine optimization, but until about 2008, competition wasn’t fierce for most search phrases more than 2 words long. You could put up a website for your pizza business located in Fresno, CA, and as long as you structured your words correctly, Google would give you a pretty decent ranking when someone search for “pizza in Fresno, CA”.

Not so easy anymore! Just in 2010, 21.4 million websites came online [source]. Every business worth its salt has claimed a little piece of the web, and many have taken the next steps toward search engine competitiveness.

But Google has thrown the world of local business websites a curveball. Now, when people search on a phrase that Google deems “likely to involve location” (such as a search for “plumbers near me”), Google serves up a box of Google Places options all situated ABOVE the normal organic search hits.

That means that for localized web searches, a high-ranking Google Places Page is worth WAY MORE than having a high-ranking website — or ANY website at all!

So I have good news and bad news for you.

The Bad News: it still takes WORK to occupy a top position in Google Places, just as it takes work to occupy a top website position in Google Search.

The Good News: building and maintaining a Google Places page that ranks highly for your audience’s keywords can often be easier (read: cost less!) than trying to rank your website for those same keywords.

The Even Better News: because Google favors Places over websites for location-related searches, a high-ranking Google Places page will DO MORE to build your customer base than a website. And all Places pages are mobile-ready, right out of the box!

What are you waiting for? If you’re not on Google Places, where are you?

We’re looking for you — it’s time to Get Found!

–Naomi Most

ps. In most cases, if you don’t already have a website, we can build a very simple website for your business that helps build your rank in Google Places and gives your customers a place to go when they want to learn more. Who knows, maybe a FREE website will be just fine for your needs!