Why Your Business Must Be on the First Page of Google

Why Your Business Must Be on the First Page of Google

Are you spending more money on your Yellow Pages ads than Internet
marketing?


Why?


Do
more of your customers use the yellow pages than the Internet?

If you're in any high
-
tech industry, this is old news to you. But, if you're selling consumer
products to a local market and still think that the two
-
color, half
-
page ad yo
u are running in your
local yellow pages directory is a justifiably better marketing spend than spending a little bit of
money on your Internet presence, you may want to reconsider.

Pretend it's 7:42 p.m. on a Wednesday and your heat just stopped working
(its cold today in
Boston).


You pull up Google to search for "heating repair, city". Two seconds later, you get a
list of company names, addresses, phone numbers, maps, and website URLs. Just like that,
you've instantly found

what you wanted, without even

thinking about where you keep the yellow
pages.

Do you even have a yellow pages in your home or office?

This is a common scenario used to establish how integral

search engines

has become in our daily
lives.


But

what about the online versions of yellow pa
ges?


Here is some other evidence for you.
In a September 2007
article written by Chris Smith

for Search Engine Land, the trends he
sites

clearly show a decline in Internet Yellow Pages usage wh
ile search engine traffic continues
to soar.

Chris writes, "It's my opinion that Google's (and other top search engine) innovations in local
search combined with increasing inclusion of business listing data in the search engine results
pages ("SERPs") is
causing users' behavior to change. Users are finding more and more the
information they're seeking directly in SERPs, negating the need to find Internet Yellow Pages."

To many marketers serving a local
-
area target market, search engine optimization and

pay
-
per
-
click marketing

can be scary,
expensive

territory. The great thing with all the different ways to
get started in sear
ch engine marketing is that you can start simple and low cost and work your
way up from there.


For search engine optimization you can use the
free SEO tool Website
Grader
, and for Google Adwords you can set you
r ads to only show up in a local area and pick a
daily limit to your spending to manage your budget.


Before you get started, just make sure you
understand the
d
ifference between paid and organic search
.


Finally, you should also read this
article about
Free Google Advertising
-

it is a must for any local business.

In t
his new world of marketing, outbound marketing strategies just don't hold up when compared
to
inbound marketing

practices
-

thing
s like SEO, PPC, and becoming an active participant in the
blogosphere and social media.


The better you become at working all facets of inbound
marketing, the more likely you are to show up on the first page of Google.