Marketing a Small Business Locally Online

If you think your small business doesn’t need to be marketed online because all your business is local, you’re wrong. You can use the internet to market your small business locally. I talked a little about this the other day, when I talked about marketing your offline small business online.

(c) L Gerlach

Many times when someone is looking for something local they will put in their search terms plus their town, city, or state. For example if you’re looking for a plumber, and you live in New York City you would type in “plumber New York City.” When someone types in this search, you want your business to be at or near the top of the list when the results come up.

It’s actually much easier to rank high in the search results for a search term with a town or city after the results, you’re competing against way fewer results than a national or worldwide search would produce.

Today I want to talk about one thing you can do to promote your small business online to customers who are local to you. One of the biggest things you can do is get your business listed in local online directories.

Two of the biggest local directories are the Google Local Business Center, and Yahoo! Local. Both are free submissions for listing, and both will show up high in the search results when someone puts in local search terms. So even without a website, submitting your business to local directories help you get found online (for a very low cost, or free). There are other local directories out there, just do a search to see what you can find for your area.

There are other things you can do to market your business locally online, and I’ll talk more about it in upcoming posts.