Google Places has emerged as the most essential marketing tool every local business must have to prosper online.Until now, small local businesses had to compete with large national brands for top search engine results, and truthfully, they had no almost no chance of coming up on a broad search term like “skin laser doctor,” “restaurant”, “dentist” etc.

Local search marketing is a great way to reach customers in your geographic area without breaking the bank. It allows you to pinpoint specific search terms and keyword phrases, and limit the geographic area of where users can view them from. This leads to more local, ready-to-buy customers, and less money spent in the longrun. No longer will you be paying for clicks from users across the world; users who are only looking to browse, price shop or research. You’ll be getting clicks from right down the street!

Then you would utilize references to your city, state, surrounding counties or other significant elements that support local search optimization. In addition to this there are a number of useful local search tools such as Yahoo, Google, Superpages and others that can assist in augmenting organic search engine placement.

Why Local

• More than 30% of ALL internet searches are local and include the location in the search.
• 80% of a business’ customers come from within 5 miles.
• There are 2.6 billion local searches a month.
• Mobile device use is fusing with local search technology and more consumers use their mobile phones to find local services.
• It’s estimated that over 90% of searchers in Google don’t look beyond the first page of results.