If you’re thinking about taking your website local or taking your local business to the web, one thing stands true regardless — the local phenomenon is only growing online. The good news is that it is very easy to participate. Here are just a few reasons why you should take action today…
It’s easy to be intimidated by big search, but the good news is that Google wants to be your partner — after all, that’s why they’re in business. Without your websites to use in the creation of their search results, they have no product to offer to their customers. And as the search engines compete fiercely in the local search category, they’ve made it incredibly simple for you to participate.
Yahoo! Local wants your business. Your local business listing, that is.
While Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing search engines are combining some of their services as part of their recently-announced partnership arrangement, it’s not immediately clear how or if they’ll combine forces when it comes to their Local sites as well. For now, it’s definitely still a good idea to submit your local business to both — and it will only take a couple of minutes of your time, so why not?
Participating in the Bing Local Listing Center, the local product offering from Bing, the newest major in the search industry, is downright simple. Of course, you’ll also want to make sure you’ve added your local business information to Google Local and Yahoo! Local too — it’s important to get listed with all 3 of the major search engines on their local platforms. But, back to Bing Local, it’s just going to take a few easy minutes to get your site listed. Here goes…
We’ve discussed in-depth why going local with your website is quite likely to have an impact that’s very measurable — in many cases, even on the same scale used to measure "going global." Local is good stuff because it’s a very focused niche in and of itself, especially when applied as an overlay to your existing niche or specialty.
With this in mind, there are a few local websites and resources that often go overlooked. So let’s re-hash and take a look at some of these.
Local search has been around now for several years. At first, it wasn’t taken all that seriously—the thought patterns of many people out there were something along the lines of, “I’m trying to take my business worldwide on the internet, why should I waste my time with local?”
Attitudes have changed.
Let’s get straight to the point: Local is the future of the web and you’d be downright foolish not to join in. Why?