Lately, I've been incredibly frustrated with search results - and it's NOT the search engines' fault (this time). No, this time, I have to blame business owners. Why? Because they don't have websites! How is it, in this day and age, that local businesses can't even have a one-page brochure website? It costs, what...maybe $15/year for a domain name and cheap hosting for a tiny site?
I'm not asking for much here. I just want to be able to find services in my local area. You see, I'm moving soon. To a bare-naked piece of land. That land needs things done to it. I need a septic tank installed. I need water lines run out to wherever they connect to at the street. (At least, I think that's where they'd connect to). I need a fence. I need a deck built. I need a driveway laid down. I need lots of things done before I can even begin to start the moving process.
So, naturally, I turn to the internet for help. No, I don't turn to the phone book because I don't have the phone book for that area. I'm moving to a different part of the state. I suppose I could call the phone company and order a phone book, but I shouldn't have to. I should be able to search for businesses in the area and find websites! Any kind of site would do - even ugly ones! I mean, c'mon people, just fire up Microsoft Word, write down the essentials of your business, and save as an HTML page. It would be better than what you have now, which is nothing.
Instead, all I can seem to find are these weird bogus phone book type sites that apparently are just spam sites. Sometimes, local search such as Google's local results will give me names, addresses, and phone numbers, but no urls. Why? Because no urls exist for all these businesses.
Times like these, I wish I was in the web design business, or at least had some real web design skills. (My graphics ability isn't all that). I'd be targeting local businesses like crazy. And how hard would it be to get those sites to rank well? Piece of cake, because there is no competition!
If you are an SEO with web design skills, you should consider expanding. Do some searches for local businesses. Find the ones that essentially return no real results. There are tons of customers out there waiting for you! And I'm sure there are tons of searchers waiting as well.
Local search could be so much better. But first things first - there need to be websites for local businesses before local search will be useful at all.
Not necessary . I did a little time ago SEO for some local searches eg physical therapy I got #1 for lots of them but people don’t search for them (only a few ) and when they search first results in google are local search results .
But for a business model this is a $$$ making machine they (business owners) don’t know much about internet the company I did SEO for paid $40/m for webhosting for 7 pages of content with a few visitors per day 🙂 . Too bad I am not in USA .
Well said scoop!. But in the meantime, I’d get a phone book.
Dave
Donna: First I’d get a Yellow pages and that will get you all the help you need.
But you are absolutely correct. I looked at an old friend’s site today for some optimization elements. His site ranks 5th in google for a category in New York City. So it could have some heavier competition because the region is so populated…but his site is very visible on the web.
It doesn’t take a lot.
Dave
This message is one that needs to be trumpeted around, Donna. Let’s all spread the word. 🙂
Yellow Pages provides only a subset of all the possible contractors since they don’t all have a listing there. The local searches done by the search engines don’t normally produce all that many possible suppliers either. So if a contractor puts up a web page as you describe with just a little bit of SEO-savvy, then they’ll be up at the top.
Now how can we get everyone talking about this?
I wonder why all business owners donÂ’t take advantage of getting an online presence. It would really make it a whole lot easier for the customer. I donÂ’t really even use the phone book anymore. There are a lot of businesses in small towns that donÂ’t have a website. I think that it would be good to meet with small business owners and ask them about doing a website.