Search Engine’s algorithms have been changing and moving away from those big spenders and more towards helping of small and mid level businesses. The big companies used to own the web and could buy keywords on Google, Yahoo and Bing and overpay to cut out the smaller businesses from showing up; Mom and Pop Shops cannot spend the same kind of dough as the big players in business, so they were going out of business more often than ever before. If your company can’t compete, you can’t gain any customers or keep your doors open. It was a dark world for the small businesses. This probably didn’t help the economy… but I digress.
Business is changing locally.
This past years Google’s “Penguin” algorithm helped to make the local search relevant again. Local searches are becoming more and more popular, heling the smaller companies to gain more web traction and visitors to their websites. Companies can leverage their local towns and localized partnerships to piggyback on one another and help create a prominent business area in the local town. This is a different story that the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Web marketing is evolving.
Impacting the business world is a term called “Citations,” also known as localized popular sources. These are sources in a localized market that get a lot of visitors and are wildly popular. Every area, state and city have their own culture and websites that are unique to that place. For example: In Philadelphia, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s website might be the highest used website in the local area, so by being a part of their listings, directories and localized advertising a business may be more effective than in a small town e-newspaper’s offerings or listing, because less people visit this site. In Ohio it may be Twitter’s website is the most used, or Yelp or even another local newspaper’s website.
Why does this make a difference for your website?
Easy answer- All of these local popular websites can help mold your company and reach your target market. By back-linking and being a part of a popular website, in your local area, you have a way of “pull” marketing and having those popular site visitors move to your site. You can gain traffic, find new potential customer and tell your story all at the same time.
Localized marketing is where business and web marketing is heading.
