I’ve been saying it… preaching it… nearly shoving it down peoples throats for the past years!

And now Webvisible and the Nielsen Co. have backed me up again.

Local business CAN NOT neglect internet marketing at a local level!

Here’s the latest research from Webvisible and Nielsen Co:

-63 % of consumers and small business owners turn to the Internet first for information about local companies and…

- 82% use search engines to do so!

So again… probably for the thousandth (is that even a word??) time… people are no longer going to the Yellow Pages to find local products and services.

They are flocking to the Internet. And the beauty is they are adding local indicators to their keywords

(the words they are typing into the search engines).

That means they are no longer typing in “chiropractor” people are using local indicators such as “chiropractor Brisbane Queensland”. (see example on the right)

And the beauty about these is that these words are not very competitive and you can easily reach page one of google when doing a little bit of focused small business search engine marketing.

On top… search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing have quickly adapted to this trend and are now showing a map of the local results right at the top (even above the number 1 ranking websites) plus the maps of where to locate these businesses.

So what do you need to do?

Well here’s a few tips you can follow to make sure you’re profiting from this ever growing trend… and take advantage of low hanging fruit while their good for the taking.

1) Submit your business to the local listing in google place, yahoo local listings and bing local listing centre.

2) add your business to the top local business directories.

3) entice your best customers to leave positive reviews about your business on these sites to give your business credibitlity.

Lastly and most importantly make your listing a Direct Response Listing — this is pretty advance stuff. But you can actually have a voucher in your listing people can take advantage of and choose you over your competitor.

The first thing your prospects always ask will be “What’s In It For Me…” and this is an easy way to answer this question and get them to choose you over your competitors.

But this is just the start… imagine being able to dominate not just the local listings, but spot #1, #2, #3 or more on the first page of the search engines.

Well what you really need is to do some serious search engine optimisation… and yes this can be a learning costly and long learning curve… but the beauty is there’s lots of Internet marketers out there specialising in this field, who are more than happy to save you from spending 10′s of thousands of dollars with the big SEO firms… and get you mostly even better results.

So if you’re thinking about crushing your competition and dominating the search engines here’s a quick article which will give you 3 tips to hiring the right small business internet marketing consultant.

Let me know what you think about this ever growing trend for small business and any successes you may have already had by cutting in front of line and taking action early before the rest of the small business owners out there are playing catch up.