In this economy it’s tough to see really great companies having such a horrible time of it. Google is down to 325, newspapers with storied histories are dropping like flies (the mighty Seattle Post Intelligencer published its last print edition this morning) and media innovators in the local space like SpotRunner have just announced another large round of layoffs. Given this desolate landscape there is clearly a move towards value.
We work with thousands of local companies making sure they are clearly incredibly focused on maximizing their limited marketing budgets. Our typical customers are very sensitive to both the cost of marketing and the value they get from it. As the yellow pages collect dust at the back of closets local businesses still need to reach out to people looking for all over the nation our low cost high impact package which gets our customers new business through search. We do one thing really well. We get small business to the top of the search results for search terms they care about for a low monthly fee. It may not be as cool as TV advertising and it certainly doesn’t have the tradition that print advertising has, but it works and it’s affordable for most businesses.
How important is it that local businesses get to the front of search?….well there are several things driving this issue. First is behavior, people online search in a particular way. In search they go to the front page and typically select from the results displayed on that page. Very few ever look further than the first page…if you aren’t on that page then the chances are that online is not going to generate many customers for you. How big is the opportunity? Let’s look at the numbers: There is certainly a lot of search traffic going on. Reports differ but typically US search volume is in the 15-20 billion per month range and depending on whose numbers you believe anything up to 40% of those have some level of local interest. That’s a lot of search, lots of people looking for goods and services.
However if you take the number of people looking for things and divide that huge number by the number of locations and activities people are searching there may only be a few hundred people searching for any service or product in any location in any month. The good news is that those people are highly focused on finding what they are looking for and typically close to a buying decision and those intensely valuable searches are going to be spread between the companies on the front page of search.
In an economy headed for nuclear winter with local businesses looking to squeeze the last drop of value out of their marketing dollars our low cost high impact search visibility package is a great fit. We will focus on making our product the richest deepest most effective way for local businesses to get customers, it’s all we do and it’s what we do best.
