February 16, 2010 in Blog, Search Engine Marketing by Patrick McNulty

Search Engines Catering to Local Business

This article from Search Engine Land points out that Google is catering to small businesses by showing locally focused results more often.  While the author goes on to mention how this will negatively effect traffic to multinational corporate website, this continual algorithm tweak will greatly benefit the the Small to Mid-size business.  This means the SMB will continue to rank higher for local searchers than the massive conglomerates, giving you the upper hand in targeted, local searches.

In a similar arena, Google’s Local Business Center is beta testing a new service to feature local business.   Advertisers pay a flat fee, nearly $30/mo to “stand out” amongst their local competition.  This is a curious attempt from Google to blur the lines of organic and paid listing and I’m waiting to see how this pans out – what happens when everyone has a yellow tag!?