Internet Search: automotive service longmont co

As a small business owner in Longmont, Colorado you probably want your business to be highly visible to potential customers when they do an internet search. Most visitors who do an internet search will be searching for your product or service via Google and they'll be searching on key phrases, not your business name (unless it matches a keyword or phrase).

Let's say your visitor does a search on "automotive repair longmont co". Google is pretty smart and wlll figure out that the "co" refers to Colorado, thus limiting the search to local results. Depending on how your business has been set up, there are three routes which may be combined to make your business visible in that Google search. The below pie chart represents the three types of search results which you may see depending on the service or product.

Paid advertising / Pay Per Click (PPC)

In the case of Google their PPC program is called Google Adwords. With PPC you configure an Adwords campaign to get triggered by key phrases that you have chosen that are relevant to your business along with location parameters. As a result Google returns a list of paid advertisers including your business if your PPC bid rate qualifies to display your business in the regular list.

If your bid rate isn't sufficient it may not show on the first page of results, or maybe it will display in the secondary Ad list at the bottom of the page or right column. You pay your bid rate whenever someone clicks on your ad. Depending on product and service ad rates will commonly vary between $.50 and $5.00 although they could go up to $1000 or more in the case of a service in which a lead could net significant return. You can currently distinguish a Google ad as it will say Ad, or Sponsored or perhaps Paid Advrtising. You pay for placement.

Organic search results

Organic refers to natural results that are displayed based upon how well your website has been optimized for search engines in addition to external factors such as other websites pointing to it. Depending on how coomon your service or product is, it can be quite competitive and a challenge to get your website to display in the first few results of page one. There are purportedly over 200 factors that make up the algorithm that Google uses to produce search results.

Local search results

Google My Business is the current version of their search function that returns results based upon business that have signed up for this free service. You can distinguish the local business results as a short list, usually three, that displays under a mini-map, along with a More places link if more local results exist.

Some of the main factors which determine the order of results are

• Proximity of address to the point of search
• Business profile completeness
• Local listing services - consistency of name, address and phone (NAP) across the 200 or so local listing services including:
  • Citysearch
  • Judy's Book
  • BizJournals
  • Superpages
  • Manta
  • Bing
  • InfoUSA
  • Yelp
• Quantity of citations from listing services,
• Links from other quality websites
• Reviews
• Domain authority of the website
• City and state as part of the landing page title (business title).

There are over 100 factors in all. As opposed to PPC, listing your business in My Businesses is FREE. It takes time and understanding to make it work, but the listing is free. It's not right for every business but for those that have a local presence it is the least expensive method of advertising whether you have a website or not.

Different services may return varying results views. With overhead doors there was only one result so Google set it up to view in the right column. Up to 10 organic results will follow paid advertising and local search results and that may in turn be followed by additional paid advertising.