As a business owner I can identify with a busy day filled mostly with things you have to do in order for your shop to stay open and not neccessarily the most valuable use of your time.  The thought of adding one more task to an already full schedule can seem daunting when all you want to do is go home, put your feet up, play with the kids, and have an ice cold beer.

However, if you’re not doing something each and every day to grow your business your either as big as you want to be or you’re not trying hard enough.  I left out that you might be lazy as that hits too close to home.  I’m guessing the majority of us didn’t fall into our business and it required some significant work on the front end to get things going. Maybe now though as your business has grown you’re not quite at the place where you can afford to hire someone to do all the mundane taks that fill your time so you can be out doing the valuable customer getting activities that got you to where you are now.

I encourage you to get back into the mindset of trying to do one thing every day in efforts to bring in at least one new customer.  This is a great opportunity to spend updating your web site.  It is after all a tool that you should be using in order to get more foot traffic in your shop.  Making your site more search engine friendly, and following the process to move it up in the search engine rankings can be a great use of your time.

If we look at the stats back from 2007 approximately 109 million annually people performed local searches online and at least 41% of those people were searching for businesses in their area and not an area they were planning on visiting.  The comScore study also said 82% of local searchers visited a merchant as a result of their internet searches.  That’s 2 years ago!  Think what the numbers look like today as we get more reliant upon these boxes by the day!

So consider working on building some links, adding a blog post, twittering about something related to your market, or doing some on page optimization, and then go home and have that cold beer that you so well deserve.  Those efforts over time will most certainly generate some visitors and sales!

0 Comment   |   Posted in Local Search August 05, 2009