Improve Your Business's Search Engine Ranking with Local Search

When online shoppers are searching for a particular product, the first businesses that come up in the search results often represent those companies with the money to purchase that high results ranking. This is known as search engine marketing, or SEM, and involves targeting potential customers by buying relevant keywords on popular search engines. (For a thorough overview of the SEM process, be sure to read the What Is Search Engine Marketing?)

But what about those smaller businesses, like yours, that want to reach local customers? Fortunately, the major search engines have finally come around to realizing that this represents a large untapped market. In an effort to refine their product offerings and provide increasingly relevant search returns, the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) now offer localized search geared to users looking for businesses within a specific city or region.