Here’s a natural sales, customer-service and audience-building opportunity for local newspaper company Web sites. According to research from Webvisible and Nielsen, as reported on Media Post’s Research Brief blog, despite the fact that a majority of consumers and small businesses owners now search the Web first when looking for a local business, fewer than half of small businesses have Web presences. Search and email newsletters are the growing channels consumers are using to locate online products.
And here’s the key idea: ” When using a search engine to find a business they know exists, only 19 percent of survey respondents report never or rarely encountering trouble locating that business online and 39 percent say they routinely have difficulty.”
The local newspaper company’s Web site is highly relevant in search engine rankings, as also often the case for that company’s regional portal site. A high quality local business directory attached to those sites, well-optimized for search and featuring all those local businesses the newspaper has a long-standing relationship with or is in the best position to create a relationship with, is a simple solution for this problem small businesses are facing.
Tags: advertising, local search, newspapers, search, seo
