Have you paid for a yellow pages ad? I recently had a quote for a half page ad and it was $10000 for the year. With more and more people turning online to find goods the yellow pages seem to me to be a bit of a rip off.

If you are a local small business, you probably do some marketing offline to gain customers. So most small businesses owners figure they will just hire someone to make a website and you will be in business online.

No, this could not be further from the truth. Having a website online isn’t going to help your business unless it shows up in the top 2 pages of Google. When someone searches for any information online through Google the top ten most relevant search results will come up, this could be out of 1000’s.

Ask yourself when you have ever searched online for any product or service do you ever look past page 2 of Google, I know I don’t, I rarely look past page 1.

If your a researcher doing your thesis or something looking through thousands of pages is good. If you are marketing your small business online you need to rank at the top.

Since the average small business website is after customers online you need to get on the first page, the odds are extremely high that if someone looks up say Carpet Cleaners in Sydney and your business doesn’t pop up on the first page then they are not going to click on your website to see what you have to offer.

This does not matter if you spent $10,000 on your website if it isn’t in the first page of Google your online marketing is doomed, but it’s not all bad news. The good news is that you can work at getting your local business to the first page of Google and it does not cost much at all.

So, not only do you need a website, you need a website that will be listed in the top page of Google when someone searches for your type of business. Otherwise your just wasting your money getting a website developed.

Would you like to learn how to get your website to the first page of Google. Check out the final article of my three part series or visit my website.