If you have a service or retail brick and mortar business, local search marketing should be at the top of your “to do” list. More and more people are performing local searches to find goods and services in their locations.

Say you live in Amarillo and just strained your back. You could go to drawer where the Yellow Pages are kept, open them, find the C’s, then flip through the pages of chiropractor listings. Or you could go to Google and find a lot more info about local chiropractors in about 2 seconds.

Not only can you instantly see pictures, videos, maps, service details, and even printable coupons, you also get to read reviews written by the chiropractors’ patients!

Check it out for yourself. For example, if you are a photographer in Tulsa, go to Google and search for “Tulsa photographer”. Instantly you will see the local search results for photographers in Tulsa. Now do a search for your own service or retail category in your city.

Best of all, most of local search advertising is free to the businesses! The listings there by the Google map and all the regular web site listings below the map are all free; the businesses do not pay a dime for that advertising! Isn’t free advertising great!

There are some paid ads on that search results page. Those are on the right side of the page and sometimes at the top. Those paid ads have the small text “Sponsored Links” near them.  Sure, you can buy those ads too for your business, but first take advantage of all the free advertising available on that same page.

It is incredibly easy for most business in most cities to get great exposure via local search. Once a business understands how to create business listings (those listed by the map) and web pages that Google will rank well, a brand new pool of potential customers (those who never open the Yellow Pages or newspaper) will be tapped.