New York SBDC Research Network

Search is pretty much everything these days. Even businesses that rely on people in their town, coming into their place of business to complete a transaction, are held to the fact that, increasingly, most buying decisions start out with an online search. The category of local search engine optimization has picked up steam over the last few years as search behavior combined with the rapid growth of smart phone use created a truly mobile search consumer. Services like Yext have cropped up just to help tackle this very specific form of SEO. Below are five local search tactics that demand your attention today if you are a local oriented business. Get the NAP right NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone and the search engines obviously want to make sure that when someone is looking for a local business there’s no ambiguity around what and where the business is.

Search engines like Google are wonderful for anyone wanting to perform standard searches. Google has an amazing ability to cover the depth and breadth of the internet, which is a major reason why so many people depend upon it. Google also has a real knack for always providing the most popular search results first. What happens, however, if you are looking for something that is not popular like ancestral records or obscure historic documents? Now there is another way to perform searches on the internet for your ancestors. It is called Million Short. The name Million Short derives from the fact that this search engine basically ignores the 1 million most popular websites on the internet. Instead, it focuses on less-common websites. Basically, it specializes in what are known as long-tail searches, which focus on the obscure and the uncommon. Many genealogy records are obscure. The search engine worked well in general when looking for ancestral records. It worked even be