Just about everything you are doing online right now to promote your local retail store is wrong. There are thousands of articles, courses, and books on online marketing. But if you are marketing your local business, trying to attract local customers, these books won’t help you. Here is what you need to know.

Search Engine Optimization experts promise you "I can make your website show up on the first page of Google". Many can. Maybe they can even get you to the coveted first place listing.

If your business is national in scope, and you are attracting a national audience, this type of SEO is great. If you are looking to attract a local audience, this approach will probably be a waste of time and money.

Why? Because when you are advertising nationally, you have thousands of times more people doing an online search for your product category than you have in a local search. There may be thousands of people nationally, every day looking online for information about what you sell. So simply being anywhere on the first page of Google search results will pay off.

But a local search? Just for your town? You may only get one or two searches a day for what you sell. So being in any one position on a Google search won’t help you much.

For local searches to pay off big for you, you have to dominate the entire first page of Google search results. If fact, you want to be the only supplier the online shopper has to chose from. You want your competitor’s listings to be pushed onto the second page, if possible. The only way to be listed many times in search engine page one listings, is to offer more than just a directory listing or website listing. You need to provide the search engine with lots of "content" about what you sell. Not advertising verbiage, real information.

Another difference between national online searches and local online searches is that most people who do online searches are looking for information, they are not yet ready to buy. A listing pushed to the top of the search engines will perhaps attract a person who is ready to buy, and just looking for a supplier. These listings will not attract the 95% of online researchers who are looking for more information before they make the final buying decision.

You want people who are at every stage of the buying process to see your information. You want them to read what you have to say. You want to become the "trusted advisor" that they automatically think of when they are actually ready to buy your product.

So you have to provide far more than just a high ranking listing.

You want to provide information that the customer will want to read. You can do this in two basic ways; create videos that the customer can watch, providing real information that they want to receive. The second way is through printed matter or articles....like the one you are reading right now.

In your town, this very day, are between 10 and 100 people that are interested in buying what you sell. There are another 100 to 1,000 that are at some stage of the information gathering process before they commit to buy from anyone. You want to attract these people. You want these people to see you are the expert, the "Go To" Guy, who can solve their problems.

And you want these people to see your information everywhere they look online.

And you don’t want them going anywhere else.

If you can list articles, reviews, videos on Google’s local page one search results....you will own your local online advertising media.

You can take the next step and learn how this all works for you....or just keep guessing, and hoping that something eventually works.