The way people search for products and services has changed over the past few years. Each of us used to make use of such things as the Yellow Pages whenever we needed to look for a plumber or florist, 82% people will search for those same things using the internet. The truth is since 2007, the volume of searches made when using the Yellow Pages has halved whereas the number of searches using Google has more than doubled. Local companies that use the internet efficiently now are growing four times faster than those that don’t.

Just what exactly does that all mean for local businesses? Simply put, if you don’t have a visible online presence then you are likely to be losing business to your competitors. More importantly, a visible online presence does not necessarily imply just having a website. Your website has to be found by potential clients when they are searching for products and/or services that you provide. There are a number of strategies that will help with this which are listed below:

marketing with articles • mobile marketing • forum marketing • search engine optimization • local search engine optimisation • one page optimisation • lead generation • pay per click marketing • blogging • online video marketing • Web 2 . 0.0 Marketing • Social Bookmarking • building back links • directory submissions • commenting on blogs • social media marketing • audio podcasts

In addition to all this, there has been huge increase in the volume of "local" searches, which is where we add geographical identifiers to the search term. For instance, if someone is looking for a dentist in south west London the search could be "dentist south west London". Google has now changed the way search engine results are shown, so that it is all the more essential for local businesses to target the perfect keywords.

So, local businesses really should have a visible online presence to attract new clients however they might also want to be focussing on social networking to both retain and attract customers. Social media is focused on building relationships, trust and with that referrals will follow. Sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are extremely important to achieving your goal in this area.

In summary, it is important for each and every local business to build up both a local internet search marketing plan and a social media plan in order to leverage the huge power that they offer. It doesn’t matter if you're a sole trader, small company or larger corporation; growing your online visibility is essential to attract and retain customers.