ALL Businesses Are Local Businesses

I have a client that has over 20 locations throughout an area of the US. This company is considered a good sized player in the SMB space doing somewhere north of $50 million in revenue annually.

What happened that was not unusual but still fascinating was the realization that they had in one of our meetings that despite their size and reach they were really just a local business. You see, they have a territory that spreads throughout part of 5 large states but in the online space much of how they were going to be found boiled down to their local presence.

No matter how big your company is there is usually some level of local interaction. IBM has offices all over the world and each one of those is represented online individually. As of this writing, however, IBM isn’t paying attention to these local listings at their own risk.

Exactly how is a large company really a bunch of local presences on the Internet? With my client they had each of their locations in which they served large regions. Online though, their locations each are represented by a Google Place Page which is in Google’s search index whether a business put it there or not. These listings give vital information about a company but unless the company themselves have claimed them the information is from wherever Google has sourced it from.

Long story short, my client discovered this hole in their online presence because they had to be reminded that despite their size they were still a local business in many ways, especially in the online world.

Have you taken care of your local presence online no matter how big your company is? If you don’t you are running a serious risk of allowing searchers to find information that is either inaccurate or bad for you (like bad reviews).

Remember how local you are and take care of that side of the equation. No one likes surprises so eliminate them when you can.