YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind and powered by Google. This is more of a secondary strategy for a small or medium sized business after you have a great local seo plan or local search marketing plan in place. However, it is another strategy to gain more exposure to more and more people spending more time online vs offline. We can help create a local video marketing strategy to compliment your local search plan.

Matt Cutts – Thoughts on Google Instant his Twitter account @mattcutts

Matt McGee – Google Instant Search: The Complete User’s Guide his Twitter account is @mattmcgee

Aaron Wall – How Google Instant Changes the SEO Landscape his Twitter account is @aaronwall

Rae Hoffman – Dear Mainstream Media – Please Remove Foot From Mouth her Twitter account is @sugarrae

Here is a quick video of Google Instant for you visual video type people like me.

Ok now that you are caught up I can get to what I have noticed especially for local small business owners. Since we own a local internet marketing company and help different niches like local car dealers with automotive marketing and dentists with dental marketing we wanted to take a look at the local searches. Here is a screen shot of what we noticed. (Click image to make bigger)

As you start typing something like Phoenix dentists all you see is pay per click ads and the top of Google maps or as they now refer to that section as Google Places. Another thing that we noticed that I haven’t heard anyone talk about yet is the Sponsored links and text ads on the right hand side in the 4th-6th positions are just as high on the page as the 1st-3rd sponsored links that typically get the most clicks due to how we always look top left when reading or looking at something. The 4th position is actually higher placed and right next to Google Instant results. Could this be an opportunity to get more clicks for less with all things being equal with quality scores, text ads, and landing pages? We aren’t sure yet as we haven’t tested but we do know the search result landscape sure does look like you need to really consider local pay per clicks ads and optimizing your Google Places positions.

I think Google Instant made it even more important to have a local holistic plan as a small business. Small business owners need to think about local SEO to build strategic local links and citations for the maps, local PPC to capture leads more instantly, and an overall local internet marketing plan to go after new business in their area.

Even worse, when I prospect out of these yellow page books the ads have direct #’s no call tracking so why oh why are the small business owners still using this crap method of advertising when they don’t even use it themselves when they need a local business to help them? I think it’s either a case of insanity (doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results), or they are afraid of change and to get in the local seo game because they don’t understand it and it isn’t as tangible.

It’s ok small business owner I’m here to help. There is enough local business to go around and I only want to help certain local markets . So local small business owner I can help you reallocate your ad dollars away from your print yellow page books to local internet marketing strategies that can help you long term.

If it’s not that please give me a call and tell me why are you still dropping $22k a month on yellow page print books (and yes I had a client spending that much with them). And for you very few exceptions out there that got a 4k job off a nice lil old lady in Sun City, Arizona and you can attribute back to that book could you still have got that lead with a 1k a month investment or less or could you have received double the leads online for the amount you are investing wasting in these yellow page print books?

• Just because your are targeting local, you still are in many cases competing with National competitors
• If you fix a website whether it is Local or National it is still the same process and still costs the same amount
• If you are spending 5 hours on SEO for Local Search and your competitors are spending 50 hours still tough to compete.
• Local Search = SEO
• Google Maps is a great tool for ranking for local keyword phrases
• Local does not equal “cheaper” or “lower cost” to optimize for the search engines.

Here is the video to get your own take aways from the video. I think it is a great video to share with clients.