Forgive my heading but with all due respect, you are damn hard to find!

You must be asking yourself now if I have lost it or I am out of my mind but trust me when we search for your business on the internet we can hardly see you.

Just last week I received my telephone directory and I could not help noticing that the big A4 book that we could use as a kitchen step has shrunk to an A5 Booklet with just a few pages, I misplaced that book a lot of times before I could just go through it in like 30 minutes.

I realised then that no one uses a telephone directory anymore, so Yellow Pages does not exist anymore. You must be also thinking of printing 1000 flyers and spreading them around but come on let's talk about this first.

Whatever people are looking for they are most likely to use search engines and google to find it before they go anywhere else, and this revolution has made it so easy for small businesses to show up, it gives small businesses a big chance.

What are we looking for:

Let us assume I am looking for a hosted PBX system or a Plumber; the first thing I am going to do is go on google, but my searches will be a bit different.

For a plumber, I a most likely going to search for "Plumbers in my area" and google will deliver a list of plumbers based on the distance between my search location and their registered addresses. The closest and Open will be first. So the technique google uses is to give you the most relevant result so the business has to be open, and close to you.

So for whatever service you are offering, before you even create a website and get all fancy, list on google here is a link for you to submit your listing, and it takes 5 minutes. https://www.google.com/business/

Now for my other search, hosted PBX system, now this kind of service I can buy from Germany or Cape Town, so locations do not make a difference, and also in this kind of situation there would be a lot of competition. So what this means is Google is going to make money from my search.

So what google will do is show me the companies that are willing to pay more for my click through its Ad bidding technique, what will happen is I am going to see about 15 adverts before they show up free listings.

If you offer a specialised service that does not lock you down geographically then trust me you have a bit of work to do, but please do try it. You will need to have Google Ads running and when you do run google ads you need to make sure you do a bit of keyboard research to understand what people are searching for, that will help you position your ads better without losing a lot of bucks.

Now I am going to search for your business, I better find you there.

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