By Greg Sterling
Search Engine Land
Dave’s Comments (Digital Marketing Tutorial Blog): For those of you new to “Local Search”, this is a great overview article to help you understand the importance of being listed in the appropriate “local search” sections of the major search engines, and why it is so difficult for these engines to have accurate, up-to-date local search listings.
You can also review Local Search on the Digital Marketing Tutorial Web site.
“A few weeks ago Steven Aldrich, a VP of strategy for small business software (and now marketing) company Intuit, delivered a speech in which he presented an amazing statistic. According to Aldrich, roughly 6 million businesses are started annually in the U.S. but another approximately 5.6 million go under. Think about it.
From the point of view of these small businesses, there’s a fundamental challenge to survive. From the point of view of search engines and directories trying to reflect and catalog their fleeting existence, there’s another kind of challenge – a data challenge.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 23,343,821 “firms” in this country. Of those, 5,697,759 firms have one or more employees. But almost 99% of U.S. businesses have fewer than 20 employees and most have fewer than four. These data are mirrored by similar statistics (where they exist) around the world.”
Read the entire article on SearchEngineLand.com.