Lately, walking around the neighborhood, I’ve seen many local business owners placing ads on buses, billboards, benches, newspapers, and magazines.   On the local TV stations I often find myself watching an infomercial or ‘paid-for’ segment to advertise for a local business.

Most of these local businesses have a web presences to some extent. They also have Yelp reviews that they have almost no control over which often appear higher in the search results than their own website (which they do have control over).

These small businesses need to realize that if they put a small portion of their local advertising budgets into basic SEO for their websites, it would be well worth the while.  Especially in a web-savvy city like San Francisco, where many potential customers are Googling terms like ‘Inner Sunset Bakery’ or ‘San Francisco Magic Store,’ the benefit to the business would be visible and immediate.

Going forward, I’d like to continue to analyze the cost/benefit ratio of traditional forms of ‘real-world’ local advertising vs.  local SEO projects.

Even though the monthly keyword traffic for ’san francisco kickboxing’ isn’t extraordinary, it is extra relevant.  In fact, when I first moved to the Inner Sunset, I initiated my search for a kickboxing gym by Googling those very words: ‘San Francisco Kickboxing.’  Sure, you get a bunch of yelp reviews, but I also often find myself clicking through the 1st and 2nd page results to see what else might be out there.

On our initial keword research it was very interesting to take a survey of the competitors for keywords like ‘San Francisco Kickboxing.’ Although many of the results were relevant for various obscure martial arts, they weren’t straight kickboxing gyms.

I think the same problem might occur for many other local establishments that aren’t utilizing the basics of SEO.  Almost every local business realizes that they need a website presence, but many still are overlooking SEO.  If more jump on board, hopefully some of those Google results will shape up too.