How Entrepreneurial businesses can overcome the effects of Google's Local Search Strategy?
The Powerful Giant
Google, the Internet Giant is rightly called as a Business Campaigner. Coming with new upgradations in its existing features or evolving a new technology every other day has won it accolades. With this mass serving attitude and user-friendly approach, Google stresses on providing an unbeatable web browsing experience to surfers across the globe. And with a pledge to bring new advancements in the year 2011, leader launched many of its products, StreetView, Hotpot, '+1 etc. and initiated newer strategies to help web surfers get the best and related search results. The most intriguing one was the local search strategic move.
Local Search Strategy By Google
The 'Local Search' feature that was enabled for all search results was believed to be an intelligent step made by Google that will facilitate people to find the exact search results in the local area. For instance, if a service seeker is looking for a hair salon service, then he will get search results including the name of salons in the local area when searched on Google. But besides simplifying task of web surfers, it turned the wheels for service providers globally.
Unlike the earlier search results, when a surfer, for instance searched for a web designing and development company, he used to get a comprehensive list of service providers located both nationally and internationally. The service seekers could easily compare the prices of the nationally located firms (in their local areas) with overseas companies providing the same services. Picking the one that fits their needs and pocket, they found it simple to avail the services from service providers of their choice based globally. Nevertheless, with the introduction of this new localization strategy, things changed dramatically for service providers. The two major disadvantages of this new-flanged strategy is the:
- Probability of companies (based outside local areas) to generate international leads has reduced to a big extent.
- Service seekers cannot run comparison between the prices of different companies.
Evidently, this is a major problem with the service seekers that are new to the industry. While those who have been outsourcing their massive company projects to outsource service providers were and have been benefiting themselves. That is, they have been availing services from affordable offshore service providers.
The Right Remedy
However, the most ideal solutions to overcome the drawbacks of this local search strategy that has affected many service providers is by:
Relying on Social MediaLook upon Social Media platforms for effective business and brand promotion. By publicizing your profile to global friends, you can market your business in the global market without much effort. For example, if you are in India you may add US or UK based nationals and friends to your network list that will help you promote your company and services directly or indirectly.
Creating a Physical Presence
If a company has US as its niche market, then the best way is to create a physical presence in the respective region. By physical presence, we mean building an office at the desired place. This way you not just build the credibility of your brand but also you can get your company listed in the search results whenever a search pertaining to the products or services you are dealing in is conducted.
In a nutshell, local search strategy is not a bad move certainly, as it simplified the process by localizing search results. But the ones who have been affected or will be affected can embrace above mentioned strategies to bypass the possibility of losing international clients.
Maneet Puri Web Development India
