Local Search and what it means to your company-

What is local search and why is it important to your business? Well put easily, local search engines have now replaced the outdated telephone books.

When someone performs a local search, they set their search engine preferences to their desired location and perform a search. This search will then yield the local businesses in your area. For instance, if you search San Diego Web Design, you will get Web Designers in San Diego.

It is important to realize that simply because you have a website it is still vitally important to update your place pages in the search engines, because even if you do not rely on them the search engines will still create a local listing for you, whether their information about your business is correct or not. What happens is search engines create as many local listings as they can in order to compete with each other. By default search engines only list your business name, address, and phone number, which means you will need to track down your local listing, and ensure that the information is correct, in order to gain results from that listing.

It is also equally important to understand that your website and local listing are two very different things, and they are both very different areas in advertising. See, search engines are simply creating listings in order to be the best and biggest search engine.

Monitoring your local listings can be time consuming; however the benefit obviously outweighs the negative. You want your information to stay updated and relevant to the local searchers out there.

Local search engines include: Google Maps, Google Places, Google+, Yahoo Local, MSN Maps and so many more.