Last week I did a quick survey of how people search for local businesses and services.  I did it as an experiment and although I am not surprised by the winner I am totally surprised by the difference between the winners and losers.  I was not expecting the difference to be so dramatic.

Over the weekend the total number of people I had take the survey was 519, thank you everyone for taking the couple of minutes it took to take the survey.  Below is the results from the survey and how I interpret what they mean.

The first question was asking which different media types do people use to find local vendors.  It was a check if you use type of question so a single person could select multiple items.  The graph is below:

As you can see the clear winner here is the Internet.  But what amazed me here was how much the Internet won over the others.  This means that of all of the possible methods available to a person most of them will not even use the yellow pages or newspaper.  I expected the yellow pages to be a larger chunk, maybe not the dominate method (next question) but still used sometimes.

Question #2:

The next question took the above question to the next level.  Where in question #1 we asked which ones you use, in question #2 we asked which one was your primary.  And I will let the results be shown first:

Bye Bye newspapers.  And the Yellow Pages should be shakin in their boots.  87.5 people (like 2.5 kids) out of 100 go to the internet over the yellow pages.  This one was a little more dramatic than what I thought but not overly surprising to me.

Question #3:

The third question again allowed the user to select multiple answers and it was asking which search engines they used to search the internet.  Here is how it broke down:

Not surprisingly, Google won the competition with 95.7 people out of 100 using Google.  Google won by a wide margin.  What is most surprising here is that not one person selected MSN (bing) or Other.  Not one.  And as I said above, they were allowed to select all 4 at one time if they wanted.  This was not a which one do you use the most but which out these do you use at all.

My interpretation of that is that no one uses Bing and Microsoft has not made any headway into the search market.

Question #4:

This question asked where they would click when searching on the search engine, in the result pages or in the sponsored links on the top or right hand side.  Here is the result:

This one was a surprise to me.  I went in not knowing which would win.  But to see the search results overwhelmingly win over the sponsored result tell me just how important being in the search results is.

To Summarize:

To summarize what I learned from this survey…

I learned why the newspapers are dying and why they will soon be mostly gone, at least in their present printed form.  I also learned that the yellow pages are not worth advertising in anymore and will follow the way of the newspapers sooner than later.

I also learned that there really is only one search engine to worry about.  Google.  Sad but true.  I like Google but I also like good competition.  It is better for everyone.

I also learned that not only can you lose your shirt (and pants) in a few minutes with advertising with Google Adwords, you do not get as good of results as if you were in the organic search results.  This was a big surprise to me but re-enforced how important search engine result pages (SERP) placement really is.

What you should take from this (shameless plug starts here).

If your company relies on advertising and is not in a high traffic location, and you are not on the internet now, you need to get there or start packing and putting up the going out of business signs.

If you have a website and it is on a local www.cityname.com/yourname type of service, you need to get off of it and onto your own domain name.

If you have a website that is so-so, you need to beef it up, redo it, etc.

If you are not promoting your web site, you need to start NOW, TODAY, not tomorrow so that you are found in the SERPs in the first or second page.  Stop wasting money on Adwords.

So if you:

• Don’t have a website yet, have one that is….  Ugly, horrible, etc., have one with a local “provider” (www.cityname.com/yourname) that is hurting you, scared to create one, not sure where to start, not a techie….  Then you need to go right now to www.growyourbusinessonthenet.com and signup for your FREE DVD. When you do you get a 7 day free trial in a 12 week program that walks you from step 1 to having a full blown beautiful website online.  No experience required.  All training is done with video so you can see how it is done.  This site is being renamed to funeasywebsites.com in the near future to that it better fits the name.

• Have a website you are happy with but are not doing anything to market it to get on the SERPs, you must start now or forever fall into the internet black hole.  If you need help getting started then you need to go to www.marketyourbusinessonthenet.com right now, sign up for the FREE DVD and get a 2 week trial in our training program that walks you through step by step how to market your business to get traffic and to get onto the SERPS.  After the 12 weeks you will have a plan that you can use every day, every week, every month to get your business growing from the Internet.

• Have a website, tried to market it, read about the Gazillions of methods out there and either are lost, do not have the time, or just do not like to do it.  Then go to www.gismarketing.com where we do it all for you.  It is a true set it and forget it system.

(end of shameless plug)

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