Harris Interactive in its new study sponsored by CityGrid Media posted some interesting statistics that are important for you, a local business owner, to know. Here’s what they discovered.

Searching for a local business at home

To no surprise, online search and review sites are where most people go to find local information – 60% of them to be exact in this study of 1000 adults – when they were at home. In the under 35 segment, this increased to 85%! Again, no surprise.

And finally, only 8% said they go to merchants’ websites first before searching. That last metric is a little confusing to me especially since most people have to search to find a website to go to, but regardless of how or why that happens, there is still a crystal clear takeaway from these metrics.

75% bounce. 63% bounce. 95% bounce. 38% bounce. Maybe you’ve seen those in your Google Analytics, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you’re missing an important metric in that last column (see screenshot below) that Google graciously gives you to help you win the internet marketing game.

A Primer on Optimizing a Local Business in Google

[2014 Addendum: The advice in this post is still relevant even though Google Places has now become Google Plus Local.]

Until I get my ebook done which will be full of the best advice from all the best local search experts in the world, here are some slides I prepared for my local  SEO/Google Places presentation to help you optimize your Google Place page and to get it to rise to the top.

Many changes have occurred since it was written, thanks to Google’s fickle nature, but most everything here is still relevant.

Enjoy and then return later for that promised Local SEO ebook.

Not number 1? Don’t despair. There are things you can do.

Where you are in Google Places matters, as we would expect, but if you’re not on the top, there are things you can do to get your fair share of the clicks, thanks to this great study from “Mediative” that is revealed in their white paper called “Eye Tracking and Click Mapping Google Places.”

Their study involved 12 participants who came to Mediative’s eye-tracking research lab in Toronto, Canada and 90 online from whom Mediative tracked actual clicks.

The question they were asked was: “If you are in [city] looking for a tatoo artist. Where would you click next?” They repeated the test for 3 cities to compare different actions that might occur as a result of the different query results that would appear.

Do a search on “Scotts Valley chiropractic” and you’ll likely find:

An essential task to complete when transferring your site or pages to a new URL

Anytime you transfer pages to a new URL, it’s imperative that you let Google know where to find these new pages. You do this with 301 redirects. These instructions tell Google that those pages have been permanently moved, and it will respond by updating it’s index. Here’s how to do that.