It used to be that if you wanted your local business to be found, you had to get an expensive listing in the yellow pages, a cheesy (yet expensive) commercial on the TV or radio, and possibly bill boards and signs hung around (and a guy in a chicken suit handing out fliers couldn't hurt either, right?).
Not any more. The yellow pages is dying. Cable subscriptions (and the subsequent advertisings on them) is dying. Radio is giving way to digital (commercial free) radio. And while these things are still around and probably will be indefinitely, their importance has declined very quickly.
Now, if you want to be found, you need to be on the front page of Google. And not just their regular search results, either. If you want to get more customers, you have to be able to rank in their Google + Local search results, which more and more are turning up BEFORE the traditional SEO results.
SEO [Search Engine Optimization], or the finagling of your webpage so that it is easily found by Google and more likely to show up towards the top of the millions of results, has been a driving factor in getting found if you were a national business.
The problem: Most businesses operate locally, and this made it very hard to use Google Search to find local results with any degree of accuracy, unless those local business had hired a company to build them a website and perfect their Google SEO.
To compete with other forms of searching for local businesses, Google had to change the game.
Enter Google Plus Local and Google + Local SEO.
