Make it easier for your clients to find you and your services.
There are those who walk into a store not knowing what they may find. Then, there are those that come in to a retailer already knowing exactly what they want because they've done their product research online.
Forrester Research has a name for it: "cross-channel shopping." It's rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with. In a report titled "The US Consumer 2004: Multichannel and In-Store Technology" the research firm details a number specific shopping characteristics and behaviors particular to cross-channel shoppers.
Your clients are looking online for the services that they need. Whether they go to the Yellow Pages just to find a phone number or do additional research on the product or service so that they are well versed before making the buying decision; either way, your clients are online. Update this for 2010 and your clients are probably looking you up on the web from their iPhones and finding you with Google.
One third of people are using search engines (feb 2008) to find the products and services they need and want. Your web site will help people that are local to you find your site. While people may begin by searching for a particular trade or service, they will quickly start to narrow their search and look for service providers that are local, especially when looking for services that can only be provided locally. The software that we use for your web site makes indexing for google a breeze. Now its just a matter of figuring out what people are going to search for, when they are looking for you add your locality and you will start to receive a portion of your local traffic for those search terms.
Mercury Media