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Guilt in the SEM Age
By Teri Foley | January 31, 2008
I admit to feelings of guilt. Sometimes I don’t do what I should. Not about recycling though. I recycle. I can’t see a reason not to recycle. I am helping keep trash out of our landfills and saving trees, and the City of Seattle comes to my house every other week to take my recycling away for free. I should feel guilty if I didn’t recycle, since Seattle makes it so easy for me to do a good thing.
Increasingly, I’ve been noticing something that produces guilt with no easy resolution. I want to buy locally if I can. The problem I’m facing is that when I’m searching on Google or Yahoo! for something I need or want locally, I often see more results for a national company than a local one. Plus, the national companies invest in good Web sites where I can easily shop.
To illustrate my point, I recently wanted to have some t-shirts customized as a gag gift for someone’s birthday. I searched in various ways for Seattle screen printers on Google. I know they exist here, but I don’t know who they are or where they are. Yet through each of the few searches I did I kept finding ads for non-local companies. The Web sites for the few local ads I did come across left something to be desired and did not showcase the information I needed to narrow down my choices or allow me to easily make a purchase. These Web sites hurt the potential customers’ (my) experience and they could also hurt the local business’ SEM efforts.
So while I feel some guilt about using a national company when I know there must be a local alternative, local SMBs aren’t doing a good enough job reaching their local customers. It is time they realized the value of investing in their Web sites and that SEM will help them reach those local customers who would like to do business with them. And for serving the guilt-driven folks like me, just like the City of Seattle who comes and takes away my recycling, advertising via SEM and putting some effort into the Web site will make it harder not to buy locally. The technology making local search better continues to impress me, but educating the local SMB owner about why it matters, and why the utility of his or her Web site matters–is equally important.
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