Nielsen Online reports that fewer than half of all U.S. small businesses have websites or advertise on the internet, even though most consumers search online for local shops and services before picking up the phone or leaving the house.
Neighborhood businesses now have several new options for raising their profile online. Hundreds of new services are available aiming for a piece of the $17.5 billion that consultancy BIA/Kelsey says small businesses will spend on internet advertisements in 2010. By 2014 BIA estimates that figure will grow to $36.7 billion, a quarter of all local advertising.
Microsoft's Bing is working up neighborhood-specific information and business listings.
On May 24, 2010, Yahoo! renewed a partnership with Nokia to power its maps and navigation services for local listings.
On April 20, Google rebranded an older, small business service called Local Business Center as Google Places. Google has created pages with data on millions of small businesses, and some two million companies have added their own information to those pages. Owners can also request a free photo shoot of their shop, and in 11 cities they can pay Google $25 a month to make their listing pop up with an icon and other information when consumers check neighborhood maps on smartphones and the web.
Smaller companies are aiming for the same market. Business directory MerchantCircle has online profiles of 1.3 million small companies, four times what it had two years ago. Review site Yelp had 31 million unique visitors in April, up 35 percent year-on-year. Dozens of sites offer coupons that small business owners can use to attract new customers. In March Valpak, which has long distributed local circulars by mail, launched new mobile apps. Chicago-based Groupon helps promote small businesses via daily e-mails with deals on products and services. Groupon operates in 65 cities across the U.S
The multitude of choices is spurring rapid growth in another category of online business: companies that sort through all the options and help small business owners determine a Web strategy. Among the biggest is ReachLocal, based in Woodland Hills, CA. Its revenues in 2009 grew by 38 percent, to $203 million, and this year it expects to introduce a tool that lets business owners monitor what's being said about them online.
