Did you know that about 50% of the population has put down the phone book and picked up the Internet to find local businesses?

  Did you know that close to 35% of all online search queries are made on a local level?

  Did you know that restaurants are near the top of the list of most popular local search categories?

  The latest available statistics showed that Yahoo has over 700 queries for the term “Dutchess County Restaurants” per month. Though there are no available stats on Google’s search terms it is estimated that they have three times as many. That is approximately 2,800 direct searches for your products in your market each month.

  Don’t be fooled by the big guys in the Internet marketing industry with their promises of thousands of targeted hits per month. They boast that they get hundreds of thousands or even millions of hits each month. Keep in mind that their numbers are based on national or even global campaigns. How many of those hits are coming from Dutchess County, NY? Unless they are at or near the very top of your optimal search results one might be curious as to where the traffic is coming from.

   I recently came across an online ad that was generated by a well known “pay per click” marketing campaign while on a local, (Dutchess County), website. The ad was for a restaurant and, (at a glance); it was of perfect relevance to the theme of the site on which it was placed. After clicking on the ad I found that the restaurant was located in Dallas, Texas. I’m sure that the owner of that restaurant wouldn’t be pleased to find he is paying to have his ads placed on local sites from across the country. How many of those, “paid for”, clicks will ever generate a new customer?

   I’m sure that you would agree that just one hit from a person living within a 15 min drive from your store is worth more than 1000 hits from Texas.

 Online restaurant marketing must be focused entirely on your local market in order to effectively generate “quality” internet traffic that converts into new customers. Let’s forget about getting thousands of useless hits on your website and start getting those that have a better chance of increasing your bottom line.
http://DutchessCountyRestaurants.com