Local businesses need to market themselves and they spend a lot of money on offline marketing to do so. Sadly, these “offline-marketing-only” businesses have missed the boat and they are being eclipsed by their larger online competitors.

According to a recent study by online marketing firm Internet-Engine, offline businesses have not kept up with the shifting needs of their customers.

This excerpt, from the CEO of Internet-Engine, says it all: “On-line retailers have developed and maintained a dominant presence in search marketing… To put this in perspective, when a shopper does a search on the Internet, he or she will find three listings from on-line retailers for every one listing from a traditional retailer. I find it very surprising that brick and mortar retailers have not invested more dollars in search marketing, since e-commerce sales have grown 28% since 2006 (according to comScore) while total retail sales have grown by only 3% over the same time period.“

With more and more shoppers starting their shopping “process” online, it’s no wonder that they are turning to online stores who outnumber local stores by 3-to-1.

Your organic local marketing domination today.

The bottom line for Google was a very website-searcher-centric idea: Put the most authoritative sites first. The more authoritative it was, the higher it should rank. (Which makes sense for internet users who are using search to find something).

They measured authoritativeness by a variety of factors, including keywords, backlinks, and more.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz‘s CEO, wrote a very compelling blog in which he talked about how Google’s rankings algorithm has changed over time. He even provided a handy chart which shows an estimation based on Fishkin’s experience and observations.

Essentially, he says that authoritativeness is still key at Google and they measure 4 basic things:

• The authority of the domain
• Anchor text
• Keyword usage
• Backlinks

View his chart below and read the blog post here.

Learn how search engine optimization (SEO) has changed