How much time do you spend in social media sites? A few minutes a day? A few hours a day? What about your kids and their friends? What about your customers?

It’s possible that you’re the rare exception to the rule. Many peole “confess” to spending hours online, primarily in social media engagement via Twitter or Facebook. Internet usage has skyrocketed, according to a study published in May 2009 by the Center for Media Research.

Some stats from this study include:

• There are 87% more online social media users now than in 2003, with 883% more time devoted to those sites.
• In the last year, time spent on social networking sites has surged 73%

And Charles Buchwalter, Senior Vice President of Research and Analytics at Nielsen Online says: “The Internet remains a place of continuing innovation, with users finding new ways to integrate online usage into their daily lives.“

In other words, savvy businesses are using video and social networking and other internet marketing techniques to reach out to their customers where they are spending their time: online… and, specifically, in video and social media sites.

Neilsen also concluded that: “Given the increased focus on digital marketing [...] the Internet’s share of commerce will continue to rise.” For offline businesses that are ignoring the online marketing opportunities, this is a scary thought. Internet commerce is already huge and stealing a large piece of local business revenue… and it’s expected to grow.

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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.

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Recently, my wife and I made plans to go to dinner with friends. We had eaten at all of the “regular” places and were feeling adventurous so we decided to try something new. We went online, typed in our city, the kind of food we want to eat, and the word “restaurant”. “Boston Chinese restaurant” or “Boston Italian restaurant” or something like that.

Very convenient! Google is “feeding” the local search frenzy by providing services like adding your place of business to a map that appears at the top of local searches.

Alllll the way back in 2005, The Kelsey Group (an advisory service specializing in internet marketing and other marketing channels) found that 70% of internet searches use the web to find local businesses. (Read their findings here).

That was 4 years ago and that number had increased by 16% between October 2003 and March 2005 (an increase of basically 1% per month).

I believe that this number is going to be much higher now for the following reasons:

1. There has been a growing emphasis on local search since then
2. Wifi has become more ubiquitous, allowing for search-on-the-go
3. Social networking sites have seen growth in the local side of networking (an example being Twitter, which is used to connected globally but also locally through hashtags like #nyc or #la or #miami or #boston, etc.)
4. Smartphones (especially the the iPhone) offers numerous apps geared to local businesses.

However, they are looking online! Local internet marketing provides another powerful marketing channel for local businesses to pursue… and it’s even better than offline marketing.

The Kelsey Group is an advisory and consulting service specializing in marketing (particularly search and Yellow Pages marketing). In their annual search forecast, they write that local search is going to become a huge part of marketing for local businesses, outpacing broader global search.

“Local search growth will outpace [broader global] search growth through 2013. Local businesses and those that target geographic areas will make a sustained effort to build … their online presence.“

For the next three years (at least), more and more local businesses are going to get on board with local-focused internet marketing. Your competitors probably are… will you?

So, how do you help that traffic find you? There are a number of ways you can generate traffic – from paid search to viral videos to social media to articles. No matter what combination of search engine marketing you do, there is one single search engine marketing secret that will make all the difference. Follow this one secret by making sure that all of your search engine marketing complies, and you’ll generate traffic.

The search engine marketing secret
The best way to generate traffic is by building credibility. Credibility is the magnet that will attract prospects to you so you can sell to them. All of your search engine marketing – when done correctly – will contribute to a growing sense of credibility that will help you to convince your prospects to buy.

In fact, the most popular search engine is set up to encourage you and enable you to become more credible. Google uses the concept of PageRank, which was named for Google co-founder Larry Page. Google’s game changing impact on the internet was its idea that each link to your website was a “vote” for your website’s credibility. That sounds like a good idea, but they took it one step further with PageRank: The value of a vote was higher from sites that were more credible themselves.

For example, there could be two equal sites on the web but one has a higher PageRank because highly valued, thoughtful, informative, and useful sites link to it compared to the other site.

Then, Google would use each site’s PageRank as a factor in deciding where to place it in a search result. Generally, pages with a higher PageRank appear closer to the top of search results because it has been “voted” more credible.

How credibility impacts your search engine marketing
When you’re planning what your search engine marketing efforts, you need to make sure that one of your activities is to build links back to your website using highly credible sources.

Press releases are a good example of this because news sites often have higher PageRank. Some articles, distributed to the right article distribution sites, can offer a similar result. If you create a blog or a YouTube channel or a Flickr account, these can all help link back from high PageRank sites, giving you votes of credibility.

To start, think about your industry and where the most credible websites are likely to be. Use a tool like PRChecker.info (http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php) to check for the PageRank of the target sites you’d like to do your search engine marketing through. When you find higher ranking pages, find ways to link back to your site from there. It could include submitting articles or participating on a forum or having your blog posted there.

No matter what type of search engine marketing you choose to do, just remember to make sure it builds your credibility. And when you do enough of that, you will successfully build web traffic to your small business.