Whether you know it or not, for most inflatable rental businesses your website is your single most important way of attracting new customers.

The internet is increasingly the first stop for consumers seeking local businesses and services. Four out of five consumers now use the internet to find products and services. If you’re relying on flyers and yellow pages ads to make the phone ring, you’re name is probably never even seen by the majority of your potential customers.

The Death of the Yellow Pages
Once upon a time if someone wanted to find a local company they grabbed the yellow pages and flipped through to the category they wanted and started dialing. But now the internet has made the process much easier. As a result, more and more people are using the internet as their first and only way of looking for local businesses.

According to Pew, search engines now beat out all yellow pages for how consumers search for businesses.

Ironically just as the yellow pages are transitioning into obsolescence we have several new companies publishing their own yellow pages – in fact there are over 240 companies currently publishing yellow pages. These are all delivered for free to every address; however, most households only keep one set on hand. This means that you have to have ads in several different yellow pages, to reach fewer people. And of course the cost of the ads is going up, to the point that it’s easy to spend three thousand dollars or more a year on yellow pages ads alone.

But the slow death of the yellow pages is a good thing for you! A quality website is far less expensive than yellow pages advertising, and most of that cost is a one-time setup. In fact many inflatable rental companies report that they are abandoning their yellow pages ads entirely.

How to Get Your Site Noticed
Not only do you need a quality website, you also need people to find your site from search engines. Google is the largest search engine by leaps and bounds, with Yahoo and Windows Live making up the only other significant competition.

Search engines find, sort and present information about websites in a very specific way. There are volumes on information available online and in print about how to go about optimizing your site for search engines. Fortunately, you don’t need to read all of that, since 90% of what matters can be distilled into three simple Dos and Don’ts.

Stay tuned next week for The 3 Dos and 3 Don’ts of Website Optimization.