internet marketing If you want to see how these five P’s work together for your business, check out our Honolulu Local SEO page.

Product and Price Strategy Online

Your product isn’t what you sell. It’s how people see what you sell before they pick up the phone. To a person looking for a plumber in Kakaako, your product online is your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your lead response time. It’s what they use to judge you first.

Google Business Profile Optimization and Local SEO This is another surprising fact. Imagine this. An owner in Honolulu searches “emergency AC repair near me” from their phone. The top results are three air conditioning contractors in the Google Maps pack. They all fix A/C. But only one has 87 reviews, photos of real work, and a business description that explains what it is the business does. The other two have profiles with very little information. Which one gets the call?

Your online product comes together from these building blocks:

• A completed, optimized Google Business Profile with the right business categories
• Current, real photos showing your team, projects, and physical address
• Fresh, real reviews
• Quick and accurate lead responses

Any one of these building blocks affects how the homeowner views your business. You lose leads to your competition if you omit any one.

Price Signals Without Price Lists

This is another area where business owners get confused. Your pricing strategy online doesn’t mean putting a price list on your website. It means showing your value so clearly that price stops mattering as much.

“One contractor in Honolulu told me he’d been losing work to cheaper contractors. His work was better. His reviews told so. But his website looked like it was created in 2009.”

We fixed his Google Business Profile optimization and got photos of his jobs, plus set up a missed call text-back system. Within six weeks he was booking more jobs at his normal rates. None of his actual rates changed. His perceived value went up because his online presence reflected his quality of work.

That is the price strategy in an online market. People on Oahu compare businesses very quickly. According to BrightLocal’s 2024 Local Consumer Review Survey, 87% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses. That means people are forming opinions about your value even before they ask what you charge.

So the question is not should you lower your prices? The question is “does your online presence reflect the quality of your services and justify what you charge?” And if your Google Maps ranking is low, it does not matter. People can judge your value if they can’t find you. Local SEO gets your business in front of the right people at the right time. Google Business Profile optimization gets people who are there liking what they see.

It’s a pattern you’ll see over and over again. A business owner spends money on online ads. He sends people to a poor profile or a slow-loading website. The product and price signals are out of sync. He doesn’t get leads. He wastes money.

If you’d like to get your business online right, you need to do the work first. Google Business Profile optimization and local SEO are key. Get this part right, and you’ll get the leads.

Your product online is your online presence. Your price strategy is your perceived value. Get both right and you will book more jobs around Honolulu without dropping your prices by even a single dollar.

Place and Promotion in an Online-First Market

Place used to mean where your place of business was located. That was a great corner in Honolulu. That was a place near Ala Moana. This is important. But in a modern world, place is where you appear online.

Consider this for example. If someone in Kakaako needs a plumber at 9pm at night, they are not walking around and looking for a neon light. They are pulling out their mobile phones. They are searching Google. Place is your Google Maps rank. That is your Google Business Profile listing. It is being in that top three map pack, or being buried on the second page.

Business owners do this incorrectly all the time. They spend a ton of money getting a great place of business but fail to do the online marketing piece. They remain invisible to customers that are searching right now, ready to pay and book.

Your Virtual Shop Front Is Your Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile optimization is quite simply your strongest local SEO tool. Local Consumer Survey 2023 by BrightLocal reveals that 98% of consumers used the internet in search of local businesses. Your Google Business Profile is your virtual shop front, including hours, your reviews and photos. It is your chance to make first impressions.

For business owners in Honolulu this is huge. In Honolulu, the competitive market includes both tourists and locals looking for services daily. You leave your potential clients in the hands of competitors who have done the optimization.

So what is the right Google Business profile?

• A fully completed Google Business Profile
• Verified business hours and locations
• Accurate description and categories
• Photos and videos

Most local business owners simply set up their profile and walk away. This is like showing your store open but not turning on any lights.

Advertising And Online Promotion

The definition of “Promotion” has also changed. Before, advertising would mean a print ad, radio commercials and perhaps even a billboard on Nimitz Highway. Some of that might still be effective. In a digital market, advertising and promotion would mean local SEO and Google Maps SEO, being found by customers in your immediate vicinity searching for you. These are customers ready to purchase and will do business with you immediately.

And the thing no one really gets until later. Advertising and promotions aren’t just about how you get seen. It’s about how you get seen. An Facebook ad can show up to 10,000 viewers that have no interest in the moment. A Google Maps listing shows a single person who has interest at that moment. This is the difference between a lead and a lead that just gets lost in the noise.

We have helped local Honolulu businesses get calls by focusing on what works and not just advertising. They were spending money on Facebook but not getting phone calls from searches. Advertising is working for someone else. We can only work with our local clients in Honolulu and provide Google Business Profile optimizatio and local SEO. When they were able to reach their phone they received more calls and found customers.

Want to get a sense of how your Google Business Profile compares? You can take a look at our Local SEO Honolulu service and see how we’ve helped other businesses in Honolulu find more customers by Google Maps.

Place and Promotion must work together to generate a local SEO result. You need to be at the same place people look to find you as much as possible. You need to do that faster than your competition. So for local SEO in Honolulu, the first step must be Google Maps, the rest will fall into place after that.