Like they say, “It’s nothing like it used to be in the good ‘ol days when you just picked up a phone book, looked for a company and the dialed the number.”

Phone books are pretty much obsolete and now we have the internet.

At first looking for something on the internet was simple. There were not that many places advertising online and there were only a few locations on the internet offering a way for people to easily locate a company for a particular service that they were looking for. Examples of this are Kudzu, Angie’s List.

Today almost all garage door companies in business are listing their businesses with a web site on the internet and on top of that there are countless places on the internet called “search engines” assisting people in their efforts to locate things and businesses on the internet. The top search engines are of course Google, Yahoo/Bing but there are hundreds of others like AOL, Lycos, All the Web, etc. Google is the largest and the one most commonly used and at last time I looked, controlled about 88% of the searches on the internet. For the sake of today’s post, I will focus on Google.

Let’s say you woke up this morning, got ready to go to work and discovered that your garage door won’t open. You go back into your house and sit at your computer to start looking someone to come and repair it. The first thing you do is key into Google what is known as key words that briefly describe what you are looking for. In our example it will be garage door repair. This is what you type into the Google search box. Now, additionally, you will need to tell Google where you want to look for this. So, for this example, let’s say you live in Marietta Ga. You will type in the search box, garage door repair Marietta ga. This tells Google what you are looking for and where you are. Google in turn will present to you a list of companies that are supposed to meet certain criteria for accuracy for you to choose.

If you know what is specifically is wrong, say a broken spring, then you would type, garage door spring replacement Marietta ga. If you are looking to replace your garage door then type, garage door replacement Marietta ga. The key is to be brief, specific and include your location.

In my next blog, I will give you direction on how to choose the companies that are presented to you. Google has criteria and rules that companies should meet to be listed, however, some bad companies have learned to work around the rules to get ahead. I will tell you how to sort the bad companies out.