Ignoring your marketing while you are busy means running the possibility of not getting more work when you are slow. So the new year is a good time to take a look at your current marketing situation, and figure out what you need to do to remain competitive in your business.

For some this might mean a new website. It’s extremely important to keep this aspect of your marketing updated. Your website is the number one marketing piece for any business. Before you shudder at the expense, you might want to ask yourself a few questions.

Has it been more than two years since your last redesign? Have your offline marketing materials changed, and your brand no longer seems consistent? Have your customers commented on your website being outdated? Are you no longer ranking where you want to in the search engines? If you answer yes to any of this, it’s probably time to consider a redesign.

It may also be time to work on your business’s search engine optimization. Every business wants that coveted front-page spot on Google. The search giant just redid their algorithms again, to place a higher importance on social results. So now is a good time to make sure your social media accounts are where they need to be.

It’s important that these and other aspects of your marketing are working in full swing. It’s also a good idea to hire this work out if you cannot do it yourself at a professional level.

You were right to place a value on your marketing going into the new year. Your marketing materials will often be your customers’ first impression of your business. Better make it a good one.

If you don’t see any results immediately with Adwords, people tend to become frustrated because you are still paying for the clicks. There are settings on Adwords that are designed to help you attract local business. If you take advantage of them correctly, Adwords can help you improve your local visibility, and by extension, grow your local business.

According to Google, 97 percent of users search for local businesses online. That is an astonishingly high number. Google Adwords can help you position yourself highly in these local search results for highly competitive keyword phrases.

This is how it works. Say hypothetically that you run an Italian restaurant. More than one and a half million people used the search phrase “Italian restaurant” in Google’s search in a month. That is a really difficult thing for a small independent restaurant—near impossible—to rank highly for. If you Google it, mostly major chains come up for results. So how do you compete with that to break on to that first page?

This is where Google’s pay per click comes into play. What you could do is run a Google Adwords campaign for the same keywords. Since it is a restaurant, you are looking for mainly local customers. If you did this organically, there would be no geographic base. You would have to include geography in the search terms.

Adwords has a setting for a local search. What you can do is enter zip codes for the local areas. Now, what you have done is increased your chances at ranking highly for these competitive search terms locally.

So if somebody in your town is hungry for Italian food, they find you up there on the page with all the big chains. This is a great way that Google offers to help level the playing field for small businesses.