Google Names Santa Rosa Beach as Florida's Digital Capital

Google has announced Santa Rosa Beach in South Walton as Florida's Digital Capital. Santa Rosa Beach is the postal city designation for most of South Walton and serves as a catch-all for most of the area south of the Choctawhatchee Bay.

Determining the designation is a two-stage process based on data relating to Google adwords and the online presence of local businesses. The first stage is based on Google adwords penetration per capita - i.e. "by dividing the total population of each city by the number of AdWords customers in that city".

But stage two is where it gets interesting. Fifty one random businesses are evaluated from each state's top five Google Adword cities. The businesses are then scored and ranked according to several factors relating to online presence.

From the blog of Google's Scott Levitan, Director of Small Business Engagement -  "Ninety-seven percent of Americans who use the Internet—pretty much all of us—look online for local products and services. So it should come as no surprise that the impact on businesses of being online is huge."

One of the factors scored was whether or not a local business is listed in an online directory. SoWal.com has directories for businesses, rentals, restaurants, shops, wedding vendors, and more. Check our directories to see if you are listed, or use the search function.

You can submit your business to get listed on our site. We also offer premium pages for SoWal Partners that include more info, logos, photos, and video - and being a SoWal Partner also means you gain additional marketing through our social media, editorial, SoWal Forum, SoWal Newsletter, and more.

Sowal.com is a very powerful site in Google rankings. Getting listed on SoWal.com will help your business get found and ranked higher. Google searchbots are constantly "crawling" SoWal.com to determine content and index pages. To date, Google bots have crawled over 7.9 million pages on SoWal.com, adding over 500,000 pages to its index.

With over 111,000 unique visitors to our website in July 2013, SoWal.com is a popular online destination for locals and visitors to South Walton, Florida - with the large majority of visitors to the site living in our southern tourist drive market.

Banner ads on our site have a total of over 98 million impressions (number of times an ad has been displayed on our site) and over 98,000 click-throughs to advertiser websites since statistics began to be recorded in August 2008. SoWal.com began in Fall 2004.
Contact us to learn more about advertising and marketing services by SoWal.com.

And finally - the most points were awarded to businesses that have a website providing a stellar online presence - you can get your website or improve the one you have at Moon Creek Studios, providers of website design and hosting in Santa Rosa Beach since 1998, and publisher of SoWal.com.