Local Search

Local Search

Local Search Example

Local searches include information about “what” the consumer is searching for (such as business services or the name of a product – keyword phrases) and “where” information, such as a city name, or postal code. Some examples of local searches are “hotels Vancouver”, “Miami restaurant”, and “car repair Calgary”.

Local Search in many forms has been around for a long time. When cities first formed it started with asking your neighbour where you could get a goat (or whatever). Another form goes back more than 100 years with Yellow Pages directories.

Today, the most popular way to find what you want from a local business is online Local Search.

Searching locally online replaces in many ways information that was provided by Yellow Pages, newspapers, TV, magazines and radio. With the growth of the internet, the vast amount of data available, and the accuracy of the results, consumers are increasingly using search engines to find these local products and services online.

The number of local searches online grows rapidly every day while off-line information searches, such as print Yellow Page lookups have cratered. This shift in consumer response has led local product and service providers to start shifting their advertising and marketing investment away from traditional media to local online.

Local Search is important to local business for 3 major reasons:

1. Local results are shown with many organic search results, and search providers like Google, Bing and Yahoo are increasing local results each month.

2. Search from mobile devices – which have over 80% local intent – are growing at the fastest rates ever seen in business history. Mobile search will be bigger than desktop search by 2012.

3. It’s very cost effective. Comparing the cost of an online marketing program to almost any off-line marketing shows a lower cost of entry and a higher ROI.

Local Search results can send hundreds to thousands of buyers to your business each month. People who come to your business from search know exactly what they’re looking for… they are buyers. Fish where the fish are!

Many search engines provide local search results: Bing, Google, and Yahoo, and there are many new start-ups like Poynt, or directories like 411.ca. Some are segmented or targeted to specific vertical markets while others are tied to mapping products like Mapquest.

Geolocation which determines where you are located when searching is used to match searches with relevant results. You search for dentists and the search result page returns Dentists in the town you are searching from.

Of course, the sources and types of information and information returned changes with the local search engine.

Google Places looks for physical addresses in regular web pages, on other sites, your Google Places listing keywords and images/videos. It provides these results to visitors, along with business listings and maps.

Product-specific search engines create there own database of results from web crawling and direct feeds to collect information about products for sale in a specific geographic area.

Other local search engines include Bing Local, and Yahoo! Local. Yelp, Facebook, Merchant Circle, Brownbook (and many, many more) all provide useful information about local businesses. As you can tell there is huge investment in this area from information providers and that means local search is getting better as competition increases.

We Help Local Businesses Make More Money

Right now, customers are searching online for a local business just like yours. Can they find you or will they find your competitors?