Local Search Marketing For Small Businesses

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If you haven’t already noticed, local search is here to stay. Opportunities for small businesses to reach large, targeted audiences has never been so cost-effective. With increasing competitors becoming more astute to the advantages of online marketing, local search offers something of a refuge for the smaller business owner who perhaps doesn’t have the budget for Pay-Per-Click (PPC).

Are you still using the Yellow Pages? Consider this: local search on Google, Bing and others is evolving all the time. The introduction of postcode searching a few years back suggests that they are trying to do one thing – keep the majority of the traffic on the search engine itself. Old-school directories are dying.

Work out the positioning of your website. Are you ranking higher, or lower than your YP listing for your business specific terms? If you’re nowhere to be seen then maybe your listing fee is still justified as a source of traffic. How about if you’ve overtaken it? Is your fee being wasted on a low-traffic generator when it could be better spent elsewhere?

There are multiple factors that research and testing shows has an affect your local search position. Due to constant algorithm changes, and the shrewdness of Google, these are not proven as such but have strong supporting evidence:

• How close to the central search location your business is. E.g. ”Dentist Oxford’ will throw up relevant businesses in the OX1 and surrounding areas first and foremost.
• Your resident address, and whether it’s verified or not.
• The number of reviews your business has.
• The number of positive reviews. There is also evidence to suggest the authority of the reviewer has a bearing on strength and credibility.
• Landline telephone number and address throughout your website that matches Local Business Center data.
• The number of inbound links to website. Citations are classed as links for local search.
• Your Business name and it’s relevance to the user’s search.

The modern day picture is becoming clearer, with mobile phones becoming lifestyle possessions that we use for everyday tasks that would otherwise be tasked to a computer. Local search on the iPhone, Blackberry and other smart phones are opportunities for your business to be found.

And consider the state of mind of that searcher… You don’t search for a ‘Pizza in SW12′ on a phone, unless you want a pizza right now, right?

My view is that our gadgets and material objects are becoming more affordable, and more advanced than ever before. With this comes a certain objection to reading on small screens, that makes it even more paramount that information is delivered rapidly. I do not believe that is going to change much, so it pretty much reinforces the whole ‘rapid information’ thing.

Local search is an aggregation of data, in simple terms, that can be delivered extremely quickly. It’s all useful information, the telephone will never die out and postcodes make it simple to locate full addresses and generate a list of relevant results. It’s a proven format, digitalised and delivered at speed. Your small business should be on it.

Tagged as: Local Search, mobile search