Does Your Small Business Think Local?
For a long time, small businesses struggled with search marketing, because to succeed, they had to specialize, rather than being all things to all people in a local area. That’s still good advice, but changes in how people use search (and in how search engines work) are suddenly making your location every bit as important as your specialty, at least for some businesses.
I’ve been talking for years about how businesses need to avoid the trap of thinking that being local will help them in search marketing. Just a few months ago, I beat that drum again, in urging that small businesses specialize on the Web. And that advice isn’t wrong, because most searches are not focused on location, and if you want to win those customers, you need to do something special.
But that advice is increasingly incomplete.
Every week another shoe drops on local search–search queries that provide different results based on the searcher’s location. Time was that searchers needed to type in a location to get a truly local search (“plumber in cleveland” or “dentist 90210”). Then the search engines started noticing the location of your computer using its IP address, and targeted paid ads and later organic searches based on where you are now, without you typing anything special into the search box. So, if you are in Cleveland, you just need to type “plumber” and you’ll see local search results and local ads.
But now it is getting even more interesting. As more and more searchers are using their mobile phones, the kinds of searches they do are changing. Now they are likely to search for “coffee” or “office supplies” or any number of things that they need while driving or walking around. This makes being local again the most important thing, without any need for specialization at all.
As iPhones, Android phones, and other newer phones make it simple to search for things nearby (Google just announced its “Near Me Now” service), you can expect mobile search usage to increase dramatically in the next few years.
So how can local businesses make sure they are found? Start by trying out some searches yourself. Start first with your computer, but then try your phone, too. Ask your geeky friends to help you by searching on their phones when they are near your location so you see what they see. Different phones have different apps; different carriers have different default search engines; different locations will provide different results. And as personalized results become more common, different people will get different results, too.
So, yes, it’s not that easy to check thoroughly, but you are better off checking in an imperfect way that looking at nothing at all (and just hoping that it goes well). And there are ways for you to help yourself:
So, while that car repair shop still needs to trumpet its specialty (classic car repair) to draw customers from a wider area, focusing also on very local search might snag the motorist whose car just broke down a mile from the location of the shop. For that customer, it’s still location, location, location.
Mike is an expert in search marketing, search technology, social media, publishing, text analytics, and web metrics, who regularly makes speaking appearances.
Mike’s previous appearances include Text Analytics World, Rutgers Business School, SEMRush webinar, ClickZ Live.
Mike also founded and writes for Biznology, is the co-author of Outside-In Marketing (with James Mathewson) and the best-selling Search Engine Marketing, Inc. (now in its 3rd edition, and sole author of Do It Wrong Quickly, named by the Miami Herald as one of the 11 best business books of 2007.
1 in every 13 searches on Google is now showing a map.
We are very local focused for both our own firm and our design and optimization clients. We find many clients have ZERO idea about local search, and how they can utilize this to their advantage. Real Estate agents should be jumping all over this, and sadly I find that many of them leave it up to the brokerage who in turn is uninformed also.
Google and Bing Local when combined with the other services and a few other sites can have a very large effect on SERPs also. We find get about 200 hits a month off our Google Local ad, and we are working on optimizing that even more to increase the click through conversion.
Nice post! Many years ago the trend of search marketing is too low, but now day’s every business use marketing for the promotion of their business. I think without the help of marketing it is very difficult for business to maintain their existence.
I think the trick is to make your site strong enough to appear ABOVE the google maps when doing a local search. Any idea why some of Google’s results link directly to a website and others to a Goolge Maps page?
Excellent post Mike. I couldn’t agree more that mobile search is the future of SEO and search in general. In fact, I would go as far as to say that ‘regular’ SEO will be long dead before CDs and Newspapers go the way of the dodo. I gave your post a RT as well. Cheers, Mike
Yeah don, the reason some of the results show googlemaps, while other’s list a website. Is because the one’s with googlemap returns dont have a website listed, so their placepage/local listing page shows up instead. You dont need a website to have an active google local listing.
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