Increase Your Business’ Presence in Local Internet Searches
Do you remember searching for a local business, service provider or product using the yellow pages? Today, those massive, unwieldy tomes have gone the way of the recycle bin, replaced in large part by local Internet searches.
In fact, 97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online. In addition to this, 20 percent of all online searches are locally focused, according to Google. From restaurants to print shops, hair salons to IT companies, law firms to mortgage brokers, the more-than 50 million local businesses listed on sites such as Google Places receive millions of page views each day.
Even if your business is purely online, local search marking is important because:
• Your customers are performing local searches;
• Even if you sell nationally, you are still a local business.
When you’re optimizing your web presence for search engines, it’s much easier to achieve high search-result rankings when you’ve incorporated local search terms into your online marketing strategy. For instance, a search for “attorney” brings up almost 400 million results; add “Seattle” to the search, and the results narrow to 53 million. Add the term “west” and the results plummet to 2.5 million.
Even if you sell your product or service at a national level, consumers tend to search for businesses in a particular geographic area using local Internet searches .
Don’t Miss Out on Customers
Smart phone and other mobile device users also represent a growing market of local-search based consumers. In January 2011 alone, more than 77.1 million consumers accessed local content on a mobile device, an increase of 34 percent from 2010. These statistics indicate that more than 33 percent of mobile subscribers are local content users. This number that will continue to increase in coming years.
If your business isn’t listed on local search sites, you’re missing out on customers — and not just any customers. As a group, local search users represent well-informed consumers that tend to spend more. A 2010 study by Forrester Research found that more than one-third of customers do research online before visiting a local business. This group tends to not only buy what they came for, but also to spend — on average — $154 more on other purchases, a market that reached $1 trillion in 2011.
Today, the Internet has replaced the phone book as the consumer’s search method of choice. In order to remain competitive, your business must increase its online presence on local search sites such as Google Places, Yahoo! Local, Bing Local and Best of the Web.
Local Internet Searches: How Does Local Search Work?
Simply search for information that’s linked to a particular geographic location, like a street address, a city, a state, a postal code or even an IP — Internet Protocol — number. The four major search engines — Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo! — all offer local search features as part of their general search, as well as through specialized platforms.
More frequently search engines automatically include local content in general search results, even if the user doesn’t specifically request it. This is known as organic search. For instance, a general Google search for “Chinese restaurant” will generally include local eateries among the top ranking results. Though it may seem as though Big Brother is watching, this personalized local content is the result of geo-location.
When search terms include location cues, such as a city name, search engines automatically return localized information, or a local search. To use search terms for a local search, just add geographic information to a general search, such as “yoga studio Atlanta.”
Computers and Search Engines
Localized sites allow search engines to take an educated guess as to where a user’s computer is located. Countries often have domain extensions at the end of their web addresses, such as google.se. In this case, the domain name extension — .se — suggests that the user is located in Sweden. Some sites are localized to even narrower geographic areas, allowing search engines to assess the computers’ locations with some accuracy.
Every computer has its own IP address. When computers access the Internet, IP addresses provide servers with a specific location to send the data. IP numbers are affiliated with certain geographic regions, often cities or states. Though it’s not an exact science, geo-location technology is improving, making it easier for search engines to automatically provide local content to searchers – and more important for your business to be accessible for both general and local-search users.
Local Internet Searches vs. Organic Internet Searches
Though major search engines automatically provide local search content as a part of general search results they draw information for local searches from another set of data, known as indexes. Local indexes represent another way for you to localize your web site and reach more customers. In order to rank highly in organic and local searches, it’s important to increase your business’ presence in both organic search indexes and local search indexes.
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