What Is Local Search Marketing?
Wikipedia defines Local Search this way:
Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about “what” the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also “where” information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude.”
Simply put, it’s like a phone book search without the phone book.
In the early 90’s as GTE’s Superpages site was striving for completion, there was really not a lot of use for an internet phone book. Think about it – if you remember – a user would have to connect to internet (dial-up!), wait for a connection in some cases (busy signals!), then locate the online phone book they intended to use (why can’t Yahoo find the phone book?), and then if you were lucky and your city’s directory had been converted for web use, you could look up your topic, then write all the phone numbers on a post-it note (because last time you only wrote down one number and it was no longer in service and you had to go through all that logging onto the internet all over again!), log off your internet connection, then call the vendor of your choice…
Pretty stupid, huh?
Now update this scenario for the 21st century. You need a plumber? Grab your cellphone, type in “plumbers” and your zip code and chances are you will be brought to a nice little summary page that contains a selection of available plumbers from all these Internet Yellow Page sites that have been around forever, through which you can scroll a little bit, decide who to call, click a button and the phone calls the vendor of your choice.
Pretty SMART now, huh?
By extension then, Local Search Marketing is a focus on marketing to the folks who are beginning to rely more than ever on local search tools. At home or on the go, localized search now has a well-defined purpose and fulfillment process. It just took ten years for phone technology to catch up with the fact that all this data can be accessed on the fly via internet connection.
To demonstrate local search in action, one of our techs tried to have pizza delivered to a specific location. We screen-capped the Google listing for his local search.
click image for full size
If you click onto the full size image (you might need to click on the new window again to expand it), you can read through the top ten entries in the Google Business listing, where the map is. Surprisingly, it not only contains listings for places that don’t deliver pizza, it contains listings for places that don’t even make pizza, as well as places that don’t deliver anything.
What this tells me is that folks who do actually deliver pizza to this zip code are not aggressively marketing to local search. This puts them in de facto competition with folks like KFC – a business with whom they shouldn’t be contending in a search for “pizza delivery.” In other words, if the places who actually do deliver pizza to this zip code were all listing their businesses correctly, at least in Google’s Business Listings, KFC wouldn’t be there.
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