The thing we found was that there are well over one hundred people a month searching for variations of this companies name online yet before they had a website the company had no idea where they were going.

Think about this for a minute, there are people actively looking for your business and if your website is not optimized properly or if you do not have a web presence at all there is no way for your potential customers to find you.

The business I am talking about here was a very offline business, a drilling and blasting company, when we put the site together they really were just looking to have a small site setup online but we told them it would end up being their advertising online, their way of promoting their business. They were skeptical.

Not now, they indicated they are getting many calls from the site now, customers were looking before they just were not finding this company, who knows they may of been finding a competitor in local search listings. How much business does a business loose if someone is looking for them over and over again online but can never find them.

As search engine optimizers we tend to focus on keywords and search volume for certain search terms, in many cases a persons business is searched on enough that the value is in just being found.

Is your business being found online in all the places it should be? If not talk to us about local search optimization.

In the past it has always been about eyeballs, there was no targeting, at least not in the sense we talk about today. If you were to advertise in the newspaper or on the radio you were advertising across a large region and you bought the ad based on eyeballs or listeners even if those people had no interest in your product or even if they just happened to be passing through town.

This is the model most small business owners are typically most familiar with. The web changes all of this.

Now, with local search taking a larger role in online search queries making sure you are found when people search for a service or product in Bing, Google, or Yahoo is more important than any newspaper ad someone could run. And one statistic says a lot as well, 80 percent of people in one survey reported searching online to research a product or service then going locally to buy it.

If your business cannot be found online then it is likely they are not going to your business to buy it.

With local search and hyperlocal targeting you can make sure that when people search for your business online that they find your web presence. Making sure your business shows up in the Google local listings (or Bing and Yahoo) is very important, but with people becoming even more targeted in their search making sure you show up at a neighborhood level in major metros and even in rural areas can be very important if someone is looking for a local service or restaurant.

It is not about having hundreds of thousands of people reading the newspaper and possibly seeing your ad with the web, on the web when someone searches in the search engines they know exactly what they are looking for which means if your business can get that traffic to your website then the conversion ratio is much higher than you may be used to in legacy methods of advertising.

By building your website in a way that attracts the people searching in your local area you can make sure that the customers you are looking for find you and not your competitor. These customers convert, you want them to be yours.

Why?

Because people are understanding that with the penetration of GPS capabilities in mobile devices and people using the internet more frequently on their mobile devices it is possible to targeted advertising and other services on a more granular, or as we are saying, hyperlocal basis.

The initial hyperlocal talk was really focused on news and local bloggers writing about neighborhood level topics, true community level news rather than the more regional or city level  news that typically existed.

The web allowed for bloggers to become journalists on a hyperlocal level based on the cost of entry.

Well, from an advertising standpoint this works too, between geo targeted ads, hyperlocal content, and mobile apps taking advantage of all of the above we will see more targeted advertising than ever before. Location based services have arrived.

From a news standpoint even local news stations are starting to use the “hyperlocal” buzz term, just tonight I was listening to a local weather forecast when out of the blue I heard the weatherman say “Lets go hyperlocal and see what is happening in your neighborhood.”

Six months ago you would not of heard that, now the news stations understand that online you are getting more focused and targeted, they have to find away to catch that shift. Does using a buzz word make that happen?

Nope, it will be extremely tough to take the easy distribution the web offers to a broadcast level.

Enjoy the age of hyperlocal online.

In the past advertising solutions have been about one thing, eyeballs. That is how people determined what they charged for their advertising product. The more eyeballs the better, right?

Well, local search engine optimization has changed that and turned it on its head. With the ability to optimize a website to show up in the search engine listings when people search for specific items in your local area you can receive higher converting visitors to your ad or website at a lower cost.

Why pay a newspaper thousands of dollars for an ad that you are not sure that anyone even cares about when for much less you can optimize your real estate website to be in the first page of Google search results when someone searches for the exact subdivision you are selling a house in.

With the economy, and especially real estate in a very tough downturn finding more cost effective, high converting, marketing solutions is very important. Being able to use local search engine optimization to target people searching for the exact location you are selling a property in is the best way.

If you are not thinking about this it is likely that your competitor is. With more and more people becoming more web savvy people are understanding that the search engines are not a technical subject anymore, they are your marketing tool. They have taken over for the newspapers and billboards of the past.

I you are interested in marketing your real estate website to the people searching for exactly what you are trying to sell then contact us for local search engine optimization.

The most popular are by far Facebook and Twitter, to give an idea of the importance of Facebook they recently announced they have bypassed the 350 million user mark and independent data shows they bypassed Google for a short time in December for the most visitors. This means your customers are there, you should be too.

The value in social networking really comes from friends recommending products, services, or websites to their friends or family. This type of recommendation can be very valuable. How do you take advantage of this?

In the case of Facebook it could be the use of a fan page which you can promote and get people to “fan” you, then when you update your fan page it will show up in your fans accounts which means their friends could see it as well. This is a vote of trust and can be very useful.

This also means that you can put links to your website in the post you put on Facebook, this can be used to drive traffic to your website to get awareness to a promotion or other special event.

It is important though to make sure you have the opposite happening as well, you need to make sure that on your small business website you have links to your social media sites. This allows people that normally go to your website to find your Facebook or Twitter account easily and follow you, this means when you do updates there these users will automatically see them and be driven back to your online presence.

It is also important when you are promoting your Facebook or Twitter page that you attempt to find people local to your business, if you can have them follow you they are very targeted users in your geographic location, the best for customer conversions. Look for a follow up article on this in the near future.

Accounts are free, very easy to use, and a great way to connect with customers. If you need help contact Localtek for more info on small business marketing in the online world.

But as you can imagine the usage of the white pages has dropped drastically as well, for a couple main reasons:

• Mobile phone growth and applications
• People searching online for people rather than picking up the book

Although the second one is obvious and the first one is as well for the most part, I think the part that many people miss is that since the majority of cell phone numbers are unlisted you will not find them anywhere, online or off.

Well, AT&T has figured this out and without much fanfare has killed the publishing of the White Pages sections in many phone books.

State commissions typically only make it a requirement for the phone companies to make the directory listings available NOT actually requiring the printing of them, unless required.

So what happened when they did this?

A couple quick points of reference, in Milwaukee, where this was first tested in September of last year there was a less than 2 percent request rate to actually get a copy, LESS THAN 2 PERCENT. If that is not a statistic to take note of I am not sure what is.

In Austin and Atlanta the request rate was 3 percent. Think about that a bit, the delivery rate before was 100 percent, but only 3 percent actually wanted them. Waste much????

To read a bit more about this check out Madison.com

Many of us could see things like coming but many people continue to focus strictly on website SEO rather than how they will implement their social media optimization. With local trends it gets even more important to think about how you will combine locally targeted search with real time SEO.

By watching trends and acting in real time on a local level the targeting is more focused since the “heat of the moment” is on and you know in real time what people are looking for and WHERE they are looking for it at.

I remember testing location based services when I was in a product house at Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs) around 2001 or so, it is amazing to see how far things have come. We could see where things were headed then but the the move to social media was not foreseen.

It is amazing how even very non-tech focused people are moving easily into services that  a few years back they would of considered too geeky or complicated.

Why? Because with local and trusted peer relationships on social networks they feel comfortable because all their friends are there….

In summary, we know  these trends will not always be based on search terms that are business focused but creative ways to take advantage of this tool will come to light, I look forward to seeing them.

For more info check out Mashable.

To a good accounting firm one click driven to contact you for business services could turn into your next 30 thousand dollar client, if you cannot get them to do more than browse your website though then you have lost your chance, most companies are not in the business of educating, they are in the purpose of driving business growth.

Whether you are an accounting firm, a restaurant, or a pet groomer, at the end of the day once they arrive at your website you need to do something to either gather their information or drive them to contact you or in some cases buy on the spot.

In this case the customers current website provider would not allow them access to their site to modify it to properly set it up to target high conversion local customers. First off this is really pathetic to me, once a customer pays for a site it is THEIR site and they have every right to do anything they want to with it, but I digress.

To make up for the fact they could not modify their site we worked up a plan to build separate landing page sites to target locally targeted search traffic that would convert better for them and built a simple call to action banner in the site. The site did not need to be complex, a couple pages highly focused on converting customers is what it was all about.

Results?

Well, by using the landing page approach we were able to target the right customers and provide them with a way to easily contact the firm with a phone call or contact form. By doing this they now receive more customer contact from this one highly targeted, lower traffic site than they do from their primary website which gets 5 times the traffic.

In summary, it is important to provide mechanisms for customers to contact you by providing a compelling reason. This combined with targeting high conversion search terms is a sure fire success plan.

In fact it is likely that if you live in an area with many small towns located around your  place of business you want to try to get customers from the surrounding towns as well.

Many small business make the mistake of optimizing focused purely on the town they are in, for instance they may have the title of their site be:

Smalltown Restaurants

But if you speak to the business owner for any amount of time you will find that they are also interested in growing their business by attracting customers from surrounding communities.

If that is the case there are multiple options, even if you have just one location. A couple quick tips:

Build multiple pages with unique content that is focused on that specific town, optimize the title keywords appropriately. This could be as simple as announcing a local community event you will be sponsoring or attending.

Another option for less competitive areas is to have multiple city/niche combinations in the site title, expanding on the example above:

Smalltown1 Restaurants, Smalltown2 BBQ | MyDinerRestaurant1.com

Although a very minor change it can make  a difference for your small business when attracting surrounding customers. We have had customers have immediate results from such minor changes such as this.

As someone who focuses strictly in those areas I understand that many of those areas still can be in the land of slow dial-up connections and internet usage patterns are much different than those of us that have broadband speeds on our mobile phones, in other words many of the changes that are happening in the metro areas have been slow to hit the rural communities.

In fact many people have said that the Yellow pages and print newspapers would continue to have the rural areas as a stronghold.

Well, more and more I am getting comments such as “I am dropping my ad budget with the Yellow pages this year” or “The newspaper keeps coming in dropping their price but even at that price it is not worth it.”

What this tells me is that even in the rural areas the conservative small businesses are starting to understand that they have options for more targeted advertising online at more cost effective pricing than they ever had in the offline and shotgun advertising world of print newspapers.

Many people are overlooking the rural broadband stimulus as a driver in pushing legacy media to the cliff faster than it is already happening, but if the rural areas were the strong hold those media companies are in trouble, we are seeing it from our customers more and more everyday.