Local search is something that people have always been doing, but it’s presence on the web has been increasing over the number of years as people become ever more interested in what is happening in their local communities.

Part of the reason for this growth can be attributed to the number of reasons including economy and expansion of Internet in rural communities. People are not traveling as far from their homes due to tightening of the purse strings. Instead, they’re searching for products, services, and activities closer to home. Rural families and schools are also getting access to internet in areas of the country where internet did not exist before and are now able to search outside of the phonebooks and traditional media.

Mobile marketing campaigns have also added a depth to hyper local search. Cell phones can be taken anywhere and with the expansion of mobile search, searching for a great restaurant or a car repair center is only a phone call away.

Google honed in on this concept of hyper local search back in 2003 and created a patent for its geo-targeted advertising, giving advertisers a chance to localize their advertising to a specific target market. Google knew the importance of local advertising, even back in 2003, and was able to leverage this information and become the largest search engine on the Internet.

Businesses who utilize hyper local search with their websites have an enormous opportunity to tap into consumers who may have been overlooked before. In fact, they may be able to arouse trusting, loyal customers who buy their product over and over again.

Hopefully, you’ve never said this, but if you have, there may be hope for you. Every person with a website wants someone to view their site (otherwise what’s the point?). While it’s exciting in the beginning to see how many views your site is getting, it can taper off after a while, especially if you don’t see any return on investment (i.e. ROI  or advertising effectiveness).

This is when ‘where the pay clicks are coming from’ ideology starts to count, especially if you have products or services you are selling through your website. If you’re a small business in Whatitsname, Arkansas and only cater to people in Whatitsname and the surrounding area, you probably don’t care about clicks coming from the United Kingdom or Outtherein, Nebraska. Why would you want to pay for clicks outside your target market? You want something that is more local: hyper local.

People who are not your target customers generally exit your website as soon as the first page loads. This leads to something called “bounce rate.” Ideally, you want to own a website with a low bounce rate, that is few people exiting the site soon after it loads. A low bounce rate typically means that people are viewing the content on your website and interacting with it in a positive way.

Ideally, if your website is correctly search engine optimized (SEO) and linked properly for search engines to rank effectively in their lists, then you should be getting your target customers who have interest in your business. SEO is a way of artfully implementing search terms people are using to find information into the content of your website. A search engine will scan your website for search terms and if they match will page rank your site in its results.

It’s easy to be sucked into catchy marketing companies that create websites, but many times these companies will ask for thousands of dollars just to create the site without actually helping you market it.  Before you make the investment of creating a search engine marketing campaign, be sure that your target customers are within reach and actually viewing your website.

This concept could be visualized as a fisherman on a large lake dropping hooks on the far reaches of the lake hoping to hook a fish.  In my opinion wouldn’t it seem more important just to drop a line where the fish are? Of course that begs the question:  How do you know where the fish are?

The truth is the fish are all around you if you know where to look.  They are on Facebook, Twitter, they’re online looking in local search directories.  They’re typing in to their search engine “your city name” and “your business category “and if you’re not showing up in the search engine results, your being overlooked.

This is where thinking differently about your marketing, or  Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help.  If you have a catering business in Tucson AZ then being ranked for the term “Arizona Catering” in general is not that helpful.  For example if your business is in Tucson and someone from Flagstaff AZ finds you chances are you’re not going to get the call anyway as the customer is most likely looking for someone local anyway.   If however your website appears under the search term “Tucson Catering” and your business happens to do catering in Tucson you’re going to get a call.

In summary, rather than trying to set up your business’ website to attract hits based on non local search terms you should be thinking hyper-local.  You may even work to optimize your website to be found for a particular suburb of your city.    This does mean however that you want your business to be found in both the” city search” and a “suburb of your city search” too you just never know how targeted your next customer may be looking.

As a business the Internet is no longer an option, you must start going where your customers are looking. Online, in the search engines. Get found there and get the business back that print media can no longer send.

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.