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.

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.