The Internet Contains Billions of Website Pages - All Clamoring for Attention

With so many competing websites, it?s unlikely that yours could stand out among them. Until recently, you faced near-impossible odds. Search engine results lost the "little guys" in back pages, where no one ever looked.

But Local Search is changing that in a dramatic way. Small stores and service businesses are gaining additional revenue from being found by locals who went to the Internet before deciding where to buy (70% of buyers, according to research by The Kelsey Group).

Google and Yahoo are pushing hard to make their Local Seaarch results as relevant as possible. (MSN is playing a catch-up game.) They?re under pressure to work out the bugs, so this rapidly accelerating trend becomes more reliable.

The public wants to find information about products or services with the ease and speed they?ve come to expect from search engines. However, when people are ready to spend their money, they prefer to spend it close to home (where 80% of purchases are made). So the only suppliers they care about are those located nearby. A Google query for "plumber" that delivers 2.3 million pages does them no good at all.

Buyers are Driving the Popularity of Local Search

A person conducts a Local Search when they add a geographic term (like town, region, zip code) to their search engine query. The results (SERPS) only include businesses within that geographic area. For example, entering "Seattle + plumber" in Google only delivers a list of plumbing firms in Seattle. Those results are also displayed on a city map, so it?s easy to spot the most convenient ones.