According to getlisted.org, there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month, and that's just in the United States! Of those searches, 40% of queries have Local intent.
What is "local intent?" Local intent means the entered search criteria specifies a locale in some manner.
Now this is where it can get confusing. Local search doesn't necessarily mean that you are searching in your own locale! It simply means that in your search you have specified A locale, any locale by using a zip code, city, state, neighborhood, country or any other criteria to narrow your results to a place in this world. (A note for those who cater to visitors or tourists.)
Why should you know this? Why should anyone care? Well, for a business owner, if you live and work in a location and want to attract people to your locale, you want to use all the necessary tools to do that. And if you are a Search Engine user, you may not be completely aware of how useful local search can be to help you choose the right company to give your business.
Most of the big search engines have a network, or for lack of a better term, sub-feature, called LOCAL. Google has it, it's called Google Maps (maps.google.com). Yahoo!'s is called Local. Bing has a local search category too.
How do you know which results are one of these networks? When a person performs a local search in any of the above search engines, your first indication is that a map appears in the results. The map displays circles or balloons, and alongside this map are the referring circle/balloon business names. Click on this map and you suddenly have many opportunities to drill down and get lots of information about these businesses. This helps you decide who you want to do business with.
From the other perspective, if you are a business owner, how can you capitalize on this feature? Business owners can create a free account with any of the three aforementioned search engines and "claim" a business listing. Once they claim it, and go through the verification process, they have the opportunity to change or upgrade the data the search engine keeps for that business.
Features vary from search engine to search engine. For example, some allow you to list your business hours, leave a link to your Web site, post photos, create coupons, and they also have a review feature for customers to rate and leave comments on the quality of products and services.
To see if your business data is found in a search engines local network. There are instructions in our previous blog.
In the next installment of this three part series, we will address ways to manage your listings with various search engines in one place.
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