Yep! We’ve messed with the well-know saying: “Think Globally—Act Locally!” And we’ve done it deliberately, because sometimes that’s not the right thing to do.
We’ve all being hearing for years how more and more business is done on the worldwide web. But not every business out there is a big, worldwide, global concern. And businesses that are focused on a local market really don’t want to attract visitors to their website from regions they don’t serve. It frustrates businesses and customers alike.
What does that mean for you if your business concentrates on a local market? How should that affect the way you build your site and create your content? Businesses with a local emphasis should be focusing on local search to pull in visitors. Here’s how Wikipedia defines “local search.”
Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about “what” the site visitor is searching for (such as keywords, a business category, or the name of a consumer product) but also “where” information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. Examples of local searches include “Hong Kong hotels”, “Manhattan restaurants”, and “Dublin Hertz”. Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent. A search that includes a location modifier, such as “Bellevue, WA” or “14th arrondissement”, is an explicit local search. A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as “restaurant” or “nail salon”, is an implicit local search.
What this means is that if your business is focused on a particular geographic area, the content on your website (and that includes blogs, other copy, tags, etc.) should reflect that. One big reason is that this is the way your customers tend to search, so you’re more likely to be found for the people you’re really trying to reach. And if you write your copy with a “local” flavor, it reinforces that you’re part of the local community—and not just some “cyber-company” out to make a buck.
So if you’re a local company, remember to “think locally—act locally”. And that means creating your content for your local market.
Blog Post Written by Spencer Powell
Spencer is the Inbound Marketing Director at TMR Direct. Spencer specializes in helping clients create and execute effective inbound marketing campaigns.