For consumers, local search is about finding things we want (need) that are tangible and near by. It’s not about finding sites spread across the vast open web that have the best SEO, the most inbound links, and the highest google page rank.
Local search is impatient. It’s directional in nature. It’s not exploratory. It’s more about the physical facts, and less about qualitative information.
Therefore, for small business owners, local search is about being there and being found — wherever consumers might be looking.
Imagine yourself as a consumer and you’re late to a dinner party in Leesburg, Virginia. You’re driving around an unfamiliar town looking for a wine store to pick up a nice bottle of French white wine. At this moment, you simply don’t care about who’s content has position 1, 3, or 5 in organic search results. You only care about what’s there in the real world, whether it’s close to you, and whether they’re open at 7:00 pm on Saturday.
Google, of course, understands this dynamic. They know that search is not always about “ranking” and they understand that “relevance” itself is contextual to one’s circumstance. For example, depending on your situation, you might be:
- >relaxing on a lazy sunday afternoon searching for things that entertain you
- >shopping for a friend’s birthday gift and searching for a particular product
- >interested in learning more about the conflict in the Gaza and searching for the latest news
- >driving around an unfamiliar town desperately searching for a wine store
Therefore, to facilitate search experiences Google continues to refine their universal search algorithm by blending different types of content into search results. Depending upon the query, Google will present not only organic results based on page rank — but they will also blend in videos, images, news clips, product info and a variety of other content types. For queries involving business service and locality, Google will blend in the so-called 10 pak – a list of 10 local businesses in town, plotted on a map, that might be relevant to your needs. BTW, below is a screen shot of the 10 Pak results for wine stores in Leesburg, VA:
Consumers are constantly searching in Google, in Yahoo, in MSN, in the phone book, in GPS navigational systems, over the phone with 411 operators, on their mobile phones via search-based apps. In addition to practicing basic SEO hygiene, it is critical that SMBs take additional (different) steps so consumers will find them in the context of local search.
In the coming days I will be authoring a follow-up post that will cover (a) specific steps that SMBs can take on their own to get found, and (b) the emergence of business profiling platforms designed to help SMBs create, maintain, enhance and openly distribute their content to any and all services where consumers might be looking to find them.
Google is getting better at it, but it’s still not easy for the consumer or the business owner. Looking forward to the series.