5 Scary and Exciting Reasons Why Local Listings Are Changing the Way People See Search Engine Results!
Google favors local results. They know where you are and will give you search results close to your location. They also want to provide you with informed results, with quick grades from user reviews, which makes local listings visually stand out in your search outcomes. Small business marketing in a local area has never been more valuable. And now more searches are done on mobile devices, making local search more essential.
Introduction: Search Engines Basics
Before I give you the five reasons why you need to pay attention to local listings in your online marketing strategy, I need to explain something a lot of people don’t realize. Google and Bing, and all of the major search engines out there know where you are when you type in a search query on your computer. They’re most likely to provide local results when valid.
Is Google Your Best Friend or Just Telling You What You Want to Hear?
Google and the other search engines know if you’re searching in Salt Lake City or Miami Beach. They also give you different results in each location. They truly are the friend who tries to tell you only what you want to hear.
They assume someone in Des Moines is going to want something different than a user in New York City. There is often truth to this assumption since there will be different producers of services available in certain areas. Someone hungry, looking for hamburgers in Orange County, may want In N’ Out to show up on their iPhone results, while someone in Cincinnati may be hoping for White Castle.
Local Listing Campaigns Are Growing in Importance for B-To-B
The importance of having a business show up in the local pack might be evident for specific industries like hamburger joints or roofing contractors. It’s less obvious for others, like manufacturers who cater to an international clientele. But it’s becoming more and more a factor in search results for many companies who don’t explicitly brand themselves as local.
Companies are looking for other businesses to hire in certain locations for various reasons. They may want the convenience of being able to meet vendors in person. They may want to target certain business sectors in specific areas of a city.
Local marketing is not simply the focus of “Ma and Pa” retailers, restaurants, and contractors anymore, but an important tool for many business-to-business industries.
And as this series will explain, more and more customers are looking to see a company’s local reputation on sites like Yelp. So the local perspective can’t be ignored, even if the company has a global marketing focus.
Obvious Reasons for Joining the Pack
One of the key goals in a local marketing campaign is to help your business show up in local listings. The most valuable listing, of course, is Google My Business. You see this listing in the form of the Google Local Map Pack. As we demonstrate, there are decided advantages to having your listing show up conspicuously in the address pack.
This leads us to “The #1 Scary and Exciting Reason Why Local Listings Are Changing the Way People See Search Engine Results!”
Wade Mann, the author of this article, is a content writer for Holistic Web Presence.
