Over the past five years there has been a rather steady and progressive decline in the use of such offline search mediums as your friendly neighborhood yellow page directory and “savedpenny” type of advertising rags. Their dissent into oblivion has been brought on by consumers who have simply been favoring the more effective and efficient geo search results delivered by search engines such as Google.

Honestly think about the last time that you actually picked up a yellow pages to do more than move it from your driveway to the recycle bin… Or even better yet to provide that extra 4” you need to reach something off of the top cupboard. However, with the constant decline in advertisers it’s getting even less effective for that purpose as well. Still good for leveling out the coffee table maybe?

Financial Wo-es Me

If you’re like me, many investors, or anyone under 55 (hey my mother and grandfather still use them – so somebody is), it’s been years since you considered these as effective mediums for finding local goods and services. The exodus of “eyes” and overall consumers, especially in the critical buying demo of 18 – 45 year olds,  has become more and more evident with the collapse (read: bankruptcy) of these once giant yellow page conglomerates. However, even online, in local search, the yellow pages is no match for local search. When you lose consumers you lose advertisers. Simple supply and demand.

But what exactly are people searching for? Simply put they’re searching for everything. Whether it’s for a phone number to a local hair salon in Irvine or to a plastic surgeon in Miami, local searches are now king. But why are more and more consumers heading to their PC and Mac instead of their Yellow and Penny? The answer is simple: Faster access to more abundant information.

With one simple search you can see lists of reviews, contact information, as well as company history and other business affiliations. When it comes to offline ads all you get is just that — an ad. You’re relying on what the company wants you to read. However, when searching online you get to see the good, the bad and the ugly.

Manage Your Rep or Your Rep Will Manage You

This has become a proverbial godsend for those companies, both large and small, that are embracing organic local and geo search. They are experiencing new resurgence in the midst of economic woes. Those companies who can build a good rep, for example, a restaurant that has a good looking up-to-date website, top organic ranking for their local city + food type like “Irvine Italian Food” are bearing the real fruit of those labors. No pun intended. When you add to that a proper social networking campaign where reviews on sites like Yelp! are encouraged, you can expand your reach to consumers that may have never known about you any other way.

However, it has become an absolute nightmare for many business owners who are not taking advantage of that 70+% of their local market. And it’s become that nightmare because they either have not been made aware of what is going on or have just been reluctant to take that next step because they wrongly feel that the internet is not applicable to their business. Unfortunately what many are now finding is that the internet is not only applicable, but critical, to every business, one way or another. Especially with so many people using review sites to post reviews. If you’re not at the very least using these sites for quality assurance you’re missing out on a wealth of information.

I Understand The Words That Are Coming Out Of Your Blog

For business owners understanding the market, the different online and offline models, and how the world is changing is critical to surviving. I have been saying to colleagues for years now that it’s going to come down to businesses such as your local neighborhood restaurant having to have a website that is optimized for local and or geo search terms in order for them to survive. We are now closer to that day, especially in this economy, than ever before.

That’s why I wanted to create the quick crash course on the difference between local and geo search for small business below. While my original intent was to create this specifically for small business owners and professionals like attorneys, doctors, dentists, etc… It really applies to any size business or corporation that wants to take advantage of localized search.

Local Search Vs Geo Search

What defines a local search term and what defines a geographic search term?

A local search term can be a geo term and a geo term may be a local search term, however not all geo terms could be considered local. Confused? Nice, then my job here is done.

Ok, ok, Here’s how it works… (in my brain anyway)

Local Search Terms

Let’s assume that we are working with an attorney that is located here in Irvine. He or she has an office right down the street from us and is located firmly within the city. This makes our attorney very much local to us if we were to search for an ‘Irvine Attorney’. Now when meeting with this attorney we would discuss his/her area of expertise and what areas he/she would like to target. In this instance we’re going to assume that our attorney is a business attorney. Sure I could have made our legal eagle an entertainment lawyer, sports law attorney, DUI attorney, etc… but we settled on Business attorney and there’s no going back now.

So at any rate, we would then begin to discuss the geo targeting of our business attorney’s services. This would include keyword terms such as Irvine business Attorney, Irvine business lawyer, Irvine California business law, etc…  As these would definitely be local to our legal ace.

Now our business attorney is also in Orange County, California. Which means this attorney could easily go after keywords such as Orange County business Attorney, business Lawyer orange county, and a whole host of other Orange county keywords and still be targeting “Local search terms.” The attorney would also be expanding his/ her reach to clients that could easily drive the 20 minutes to the attorney’s offices. By expanding to the county local search terms our attorney is exponentially increasing the amount of local clients that he or she puts his / her services in front of each month. This is primarily because there is four times the amount of searches on the county level over the cities’ actual search terms. More searches + more people searching = more potential clients.

Geo Terms (geographic search terms / keywords)

Now Irvine Business Attorney and Orange County Business Attorney are local search terms, however they are also geographic search terms as they are, of course, physical geographic locations. This shows how local searches can be geo searches, but what about those geographic searches that aren’t local? Well, using our attorney friend from above let’s move outside of Irvine and Orange County and go one step up and move to California. Technically Irvine is a city in Orange County and Orange County is a County inside of California, but while our business attorney is still within California they could in no way be considered local to “California”. The reasoning is while, yes, it’s POSSIBLE, that someone from Irvine or even Orange County uses a search term such as California business Attorney (it does carry about ten times the amount of traffic) realistically, odds say most of that traffic is going to be outside of that local area. If someone in San Francisco searches for a California business attorney and an attorney in Irvine is one of the top sites to pop up in his search, how is that local to that user in San Francisco? It’s not. That’s what makes a geo term, when applied to a local business, a geo term. It’s based upon the location of the person performing the search.

While I wouldn’t necessarily deter this attorney from wanting to target California I would place it as a third tier priority with local search domination the first up on the plate. If “California Business attorney” happened to get rankings through ranking osmosis, great, looks good on our stats, but it wouldn’t be targeted traffic that the attorney would ever want and/or need.

So in recap a Local search term is a search term that is local to the person searching.
A geo search term is any geographically based search term used by a search engine user.

For my argument sake anyway…

How does that help local business?

Especially in a struggling economy it’s critical for local professionals and small business owners to understand, at least in part, the internet and its place in establishing their local business. Understanding that consumers are using traditional media less and less and new media more and more to search out and find local businesses is essential to understanding where marketing is going. For the same price that most small businesses are spending on direct mail pieces each month they could be accessing, literally, large multiples of the amount of people that direct mail piece is hitting, but here’s the difference. When you utilize local and local geo search terms you are actively targeting people who are searching for services that you provide. This is a concept that I don’t think a lot of people yet understand. When you’re #1 on Google, for example, you’re not just #1, you’re #1 in a place where people who WANT YOUR SERVICES are actively SEARCHING to find you.

When local consumers search to find movie show times, local restaurants, and, yes, even a business attorney, they’re not watching TV waiting for your ad, they’re not waiting for the mail man to drop off a postcard (it’s called junk mail for a reason), and they’re certainly not using the yellow pages; They’re turning to Google, Yahoo and MSN daily to find what they need.

Are they finding you?

SUPERFLUOS PLUG!
If they’re not finding you, may I suggest that we might just be able to do something about that?
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