Local Search and its Benefits to Your Business

To a greater extent search engines and local services are being used by people in your hometown to find what they are looking for.

A deep research has shown that somewhere in neighborhood of 70% of households do some kinds of search for a local product or service on a daily basis.

That's the reason, why every local search is becoming more and more important to your advertising campaign and major search engines are rushing to become the next local search engine.

But, what is a Local Search and how can it be helpful to your Business? Let's get ahead to know more about it.
What is a Local Search?
For an example, lets assume Google, but most of the search engines have a parallel system to Google.

When you search for anything using a location in your keywords you will find Google will display a map at the top with links to 10 local results, then the usual organic results will be displayed.

In fact Google has made some changes to its algorithm recently so that when you search for anything Google will display local results fourth in the list. It does this by reading your IP address and detecting where you are based. The aim of this is to give people the most relevant results and helping them to find a local business.

How Local Search can be Beneficial to your Business
Well as you will already know it is really important to appear as high up in the search engine results as possible. As the local results are now appearing high up for the majority of searches you can get added benefits by submitting your site to the local results.

You also need to think about the fact that many people will want to deal with a local company. If you are nowhere for local results then you could miss out on valuable customers.

At this stage I do not think local search has the same power as the standard organic results. However as Google puts more importance on it so will searchers which will make it more and more important to be featured in the local results for your area.

How to Get Your Business Listed in a Local Search Engine
In order to get listed in the local search you will need to have an account set up with Google search engine. You will need to give them your postal address, telephone number, URL and a brief description. Once these details are verified it will probably take 24-38 hours for your site to be listed for your selected areas.

It should only take a few minutes to get everything set up once you have an account. When it is this easy it is absolutely vital that you use this service if you work locally and will be looking to get local businesses.

Some Important Tips for Local Businesses
If you are looking for customers that are based locally you should also consider placing your business in local directories. Probably the Yell is the UK's most important local search engine. The reason for this is that most people know and are aware of the Yellow Pages and so are happy to use it online.

As everyone uses the internet more and more you will find that more people will use the internet to find the service they need rather than any other type of medium.

Considering the reasons above it is absolutely vital that you consider local search. Getting listed in Local search engines is very much important for your business and without it you would be missing out on many opportunities.

About the Author: Robin Dale is the webmaster for the SEO|SEM|UK Web Hosting at www.teeky.org, offering useful & quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, Search engine marketing, Dedicated Hosting, hosting tips & UK Web Hosting.