Think about it, all things being equal, would you rather buy a product from someone in your city or someone on the other side of the planet? When we are looking to buy, we want comfort, we want security, we want guarantees.
- 40 percent of all search queries are for local services
- Search engine marketing is forecast to grow to $9 billion by 2009
- 92 percent of local searches convert offline
If you buy from the other side of the planet, you send your money and then you hope. If we buy from our city, already we feel secure, these people wont rip us off they are from OUR city. If something goes wrong, we can just go and visit them.
When you want to go to see a film, do you search for the name of the film or do you add your location? I'd like to take my children to see the next Harry Potter film, but we are not going to fly to Utah to see it, just because Utah was listed first in Google.
If you can ship widgets to anywhere in the world then go for it! Get to number one for widgets and make your fortune. But don't forget the people near to home that want to buy your widgets. You might think that people do not look for 'widgets Baltimore' or 'Baltimore widgets' but increasingly they do, and when they do, they should find the Baltimore Widget Franchise not a widget shop in New Zealand.
Having a 'real world' address on your web site is essential when you are trying to sell. Why not make a feature of your location and bring in local buyers. We are more likely to buy and repeat order, from people like us, people that support our local team, that share our values. Recommendations are important. We like to tell our friends about good products and good services, and guess what? Local buyers have local friends.
So where to start. Think about your location, what keywords and phrases could people use to search for your product or service in your location. A really useful, free tool that I always use is http://keywordsbot.com/local-keywords-search/ You can generate your first 200+ ideas in a couple of seconds.
Be a big fish in a small pond. A search for ‘widgets’ on Google finds 70,800,000 results a search for ‘baltimore widgets’ finds 251,000 results. Already you have reduced your competition by 70,549,000. If you have some good locally focused content, then you can dominate the local market. Get there first and you can clean up.