Standing Out from the Crowd

The benefit of hyperlocal keywords becomes clear when you consider how consumers tend to search for businesses online, especially customers living in large cities. New York City alone has more than 200 zip codes among its five boroughs. Someone looking for a tasty pizza in The Bronx isn’t likely to go all the way into Upper Manhattan to get it. The solution is to focus on a specific niche. Ways to implement hyperlocal keywords into your online marketing strategy include:

• Creating separate landing pages for each neighborhood
• Including hyperlocal keywords in all areas of text (i.e., photo and image tags)
• Mentioning local landmarks or transit stops near your business

Transitioning to Hyperlocal SEO

With more and more consumers looking for businesses online, it’s easy to see why getting very specific with your keywords can do wonders for your ROI, not to mention your website traffic and conversion rates. As with all SEO efforts, there is no magic combination of keywords that will instantly attract local customers to your business. Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to track the results you get with your hyperlocal keywords, making it fairly easy to make adjustments until a mix is found that works best for your business.

One of the first things that I typically need to discuss with customers as they start to look at marketing their small business on is the difference between the “old school” way of valuing advertising compared to the “new school” or online way of valuing.

In the past it has always been about eyeballs, there was no targeting, at least not in the sense we talk about today. If you were to advertise in the newspaper or on the radio you were advertising across a large region and you bought the ad based on eyeballs or listeners even if those people had no interest in your product or even if they just happened to be passing through town.

This is the model most small business owners are typically most familiar with. The web changes all of this.

Now, with local search taking a larger role in online search queries making sure you are found when people search for a service or product in Bing, Google, or Yahoo is more important than any newspaper ad someone could run. And one statistic says a lot as well, 80 percent of people in one survey reported searching online to research a product or service then going locally to buy it.

If your business cannot be found online then it is likely they are not going to your business to buy it.

With local search and hyperlocal targeting, you can make sure that when people search for your business online that they find your web presence. Making sure your business shows up in the Google local listings (or Bing and Yahoo) is very important, but with people becoming even more targeted in their search making sure you show up at a neighborhood level in major metros and even in rural areas can be very important if someone is looking for a local service or restaurant.

It is not about having hundreds of thousands of people reading the newspaper and possibly seeing your ad with the web, on the web when someone searches in the search engines they know exactly what they are looking for which means if your business can get that traffic to your website then the conversion ratio is much higher than you may be used to in legacy methods of advertising.

By building your website in a way that attracts the people searching in your local area you can make sure that the customers you are looking for find you and not your competitor. These customers convert, you want them to be yours.

HyperLocal SEO

Although this page and blog is focused on local search in general and not just pure hyperlocal SEO without a doubt hyperlocal is a hot topic and trend that is only going to gain more attention over the next few years.

Why?

Because people are understanding that with the penetration of GPS capabilities in mobile devices and people using the internet more frequently on their mobile devices it is possible to targeted advertising and other services on a more granular, or as we are saying hyperlocal basis.

The initial hyperlocal talk was really focused on news and local bloggers writing about neighborhood level topics, true community-level news rather than the more regional or city level news that typically existed.

The web allowed for bloggers to become journalists on a hyperlocal level based on the cost of entry.

Well, from an advertising standpoint this works too, between geo-targeted ads, hyperlocal content, and mobile apps taking advantage of all of the above we will see more targeted advertising than ever before. Location-based services have arrived.

From a news standpoint even local news stations are starting to use the “hyperlocal” buzz term, just tonight I was listening to a local weather forecast when out of the blue I heard the weatherman say “Let’s go hyperlocal and see what is happening in your neighborhood.”

Six months ago you would not have heard that now the news stations understand that online you are getting more focused and targeted, they have to find a way to catch that shift. Does using a buzz word make that happen?

Nope, it will be extremely tough to take the easy distribution the web offers to a broadcast level.

Enjoy the age of hyperlocal online.