Utilizing the internet to drive traffic to your real world store or business has become a necessary step in reaching out to the local community and local customers. The internet is the medium by which many potential customers and visitors decide upon their local shopping expenditures. With the amount of information now available at their fingertips, local consumers are going to the internet first to find local businesses, information about each, and their reviews. An online reputation is quickly merging with the material reputation of the real world and it is important to utilize both aspects to capitalize on as much positive PR as possible.

To effectively employ internet local search you must take an efficient approach to maximizing your exposure to your target audience. As most of your customers will be located within a specific geographic region, you should make sure that you appear on all the local search engines.

• Yahoo! Local
• Yahoo! Yellow Pages
• Switchboard
• Verizon Super Pages
• CitySearch
• Google Local Search
• Windows Live Local
• AOL Local
• YP
• Yellow Pages

Yahoo is currently the largest player in this arena, mostly due to the fact that they were originally a directory based around this type of search foundation. Most of these services will charge a PPC or PPM fee so it is not currently free. However, remember that a user utilizing one of these engines to search for your business is a highly targeted local customer that has searched for a business like yours, in your area. The conversion ratio on these users will likely be much higher than that of organic or PPC on the larger horizontal search engines.

Once you have established a presence within the local search engines, it is time to capitalize on geographically targeted PPC campaigns. Google, Yahoo, and MSN all allow for targeting of specific keyword phrases. If your business sells toys in San Jose, CA, you want to make sure that your keyword terms capture this search when someone looks up “toy store in San Jose”. Not only should you optimize for “San Jose” but you should make sure that you will appear in all of the surrounding cities as well. Geographically centered search terms are a quickly growing industry and you want to make sure you are able to grab these customers when they are looking.

The next arena for local search exposure is through local search engine optimization (SEO). Although this technique will take longer to come to fruition, it will eventually direct more traffic than a local PPC campaign will if implemented correctly. Properly designing landing pages around all of the markets for which you optimize and presenting dynamically driven local content and information will help to secure a local search campaign that will last well into the future. Geographical SEO should become a part of your overall SEO strategy in order to properly complete your local search optimization.

What is important to remember here is that local search has become paramount to establishing a local presence for any business. By properly implementing a successful local search strategy you create aan opportunity to reach out and advertise directly to your local customers. Geographic targeting is vital. Without a properly targeted campaign it is very possible you have customers just around the corner who do not know about your presence. Make sure to create an online experience that captures their interest and business. Local search is simply the portal in which you are able to direct people to your site. Once you can properly increase the visitors to your local site, make sure to employ site design and branding techniques that will drive the customer to visit your location in person.