The battle for local search supremacy is apparently only heating up. Now, even the “big boys” like Google and Facebook are looking to provide local internet marketing services and dominate the local search market. Recently, Facebook released Graph Search. Graph Search is anticipated to make the fight over local search supremacy a three way battle between Google, Bing, and Facebook Graph Search.
Facebook’s Local Search Advantage
Facebook is predicted to become a major player in local search over the next year. More and more people are accessing the internet through mobile devices. The majority of mobile internet activity is time spent on social media sites like Facebook. With the addition of Facebook Graph Search, users can not only catch up on their social network, but they can also access the type of local search results they are really looking for through Facebook. Graph Search will allow mobile searchers to find local businesses that are relevant to their location and that will include recommendations or reviews from their friends. People are much more apt to frequent a business that is relevant to their needs, close to their location, and recommended by a friend.
How Google and Bing Will Compete
For Google and Bing to remain dominant in local search, they will have to adapt and continue to provide more and more relevant local search results for even broad search terms. Businesses are keying in on local internet marketing strategies, so Google and Bing will need to continue to improve their accommodation for these hyper-locally targeted business web pages. The more prominent local search becomes, the more businesses become aware of the need to target local search results, and how they can take advantage of local search results.
How Your Business Can Take Advantage of Local Search Results
The following tips will help you make certain that you are taking advantage of the opportunities presented by local search.
- Create a web page for each individual location/store in your business.
- Create a mobile version of those web pages for each individual location/store.
- Build these pages with the best of current SEO on-page optimization strategies and utilize Bing and Google Webmaster Tools to make sure your pages are as pristine in the eyes of search engines as possible.
- Manage all of your online local business listings. Make sure the information on all of your listings is consistent and correct for your business.
- Maintain NAP (name, address, phone number) continuity throughout all citations and references to your business.
Make sure your business is setup to take advantage of local search results. While Facebook, Google, and Bing battle it out for local search supremacy, the only real result of this battle that matters to your business is that local search will as a result only become more relevant and more of a necessity to online business success.
For nearly three decades, Chris Marentis, founder and CEO of Surefire Social, has been responsible for driving innovation and sales growth for large media and e-commerce brands as well as start-ups. With a long-history of counseling local businesses about their marketing efforts, Marentis provides insight on what it takes for small businesses to succeed and thrive in today’s evolving digital environment. His notable career includes creating the foundational blueprints for online marketing, e-commerce and content branding for AOL's Interactive Marketing group, where he served as Senior Vice President. While CEO of Clearspring Technologies, Marentis developed one of the most widely adopted venture-backed Web 2.0 technology platforms. Marentis is a frequent speaker at local digital marketing conferences and a contributor to SMB and technology-focused publications.
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Sudipto
May 5, 2013 at 12:28 pm
Hey Chris,
Nice post and Thanks for sharing this post with us. Yes, Facebook is getting famous in every field and it really helps in promote our blog and also helps in drives traffic to our blog. Creating a web page of our business is really a good idea.
Rohit
May 7, 2013 at 1:35 pm
nice article Chris,
I’ve seeing and analyzing the Facebook graph search for a few months and i realized that it is the best way to get the more accurate local search. graph search from Facebook is the major competencies to Google local search. lets see how much advancements will it bring to defeat the search giant “Google”.
Rose
May 8, 2013 at 8:41 pm
Facebook will surely be capable of handling local search since most members interact locally. It will be a great motivation for G+ to stay ahead after they implemented a comment Apps for blogger and WordPress. G+ maybe ahead for now but once Facebook starts using its users hen we will have a fierce competition.
Rose
Jennifer richard
May 13, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Nice Blog, its can be consider as great articles. Facebook definitely help in local search. many visitors use facebook for search their needy item. facebook is great things.
Walter
May 30, 2013 at 11:22 am
Facebook has a head start in local search as people tend to voluntarily offer up their personal information including their current place of residence. Google+ will help Google catch up of course, but as a ‘local’ business myself I have already been using Facebook with some success to interact with local people.
rajneesh
May 30, 2013 at 2:10 pm
Effect of Facebook in our life is such that almost all the people who has a Facebook account open it at least once in a day. Facebook hit the bull’s eye with the addition for graph search feature in it for billions of its user, It gives us information about our locality, market, our friends & many more things which were available only on Google/Bing some time before. Advantage of Graph seacrh over Google/Bing search is that Facebook has most number of active users who can take these information whenever they login into their Facebook account. This is the reason why Facebook is becoming a major leader in local search.