For years, the Internet was all about expansion – offering global access to information in ways never imagined. While having access to weather reports and shopping information for a location halfway around the world is surely interesting, this “globalization” of information came at the expense of being able to easily find products and services in your own backyard!

• 70% of US households now use the Internet as an information source when shopping locally for products and services! Other studies found that as many 84% of US-based internet users perform local searches.
• 43% of Google searches included a “geographic identifier” which is a fancy way of saying that more than 4 out of every 10 Google searches included a local city, state, area or zip code so the searcher could narrow their search results to their immediate area! Of those 43%, 86% followed up with a phone call! Where else are you going to get such a great ROI?

Look at the differences between these three Google searches:

1. Search #1 “Coffee shop” returned more than 56 million results

2. Search #2 “Coffee shop Silver Spring, MD” adds a geographic identifier, which brings the “Local Business results” higher up on the page, and reduces the number of results by more than 50 times – to less than 1 million.

3. Search #3 “Coffee shop Silver Spring, MD 20901” adds a more detailed geographic identifier, the zip code, which reduces the number of results from the original results by another third!