What is Hyperlocal?

The internet has been a highly valued vehicle to connect the world. Our globe is much smaller now thanks to the speed with which we can connect with others. Friends, family, and businesses can all connect far easier because of the web and it technologies. Email, voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP), instate messaging, Twitter… All of these tools and so much more allows us to collaborate with someone on the other side of the world as if they are right next to us.

From global to local
But people are realizing that they’ve looked so far afield for business and relationships at a great distance that they have nearly forgotten about those right next door. To right this wrong, people reset their sites to try and cover both global and local markets in an initiative called “glocal”.

So the web – which has long been touted as a global medium – has now also become a local medium, focused on a specific and defined community (like a city, town, or smaller geographic unit).

Hyperlocal definition
That’s the trend you need to know about first, so here’s how the term “hyperlocal” fits in: According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlocal “hyperlocal” serves a very specific geographic region with content created for residents of that region by a resident of that region. In other words, hyperlocal isn’t just a distant view of a narrowly defined area. Rather, it is an extremely specific way to serve an extremely specific market.

If you run a business serving a specific geographic area and your marketing is targeting that area, you are a hyperlocal marketer. That might not change what you do or how you do it, but it’s important to know the rising trend in the concept.

Twitter… In Plain English

Local businesses learning to create a web presence and market themselves effectively online wonder at the value of Twitter. Will their followers really care to read “I’m eating a ham sandwich” or “I’m drinking coffee”?

Twitter is so much more than that. I love what the folks at CommonCraft have done to explain how Twitter works:

Twitter does give local businesses an online presence and adds search engine marketing and search engine optimization benefits through backlinks and to help increase web traffic.

See us for starting your Maryland Social Media, Maryland Search Engine Marketing, and Maryland Search Engine Optimization Services today.

Local Search Engine Marketing Basics: Long Tail Keywords

Local Search Engine Marketing Basics is an occasional series of blogs providing definitions and basic guidance on search engine marketing concepts.

Defining “Long Tail Keywords“

In order to understand “long tail keywords”, you need to first understand the “long tail” concept.

The “long tail” is a concept introduced by Chris Anderson in 2004 in which he talked about a phenomenon in business where there is an initial large amount of purchases of a product or clicks on a website (called “the short head”) but those began to trail off (the “long tail”)… however, the amount of the combined trail was equal to or greater than the short head.

In other words, a movie might make $50 million at the box office during its initial theatrical run. But it might make another $50 million or more in “cheap seat” cinemas, DVD sales, and international sales.

Read more about the long tail at Wikipedia.

This “long tail” concept has been broadened to the search engine marketing world.

Common keywords, like “marketing” or “restaurants” are the short head. Millions of people type these into searches every day. Not surprisingly, large companies invest millions of dollars each year to appear at the top of Google searches for these terms.

The local business may have a very challenging time appearing at the top of those “short head” searches. But, for local businesses, the long tail provides some serious possibilities!

Short head keywords might be “marketing” or “restaurants”. Long tail keywords are very specific. On their own they might be searched as much as the short head keywords, but the cumulative amount of search for long tail keywords is dramatic.

So, a local Maryland-based marketing company might forgo the short head keyword “marketing” in favor of several “long tail” keywords like “Maryland marketing”, “Maryland advertising”, “Maryland marketing company”. A Boston-based restaurant might not have  a prayer of achieving a top Google ranking for “restaurant” but they have a much better chance of getting to the top of Google for a long tail keyword like “Boston restaurant”.

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