It is a very familiar scene; most internet users could identify with the following scenario: You heard about a product, you want to buy it locally, you enter the product name at Google and you cannot find a local vendor. You entered the product name or service, description and your city and you still cannot find a vendor. This is a very frustrating situation that many consumers all over the United States experience. However, it does not have to be this way.
Increasingly, search engines like Google and Bing are evolving towards localized search. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they are making great strides to getting local search work for consumers. Depending on how popular the particular product or service you are looking for, Google and Bing accommodate product name and location search strings. For example, if you are looking for Nike shoes and you live in Los Angeles, you just put in “Nike shoes Los Angeles” or “shoes Los Angeles” and more likely than not, you would find local listings. The problem with the current state of search technology for local businesses is that it may provide spotty results. Also it revolves largely on how good the searcher is. If you are very specific and you know how to search with the right search strings at the major search engines, you should have no problem. Unfortunately, not everybody is that exacting. Not everybody uses the same product categories, product names or product descriptions.
Even place names can be problematic as well. While most people would search for a particular product using their larger city name, others would use district names. Also if you are looking at more targeted geographic locations, you would tend to use district names or even street names. There is also the problem of informal location names because they are many cities that operate on incorporated basis. The formal name of a city is the incorporated name. Unfortunately, many cities also have a traditional name and this might not be the formal name for the city of the district that you are looking for products or services in. To address these issues, use the guide below to empower you to make your local business searches more effective and yield more positive results.
Planning Out Your Search
Just like with finding jobs online or finding a soul mate online, every second you spend planning out before you search helps improve your chances of success. Do not have any second thoughts about sitting down and coming up with a quick action plan regarding your online search. Use the analysis below to help boost your chances of successfully locating local businesses online.
The first step in planning out your search is to figure out exactly what you are looking for
If you are looking for a product, find out the particulars. What is the category of the product? What is the make, meaning the manufacturer of the product? If you can find it, find out the model. For each level you go down in specificity from category to manufacturer to model, the easier your search would be because when you are searching by category, there are many, many manufacturers and models that fall within that category. Similarly, when you are searching by manufacturer, most manufacturers have many different product lines. It really helps to get a model. You do not have to get the model number, but just get a specific model or series of products in order to get close to what you are looking for. If you zero in on the specific model immediately, you might be painting yourself into a corner because there might be related models that would be a better fit for your needs. Do not restrict your options. Maybe stop the analysis at the model series. If there are specific models, that may be too narrow.
If you restrict your analysis to just a model series, this might give you more options. The same analysis applies if you are looking for services. The only difference is, of course, you are not looking for a manufacturer or a model, but you are looking for the category of the service. In this particular situation, look for the subcategory. In terms of services, the more specific you are regarding the subcategory of the services, the higher the chance that you would retrieve results that match the particular service you are looking for.
Finally, when it comes to planning out your search, make sure that you keep in mind what type of merchant you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for a product, ask yourself if you are looking for a distributor, a retailer, or a wholesaler. This is very important because it impacts the price that you are going to pay. Also it impacts the amount that you are going to buy. Most consumers are looking for retailers. However, there are many consumers that are also looking for price breaks and do not mind buying in bulk. If that is the case, look for distributors or wholesalers. Keep in mind that there are two kinds of wholesalers and distributors. There are those that deal strictly on a business to business basis. Most of the time, this does not apply to you unless you are a business owner and you are looking to get bulk discounts from a business to business arrangement. If you are a regular consumer, look for wholesalers or distributors that sell directly to the public. These do exist and this is quite a large niche in product marketing. If you are looking for services, there are two different kinds of service providers. There are direct service providers and there are those who merely refer you. They have a website, but they just refer you to the actual company or person doing the service. For example, city based dental groups or legal services work on a referral basis.
Using Search Engines to Find Local Businesses
Now that you have planned out your search and tightly defined what you are looking for, it is now time to use the search engines. The larger search engines use city search strings-you type in the product you are looking for and next to it is the city.
It sounds simple enough, right? Not so fast
Depending on how you enter the search string and what you put in the search string, your results might vary. You might not get many direct matches. You might not get any relevant matches. It is very important that you tightly define what you are searching for and go through the analysis described above and then pair it with the city. If you do not get any matches, then go to the next higher level. For example, if you are looking for shoes, the analysis would be category is apparel, subcategory is shoes, sub-subcategory is a particular manufacturer for shoes, and sub-sub-subcategory would be a model made by that manufacturer for shoes. If you cannot get results with sub-sub-subcategory, go up to a higher level and try to find the sub-sub-subcategory and in this example the manufacturer of the shoes. Depending on the product, most detailed searches on the sub-sub-sub-level would work. However, if there is not too much demand for the product, then you probably would need to be more general in your search and go up several higher levels in your search analysis.
This applies to product searches and it also applies to service providers
When it comes to service providers, however, the higher levels are composed completely of categorization. If you are still not getting the results you are looking for, why did not the geographical parameter? Currently the parameter is the product or service plus the location. What you need to is again to widen your search. First, widen to a district in your city. If that does not work, widen to the city itself. If that still produces spotty results, extend your search to nearby suburbs. If that still produces substandard results, widen your search to the next city. If that still does not work, then apply region parameters, for example, Southern Illinois or Southern California.
Check and Verify Your Results
Now that you have gathered a lot of local listings for the product or service you are looking for, use the power of the internet to verify your results. Find out if these are quality vendors that are worth your time calling or visiting locally. The bottom line is time is money. Do not waste your time contacting substandard local merchants. Use the internet to filter your local merchant or service provider results. Use the three verification systems described below to filter your results.
1. Find BBB ratings for your results
The Better Business Bureau is a powerful ally in selecting businesses locally and online. Better Business Bureau rates businesses based on customer satisfaction, costumer complaints and a whole host of other selective criteria. This is a great way to get an objective and impartial rating of the business. Obviously you would want to steer clear of businesses that have had many complaints from people reporting to the BBB.
The downside with BBB ratings is that they may not cover the local business that you are interested in. There are so many businesses that your particular business might not have a better business bureau rating, although it might have had informal complaints in the past. Because of limited coverage, BBB rating might not help you. The local business result might not be there and you should run all of your results through this analysis. For example, if your search for local shoes yielded 30 local results, analyze all 30 with BBB rating and if only two appear that have favorable BBB ratings, go to those. It is not uncommon for local searches to produce a list in which none of the listed businesses have a Better Business Bureau rating. If that is the case, use the two other tools listed below.
2. Consult Yelp Reviews
Yelp is a massive collection of reviews of local businesses and service providers. This website is especially helpful when it comes to assessing restaurants. The great thing about Yelp is there are many cities and locations covered in their data base. This is the cornerstone of any good review site–the amount of local coverage it offers.
Unfortunately, most review sites tend to be very narrow in their geographic focus or they tend to be thinly populated when it comes to local businesses and restaurants. Yelp stands out from the competition because it has a huge data base of covered locations.
The downside with Yelp is that the particular product or service you are looking for might not be a covered category there. Also the reviews that are posted are user generated. It might not be reflective of the views of the average consumer. There is the danger of self-selection where people of a certain profile would tend to be over represented at review sites. The problem with this is the biases and particular world view of that demographic segment might be over represented and might not reflect the views of the average consumer.
Finally, another drawback to consumer review sites like Yelp is the issue of impartiality because Yelp in particular was embroiled in some controversy awhile back where it was accused of extortion. It allegedly offered to remove negative reviews in exchange for something of value. Apparently, this has been resolved in some manner. However, this situation does highlight the fact that objectivity might be compromised by the particular business model or advertising model of a particular site. Keep this firmly in mind when consulting with reviews of local businesses that you find in your searches.
3. Find blog posts about the business
Using Google’s blog search engine, find a blog post regarding the business that you are thinking of transacting with. The business might not have a Better Business Bureau rating and it might not have online review from Yelp and other review sites. However, people might be blogging about it. This is particularly true of local favorite local restaurants. These are hole‑in‑the‑wall restaurants that have a devoted following, but have very meager advertising budget. If you are looking for great food through word of mouth or you are looking for a particular cuisine and want the feedback of people that are connoisseurs or have specialized knowledge regarding that particular cuisine, blog posts are great way to go.
Blog posts are also excellent for finding issues regarding a particular product or service sold by a merchant
The downside with blog posts is that anybody can write them, anybody with an agenda or without an agenda. They can easily be gamed by competitors to make a target competitor look bad. Also they could be written by disgruntled ex-employees who only saw one side of an employment issue and posted something negatively about their ex-employer.
The downside with blogs is that many blogs are on anonymous and free platforms and this means that there is no accountability, there is no editorial process and there is really no transparency in the content generation process. The end result of all these weaknesses is that blog posts may not be very reliable. Again, take what you read with a grain of salt and use a lot of common sense in terms of figuring out if a particular blog post is relevant to your particular needs. In particular, look for inconsistencies. Also look for evidentiary support. Is the person making claims and there is nothing to back it up? Is it all opinion? Using basic critical thinking and analytical skills, you should be able to quickly and efficiently separate the obvious libel and troll pieces from legitimate independent reviews.
The Bottom Line
The internet has made searching for local product, merchants and providers much easier and more effective. However, local search still has quite a ways to go to fully delivering the results most consumers need. Use the guide above to help you plan out your search so you spend less time searching, learn the proper search strings so your search yields more relevant results and follow the verification steps above so your results are filtered properly. Using these steps, not only would your efforts produce better results, but it also means that you follow the proper method and system in producing items that would fit your particular needs and situations.
