Last night, I was talking to a small business person who ran a small mobile service business. He told me that most of his business came from the Internet thanks to key words for his industry, as well as the types of services he provided. In many regards he was marketing online correctly, and he was only doing services in his immediate area, within the city limits. You could say his marketing was “hyper local” – the right word should be. Now then, I have a question for you as a small business entrepreneur; are you marketing your small retail store online in a hyper local way? If you’re not, you should be.

That is to say, if you wish to reach customers who are local to you, and will come to your store and buy stuff. Even if you sell some items online, you don’t necessarily want to market to people in Timbuktu. Many people believe that they wish to sell to people all over the world from their little store in some little city in America. This isn’t a necessarily wise strategy, unless you are hyper-niched, and you don’t have a lot of competition, that strategy probably won’t work. Let’s face it if you own a store in your local city 85% of your business comes from a 10-mile radius.

When you market your business online you need to draw those customers into your store, and you need to concentrate on those potential consumers that live local to you. There are many ways you can do this, and one is to use the name of your city, community, as part of the title of your website. If your city has a short name, you might wish to include it in your actual domain name, ensuring that you will get only local traffic. Now you might think this is going way overboard, but if you have a few other competitors in your city, you need to be thinking here, because sooner or later they too will have a website trying to market locally.

Although I am not a big fan of trying to spam search engines, or use SEOs strategies, I also realize that you do need to have content on your website which corresponds to your location. Therefore if you have testimonials you need to put the name of the city that under each of your customer’s testimonials corresponding to where they are, local testimonials online mean a lot. The more times the name of your city is listed the better off you’ll be, as long as you are trying to fool the search engine with too many keywords purposely. Indeed I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 23,500 articles by mid-day on June 23, 2011 is going to be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off..