Every day, people search for products and services that they can get in their own neighborhoods. A new Google search feature even allows users to refine or restrict their queries to results near their own. The example given in Google for “things to do on St. Patrick’s Day” and modified for Minneapolis shows the power of a local search for a fairly general query.

Having local information in the text of your website, and claiming your local listing with Google Local Business Center, are two ways of making sure the search engine understands where you are. If you have any kind of service that is restricted to a geographic area, it is in your best interest to help the search engines understand as much about you as they can. For instance, if you’re a cosmetic surgeon in Beverly Hills, you want to list all of the procedures that are done in your office, and you want to make sure that “Beverly Hills California” and surrounding communities are referenced in the text of your pages, or at least in the form of an address at the bottom of important pages like the homepage and contact pages.

Ensuring that your site is locally oriented is already critical for SEO today, and may be even more important in the future as GPS based search applications become more available to smartphone customers. The Google Android platform is providing its own GPS mapping service, and your site is less likely to be associated with your business’s map location if you don’t take advantage of tools like the Google Local Business Center. Any business with a local presence, or with franchises, may want to consider revisiting its website(s) to ensure that search engines can associate the site with a specific geographic area. As more and more customers get plugged in to geo-based search tools, and search gets more segmented, a site that thinks locally can gain a competitive advantage, not to mention a little more foot traffic in tighter times.