Local Discovery In The Future

Local marketing is heading towards an exciting era. There are number of factors that are changing the way users search anything in a specific location. Thus, advertisers and local marketers now need to tune their marketing efforts to extract better results.

With that said, it is worth mentioning the features and technologies that are essentially going to change the scenario of local searches and marketing.

Analysis and utilization of big data

One of the primary ranking factors for local searches is proximity. All of the search engines have been using locations to rank any business which would be meant to show up in the local search results.  For instance, if we talk about Google, it is known to store user’s info in its servers. It has been tracking users’ browsing history and personalizing the search results for quite a time. Now, the algorithm updates and Google’s ability to analyze users’ data in a bit more detail make the search engine more capable to tether proximity with the local searches in an even better way.

Another factor that is the part of ‘big data’ discussion is time. Google has started to perfect its ability to show location based results at right times. These kinds of search results can be shown only when Google know about the users’ preferences. Honestly, this is where the things related to local search are heading.

Voice search and digital assistants

Many of the tech giants are releasing their own versions of digital assistants, but the goal seems to be the one; i.e. assisting users with everything after receiving voice commands. For now, the ability of any digital assistant to receive a voice command, understand the sense of it and giving accurate result seems questionable. But the pace at which the progress is being made seems to perfect the technology in not-so-distant future.

We can see that big companies like Google, Amazon and Alexa are already on their way to deploy these assistants everywhere including your phone to your car to your living room. Furthermore, these assistants are equipped with the ability to distinguish between users after receiving the voice commands.

Augmented reality

No matter how big the LED screen of your plasma TV or media center is, nothing can match the charm of what you can see in front of you. This is the reason that techs have identified the need of replacing TV screens with something that doesn’t hide the things in front of us. What we are talking about is the augmented reality. Augmented reality is associated with adjusting visual features in the things that lie in front of us. Think of a wall that displays your favorite TV show in a way only you can see. This is what the augmented reality is capable of.

Although, this feature may not have any practical application in the local searches for now, the time is not far when you will be able to visualize the buildings and businesses in your area using augmented reality.