If you haven't noticed, the world of marketing has drastically changed... especially on the local level. What used to be as simple as a Yellow Book ad is no longer the quick and easy way to instant marketing. For the first time ever, local residents using the internet to find businesses and services has surpassed the use of the Yellow Book.

How did this happen, and why is it so popular? In my opinion, the reason that this paradigm shift has occurred is due to the mapping sites available on the internet. You might be wondering what sites like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and Mapquest have to do with local product and service searches... let me explain.

Once the mapping sites became popular, local residents would use the internet to get the directions to the stores they just looked up in the Yellow Pages. I can remember doing this myself, especially when I first got connected to high speed internet service. You'd find what you were looking for in the big fat newsprint Yellow Book, and then print out your directions using the internet mapping sites.

The reason people were still using the Yellow Book in conjunction with the mapping software was simple... local businesses did not show up in the search results. Not so long ago, it was widely believed that the internet was not a good tool for getting local business exposure. You would optimize search terms for your product or service, but people all over the world were finding your site, not local customers. Unless you were in a mail order business, there wasn't mcuh of a way to tap into internet search optimization.

But with the continued development of the mapping sites, we now see business names, descriptions, and business categories connected with the addresses indexed on the sites. This was a major breakthrough. It kicked open the door to local search usefulness.

The result? You don't need to consult the big fat Stone-Age Yellow Pages book to get the names of businesses that sell the product you are trying to hunt down. Now, when you search for your product or service keywords along with your city's name and your state, you end up with fairly accurate results right there in your home town.

It's a brand-new ballgame, folks, and local marketing will never be the same. Add local searching with the new social network sites, and you have just created a new marketing monster that can vault your business growth beyond your wildest imagination.

My recommendation to local business owners: You better be playing very close attention to all the changes coming and new developments with local internet searching and Web 2.0 marketing. Either stay on top of this trend, or get left in the dust, and hand over your future market share to your competitors.