Local was big in 2010. Groupon and its imitators inundated us with social coupons. Foursquare and its ilk rode the wave of smart phone adopters, and Yelp, Google and Facebook fought back with check-in features added to their existing services.

Incorporating local into an overall online marketing strategy is obviously crucial for retail outlets like restaurants, hotels and dentists. It may be less obvious why this is important for businesses that don't have retail space, or that don't sell directly to consumers.

But even if you have no retail outlets, even if you just sell online services B2B, even if you're a tech startup that hasn't fully figured out its business model, the local landscape can still be important. At Avalara, we sell software as a service to other businesses online. But we have found at least four reasons to increase our engagement with local-aware websites.

1. Improve relations with local press

Regional newspapers and local bloggers are often hungry for unique content, or a local angle on a national story. Increasing awareness of your location could get you additional mindshare, which could lead to mentions in local press.

2. Authority links

Many local-aware websites are valuable sources of incoming links. And often a basic business profile with a website link is free to create. Apart from the intrinsic SEO value of these incoming links, claiming your profile with Google Places, Yelp, or the like, can act as a verification of your name, location, phone number and other identifying features. Aggregation services may pull from a popular database, and startups may leverage existing databases from Google or Yelp. So creating a single profile can result in multiple relevant, trusted incoming links from powerful domains.

3. Manage your brand

Because consumers are accustomed to leaving reviews and ratings on local-aware websites, they are begining to do so for software and services as well. Yelp and Google Places have become important websites for non-localized company, product and service ratings and reviews. Claiming and enhancing your listing gives you better control over what content is published about you, and gives you the ability to be notified of negative reviews so that you can give a timely response.

4. Your "Customers" are not your only customers

Here is a quick list of people you may want to impress with your local savvy, or at least with accurate Bing or Google Map directions:

• Investors
• Potential employees
• Creditors and Vendors

For these four reasons alone, engaging with locale-based services make sense for a non-retail business. There may be additional benefits as well. Have you had an employer or client that benefitted in unexpected ways from thinking local? Let me know in the comments. And if you have questions about how Avalara has successfully leveraged this market niche, I’d be happy to answer private messages.