Many small businesses have an intensely local customer base. The Internet is often seen as a great tool for global sales, and it’s easy to forget that it can be used on a neighbourhood scale too.

Take, for example, the cinemas who engage with their customers on Twitter, announcing forthcoming movies and warning regulars when booking may be necessary. Then there are the cafes, reminding customers of their presence by announcing the day’s specials on Facebook… just around lunchtime, when stomachs are rumbling. Councils announce new policies; pubs put out their list of upcoming gigs; bus companies warn of delays or changed routes. The list is endless, and for many of us grateful subscribers to local twitterstreams and Facebook feeds, the benefits have made a small but palpable improvement to daily life.

Facebook recognises this local trend even if we users are less aware of it. It now allows you to advertise within a very tight regional area. So, for example, if you are located in Nottingham, you can choose for your ads to only appear to that city’s residents. Got a branch in Sheffield too? No problem – you can pick and add as many cities as you wish. What’s more, you can choose to advertise within a 10, 25, or 50 mile radius, thus reaching as many outliers as is practical for your own individual business.

Check which cities are available on the Create a Facebook Ad page: it may be time to seriously consider investment in this area of marketing now, even if it never seemed worthwhile before.

Did you hear the one about the technology blog that people started mistaking for Facebook?

It’s a funny story, really, but it teaches us a lot. In a nutshell, ReadWriteWeb wrote a workaday blog post one day, about a new log-in function of Facebook. Now, ReadWriteWeb is a high-ranking well-respected blog, and before long, that post had gained a high Google position for the term “Facebook log-in”.

So far, so good, until the post starts attracting a disproportionate number of irrelevant comments, all saying things like “What’s going on? I just want to get to my Facebook page!”. Yes, you guessed it, these were people who habitually get to Facebook by going to Google, typing in ‘Facebook log in’ and selecting one of the top results.

Having reached that page, though, they don’t think, hmm, this doesn’t look like Facebook. No, they quickly look for a log-in box, enter their details, find they’re still on the same page, and leave a bewildered or angry comment.

At some point during this process, more savvy web-users pick up on what is going on, and start to comment too. The resulting effect is a string of these discontent comments, interspersed with comments saying – with varying degrees of politeness – ‘This is not Facebook! Try typing Facebook.com into your address bar!’.

Amusing or sad as this whole event might be, it does underline a couple of pertinent points. Number one, there are a lot of users out there for whom the internet feels like an irrational arena, prone to springing unwelcome surprises upon them. Longterm users have, without knowing, picked up an understanding of interfaces and vocabulary that not everyone shares.

Number two, everyone skims. There is so much irrelevant stuff on every webpage these days – ads, invitations to register, alerts, and so on – that skimming is a vital skill if you want to actually get anywhere. Can we blame these people for skimming what, at first sight, may just look like an announcement for a new piece of functionality? Goodness knows the ‘real’ Facebook does enough of that.

There’s a take-away learning from this incident. You cannot underestimate your audience. Make your website as simple as possible, and when you’ve done that, make it twice as simple again. Remove unnecessary clutter. Don’t expect people to read your lovingly-crafted six paragraphs of text. Signpost the way. Your users will follow.

Online advertising is big business, in case you didn’t already know. Our top search engines would argue that it benefits us to have ads delivered that are specifically tailored to the user – and of course, we can all see that.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, consumers are becoming increasingly worried about the amount of personal information required – albeit retrieved by algorithms and bots, rather than humans – in order to deliver these oh-so-relevant ads.

While Google puts out a lot of PR to let us know just how it is refining our general search results day by day, I was surprised to see how openly Yahoo is trumpeting its research into Computational Advertising. It calls it “a new scientific sub-discipline”, and has its latest papers online for all to see. Fair enough, it’s a fascinating subject – and, just maybe, this degree of transparency will overcome the doubters and engender trust.

Meanwhile, as small business owners, of course, tailored ads – both content-wise and geographically-speaking – will only benefit you. Oh, and those search engines, of course.

Yahoo pitches in this week and signals the importance that it gives to social media, with the announcement that it will be integrating with Twitter as well as with Facebook. Effectively, this means that users’ Twitterstreams will be accessible from all Yahoo’s products, from its Search page to its acquisitions such as Flickr (seasoned Flickr users will already know that they can tweet or blog their photos right from the Flickr page).

Integration is also set to go further in the near future: comment on an article within the Yahoo sphere, rate something or contribute to Yahoo! Answers – and you’ll have the option to update all your friends via Twitter and Facebook as you do so. Like Google, Yahoo are trying to synthesise your online experiences into one place – and, of course, like Google, they want that place to be their own domain.

As a user, the question is, perhaps, at what point does all this synthesis result in a big fat Too Much Information? But meanwhile, as a small business owner, you need to be sitting up and wondering whether it’s going to benefit you if customer interactions and reviews are appearing in ever more places across the internet – and what you can do to ensure that those messages are positive ones.

In a recent article from the Independent, Google attempts to emphasise its non-partisan status by pointing out that it isn’t the first result when you search for ‘Search Engines’. Does that make you feel a little better about your own positioning for crucial keywords in your business?

Perhaps not – and, if that’s the case, you need to come and have a word with us. Meanwhile, something else I found interesting about this article was the quote:

Google makes one or two changes to its algorithm every day, on average.

That adds up to a lot of changes every year. Indeed, this Financial Times article further clarifies:

Google’s algorithm draws on 200 factors and is tweaked 400 times a year by an army of engineers.

To me, it’s just one more compelling reason why it makes sense to outsource SEO: if you’ve got time to keep up with that level of change, then who’s running your business?!