Local search marketing tactics need to consider the needs of the desired customer base, and where they might go to satisfy those needs.
SES London: Touching Your Local Customers
Murdok guest correspondent Debbie Harrison has been providing us with a look back at the proceedings at Search Engine Strategies in London.
ComScore tells marketers that 40 percent of all online searches have to do with local information. People want to find something in or near where they live on a regular basis. Touch Local’s Grant Muckle emphasized that search engines like Google and Yahoo are not the only places to play with local ads online.
Yellow pages type directories and smaller, local search engines get attention too. That may be hard to believe considering Google’s always-impressive share of search engine click-throughs, 64 percent by Nielsen//NetRatings January 2006 figures.
Google is where local advertisers need to be, plain and simple. Not just on the relatively lightly-used Maps and Local niches, but the main Google search that Internet users know so well.
The rationale for focusing on Google comes from Google’s increasing attention paid to local search. On Google’s search pages as Muckle demonstrated, a search for a particular business in a location may bring up a One Box of local results.
If the local business appears there, it’s going to get a lot more attention from searchers. The higher in the organic search results a website appears, the more likely it will get someone to click through to it.
Getting a higher organic result can take time, and a business may want to get faster results. That’s where PPC advertising comes in, and why Google has a US share price in the $470 range
