I came to this session looking primarily to see what people are doing for local natural optimization. Instead, it was largely about ads, but there was still a lot of good information for anybody that primarily seeks localized business.
Moderator: Greg Sterling, Sterling Market Intelligence
The internet was originally about the global marketplace, but now it’s moving more local. The internet is more about local than anything else.
What’s local? Maps, jobs, cars, real estate, news, products entertainment, yellowpages, travel, etc. About 40% of the top 20 search terms are local. Internet has 84% local reach on online population.
Local ad spending has reached $150 Billion. Currently
Justin Sanger, LocalLaunch!
Newspapers make up almost 50% of local advertising. Consumers are getting more and more savvy for local search and shopping. People are using the internet to compare and contrast various local sources. Looking for things like distance, price, coupons and more. Local search is also very community driven.
Will be seeing a tremendous amount of integration between local and vertical search.
Local advertisers are confused and overwhelmed by the innovation and how to create simplified local search solutions. We need to bring more structured business content online.
Patricia Hursh, SmartSearch Marketing
How to reach local searches with ads: IP targeted search ads, keywords with local qualifiers, using local search engines, local ads on maps.
How do you IP target in the US? Google allows radius of address, city, region, state or even customized area. MSN allows metro areas. Yahoo is based on business physical address but will have targeting by city with the Panama rollout. With yahoo, you don’t even have to have a website as Yahoo has locator pages.
You can run three consecutive Google campaigns. National, national with local keywords and IP local targeted. National is cost effective, ip targeted produces relevant results, local searches catches the rest.
Stacy Williams, Prominent Placement, Inc.
Local search counts for less than 1% of the local search results. To get into the main results you want to optimize for your main terms with localized references.
To get into local map results add physical address to bottom of every page. (text all on one line). You can also submit your business profile directly.
When submitting a business profile, add as much information as possible, be thorough and complete. Go to as many local search providers as possible and create / fix your profile.