Studies show that nearly 1 billion local business related searches occur on the web each month and that number is growing quickly making local search engine marketing essential for acquiring new customers and dominating the competitors. In the modern world Yellow Pages isnt where customers are looking for companies.
Local search is the specialized use of internet search engines that allow users to modify searches against a structured database of local businesses according to the geographical conditions. Local search examples include London Hotels, Malls in Mumbai or Indian Restaurants in Boston. Local search sites are primarily supported by advertising from businesses that wish to be prominently featured when users search for a specific product or service in specific locations.
Studies have shown that majority of people use the internet to find products locally. It is also true for people searching for local business that they might need the service of. Having your business name come up when every relative search will make sure to give you the opportunity at getting as many customers as possible. Driving traffic to your website and business will help to make your business grow. Word of mouth is a very effective marketing tool which is generated by satisfied customers and in order to get as many satisfied customers as possible one must make sure that their company is listed in the top on local search engines.
Local search engine marketing is a lot more effective than advertising in local newspaper or giving out fliers to random people on the streets. A business gets much more exposure and value for money when they focus their advertising budget on local search engine marketing. The first type of local search engine marketing a company would be interested is pay-per-click advertising. One of the biggest advantages of pay-per-click is that results can be immediate. A business just needs to sign up with local search engines like Google or Yahoo, then choose a few keywords related to the business and the products and services it offers. Once process is complete ads will appear on the search results usually above and to the right of the page. The only drawback of this kind of campaign is that is involves high cost in order to bring in the traffic. As soon as the money dries up so does the traffic, hence proving PPC to be a more expensive local search engine marketing tools.
The other way to involve in Local Search Engine Marketing is to implement search engine optimization. Instead of appearing above or to the right of the search results, a business might seek to get links to its website listed in the organic search engine result. As clicking on these links is free, SEO can bring vast amount of long term traffic for no cost at all.
