Search Hits Close to Home: How to Implement Marketing Strategies in the Local Search Zone
Depending on who’s counting, local advertising in the US represents 2/3 of all advertising dollars. If you look at just newspapers and the yellow pages, much of which Internet advertising is taking over, you can see it’s a major factor. When search marketing start it was very difficult to get good local search results, that has changed as the major search engines have perfected local search research or have partnered with local search engines.
If you’re a local business and you want to use search to get businesses, you need to understand your options. But if you’re a national or regional business with multiple offices it’s just as important. If you are a franchise with multiple locations, you have the same challenge to help people understand that you have a local presence. Just having a “find a branch/outlet/dealer” on your web site won’t help the users that didn’t get to your site in the first place, who did a generic search but want a local offering.
Local Search Strategies
What kind of local search strategies are available in today’s market? Actually, quite a number of them.
Local search started when users started to input generic search terms with geographic- specific terms. Before the major search engines were offering the ability to limit a search campaign to a specific geographic area, search marketers were using search phrases such as:
-Real estate agent Denver
-Wholesale lumber NYC
-Pizza 10945 (a zip code or zip plus 4 search)
Searchers were smart enough to understand they were looking for a geographic specific vendor, in turn, making this a viable search marketing strategy.
This is an even better PPC strategy than organic because a web page may or may not include a local address. Furthermore, it is very likely that that same web page won’t include surrounding towns, the county, or abbreviations of the same location. With a PPC geographic-sensitive campaign, you can buy these combinations and not have to overburden a landing page with this extra copy.
The second type of campaign is what most people think of as local search: a campaign that is limited to the area where it is displayed. When you set up this campaign, depending on the search engine, you can limit this by one or more of the following areas:
-Country
-State
-Town
-Surrounding area by number of miles
-Custom shape drawn on a map in the Search Engine’s ad management area.
In this case, the ad only shows up in the selected area. This is done by tracking the IP Address of the visitor. Over a period of time, the search engines have mapped where most IP addresses are located in the physical world. When a visitor comes to the search engine and puts in a search term, it is compared to the user’s IP address. If both the search term and the IP address match the ad campaign, it shows up in the users SERP.
Another type of campaign is a variation of the first. A geographic-specific search is performed by the search, but the search strategy is to broaden their selection criteria. For example, someone searches “car dealerships” in a specific area. A marketer could purchase this geographic search phrase with number of different approaches.
Reader Comments.
Great article, I believe that the local search landscape will change before the end of this year. Offering marketers better strategies than what is available today.
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