Local Search Marketing

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Beyond Local Search Marketing

Local search campaigns tend to perform well for product & service businesses which are interested in targeting a limited geographic area, but it can be difficult to generate a significant volume of leads because of the lack of usage and the geographical limitations.

A primary consideration as to whether a business would find local search relevant to their marketing is if the business has at least one physical location. Thus businesses with only an online presence typically do not implement local search marketing tactics unless they offer a unique proposition related to a geographic region.

Local search marketing may be effective for small, medium & large businesses including everything from consumer services such as hotels, restaurants & hair salons to B2B services such as lawyers & accountants. Even if you market nation or worldwide it is important to consider also targeting your business in local search for each location to generate local leads and provide further brand exposure at very low costs.

Geo targeted search results are a subset of all search results which allows you to target audiences likely to be interested in results based upon their geographical location. While the majority use google.com others are directly provided search results based upon their geographical location as determined by ip address. For example Google has over a hundred different geo-targeted domains that provide country specific results (i.e. Canada - www.google.ca). Country specific search results can be an important avenue to pursue for those with interests outside of the United States including Canada, Latin America & Europe in particular.

Common factors that influence inclusion based upon search optimization within geo-targeted results include top level domain extension (i.e. UK - domain.co.uk), physical location of hosting, text content (i.e. UK contact information) within the site & links from other web sites related to the geographic location targeted.

In addition pay per click campaigns may be set up based on nationwide geographic & language limitations. For example, AdWords allows you to specify which country and language you would like your advertising displayed within. If you are a business strictly selling only within the US & speak only English, then you'll want to specify this by restricting your ads from being displayed to visitors outside of the US and those not speaking english. If you serve those speaking Spanish or another language, then you will want to also display advertising to those languages and relevant geographical locations.

In addition to targeting local search engines & search engines utilizing geotargeting, an additional tactic is to target keywords phrases including geographical words (i.e. New York City Florists) within the major search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN). This may be accomplished thru search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns setup for nationwide or worldwide pay per click distribution.

While the search engines have made an effort to improve local search technology, there is still rooom for improvement. This is evident to the experienced marketer as the vast majority of visitors are not referred from local search but instead frequently utilize their favorite search engines (i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN) and include keywords that qualify their local interests. Because of this, extended keyword analysis including geographical identifiers & related search engine marketing is important to businesses interested in developing a successful local search engine marketing campaign. If these steps are taken, your advertising budget will be focused upon visitors that are qualified based upon your geographic target market.