Local Search Advertising: New Dimension For Small Businesses

A couple of years ago, local search advertising was defined as online search advertising which is made through mapping websites, local internet yellow pages, local search engines, and classified ads websites. The purpose of conducting a local online search is to rely on information collected from online sources to execute an offline transaction.

This type of search is extremely important for small entrepreneurs and small businesses. This is simply because it is almost free as it only requires a small budget to make a successful advertising campaign. The small business only seeks customers and potential clients locally and from surrounding areas. This process is also cheaper from all other types of local advertising as newspapers and media advertising like TV and radio commercials.

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Some small businesses do search engine marketing by themselves, and some outsource this operation by professional and specialized third parties. They later achieve more successful and efficient results as it is a simple process, but needs experience and knowledge of the market variables like economical conditions and customers’ trends.

Local Advertising Benefits

1. Local search advertising is based on the IP to deliver local search results. When a customer searches for a general term like “lawyer”, the search engine delivers local and non-local ads’ results, which will benefit the searcher in both cases. IP targeting search results are not perfect, but serve as required and in most times they are sufficient enough for the searchers. This is of a great advantage for advertisers like small businesses, as it will help them achieve more customers when local customers conduct online searches.

2. Local search advertising can give you the option to target customers within a specific area, like a region, a state, a city, a town, a county, or a small neighborhood. You can specify a point on the map and then target all customers from 50 or 100 miles in every direction of that point. Local search can turn up to be international advertising or exclusive to a couple of countries. The options here are unlimited as you can target more than one area with the same ad.

3. Pay per click and classified ads are the most common two methods of conducting and executing local advertising campaigns. Major search engines like Google and Yahoo are specialized in providing advertisers with hundreds of options to publish their advertising campaigns locally and globally. Craiglist is considered to be the biggest classified ads website on the web and most of the ads are for local users only.

Donny Gamble writes a blog about creating wealth by combining Internet Marketing with Network Marketing and explains why every Internet marketer should have an MLM business.

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About the Author: P Chandra is editor of QOT, one of India's earliest tech bloggers since 2004. A tech enthusiast with expertise in coding, WordPress, web tools, SEO and DIY hacks.