Local Search

I remember the first ad buy I ever made. The year was 1996 and I was purchasing a 3”x2” ad in the independent newspaper the Houston Press. I had never bought an ad before and the experience was exciting knowing that my ad would be read by thousands of people who just might purchase the services of my employer, a local ISP in Houston. Now you might ask why I wasn’t buying ads for that campaign online. Well, the answer is simple. That’s not where the local customers were. Oh how times have changed.

By now we all get that local anything online is important. That fact is understood very well by the Internet industry because we see it play out first hand in percentage of searches with local intent and the mainstreaming of smartphones that will accelerate this growth. As with most things, it’s important to have some numbers to back up the observational ‘gut feel’ we get when it comes to trends. BIA/Kelsey has put some numbers to this phenomenon and for the foreseeable future, local search revenues will

If you are an SMB owner or marketer and have been in the Internet marketing game for any length of time you know how strange it sounds to consider Google reaching out to you though marketing. It’s a well known frustration regarding Google that having something that has a pulse behind it rather than a blinking light to field questions or concerns or even give some general information often feels more like a matter of fate and chance rather than design. Of course, if you spend enough money in AdWords you may

Google is committed to its local Internet marketing efforts to lengths like we have not seen the search giant go to in a while. Searching for new revenue streams will do that. What have they done recently? -Moved Marissa Mayer to oversee the local search and advertising efforts