The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Driving local business is one of the great benefits of search engine marketing. You can target ads to a several-block radius in most major cities. And you can reach customers looking for products or services in your own town. Local search advertising is cost effective, easy-to-implement, and is rapidly gaining momentum.
 
Industry forecasts predict double-digit growth in local search marketing spend over the next five years. Why is local search so effective? It targets customers when they are in the research process, the price-comparison process, and the purchasing process. Customers are logging on before they buy. Getting your local business recognized online is a huge opportunity to gain customers, and improve your advertising effectiveness. 


Setting up your local campaign
There are many options for starting a local search-marketing campaign. If you are unsure whether local search advertising will work for you, there are many services (Clickable being the best in my opinion, with powerful location targeting), but ReachLocal, LocalLaunch, and Yodle, are some others you might want to check out.) With any of these tools you can get a local campaign up and running within a couple of weeks. The commitment terms are nominal, and the cost of getting it all set up and running online for three months can be well under $5,000. 

Monitoring your local campaign results
Your campaign results will be available almost immediately. Tracking happens every time someone clicks on your ad. Detailed data is immediately available: what search terms brought someone to your Web site? How much time did someone spend on your Web site? Did anyone contact you? Were any purchases made? You will be able to track your incoming leads, sales, and ROI. There are great educational resources available if you want to learn more about local search advertising for your business. Google has wonderful write-ups on its Local search platform at the AdWords Learning Center. Clickable University is also a great place to learn more about local search advertising.  
 
We are happy to address any questions you might have about Search Engine Marketing. Drop us a line on this blog or in our Forums, and we’ll respond within 24 hours. 

Trace Johnson, Clickable SEM Guru
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search-marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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