Small businesses can benefit from Local Search listings and advertising opportunities. Online advertising is advantageous because it is accountable, effective, and provides an excellent return on your marketing investment.

Local Sales Start on the Web

Today’s consumers are using the Internet to research purchases online before buying at a local store because it saves time. When they go to a local store, they already know pricing and the different models available. Many times, they can purchase online for in-store pickup. This trend is growing rapidly; therefore, it is important for small businesses to know the benefits of local listings and local online advertising.

In case you doubt this trend, a recent study by ROI Research Inc. and Performics shows that online searches influence 20 to 30 percent of purchases made at retail locations, and these numbers are increasing.

Free Listings

Local search engines will give you a free basic listing that consists of your company name, street address, phone number, and other business details such as email address and hours of operation. Google gives you the opportunity to create coupons that customers can print out and present to your store for discounts.

You may find that you are already listed in some of these search engines because the engines populate their local listings from large databases such as Acxiom. Sometimes, the information is not accurate or up-to-date; therefore, you need to check for a listing, and if it’s wrong, make corrections. Each engine will post a procedure for doing this

The top five general search engines that provide local listings are Yahoo Local, Google Local, Citysearch (provides listings to Live Search), AskCity and AOL Local Beta.

Local search engines such as Local.com, TrueLocal, Verizon SuperPages and YellowPages.com compete against the major search engines for user queries. In most instances, you can get better results by advertising on the locals.

Advertising on the Locals

Savvy small business owners will budget for local search to reap the benefits of local online advertising. There are many benefits to advertising on local search engines versus general search engines. Below are a few of the reasons why.

Higher Click-Through and Conversion Rates: You will likely get higher click-through rates because the audience on locals is segmented and highly qualified. You might get fewer clicks because of the smaller database, but your conversion rates will be higher because the audience is targeted.

Branding: You’ll get better brand recognition on local search engines because results will be relevant to user queries. Fewer users will be exposed to your brand, but those who see your listing will recognize and remember it in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Banner Ads: Because they are smaller, local search engines can provide custom positioning for your banner ads. Most locals go out of their way to please advertisers and users by offering highly relevant content with targeted banners on the SERPs.

Other Advertising Opportunities

Besides the above, you can also invest in the following advertising programs on the locals:

AOL’s CityGuide specializes in local entertainment information. Marketers can target consumers by lifestyle and market through AOL.

Ask Sponsored Listings provide three levels of pricing for pay-per-click advertising: Easy Access Plan, Advanced Plan and News and Events Plan.

CitySearch offers two pay-per-click advertising plans, Web Connect and Call Connect, for placement on Microsoft Live Search, Yahoo, Google and Ask. You also receive access to online advertising tools to help manage your daily results.

Craigslist provides online classified ads, organized by region or city. Craigslist connects buyers and sellers in more than 300 communities, offering free listings.

Dotster is a web domain registration and hosting company that provides Local Site Promotion, a local advertising package. You set your monthly budget, and this service places your ad on all major search engines.

Froogle Local is a shopping search engine that allows users to search for specific products by location. You can be found in Froogle by submitting items free on Google Base. From Google Base, you can also create AdWords ads for each offer.

Google AdWords can help you target local online customers by setting your pay-per-click ads for “ad scheduling,” which is like dayparting, and the ads only appear during the hours when people search in a particular city, state or region.

Local.com gives you a free listing, and you can also target its 10 million-plus monthly customers with pay-per-click and banner advertising.

MyEzClicks will list your business in over 30 major search engines, including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search for a monthly fee.

ReachLocal takes the complexity out of local advertising by providing one central place to set-up, maintain, and track your local search advertising campaigns with various pricing plans.

RegisterLocal provides a service for an annual fee that allows you to create a master profile that it submits to search engines and directories on your behalf.

TrueLocal’s mission is to drive online customers to offline businesses. This local search engine currently indexes over 13 million local businesses and offers multiple advertising opportunities starting at $1 per month.

Yahoo Local Listings will let you add or edit your business listing for free (Basic Listing) and also provides fee-based Enhanced Listings and Featured Listings to meet your company’s advertising needs.

YellowPages.com is a huge online local directory site that provides basic free listings as well as city guides and multiple advertising solutions.

by Claudia Bruemmer

Never has customer service been more important than on the web. That’s because consumers are just one click away from another retailer if your site does not perform.

Let me share a recent online buying experience. I went to a big retail site, which shall remain nameless, and searched for a gift for my son’s birthday. I found the perfect gift and ordered. It had to be sent to his address because I was late in ordering. So far, so good. In fact, everything went peachy keen with that transaction to the point where the gift was delivered promptly, and the recipient loved the gift.

But that’s not the end of the story. I was so impressed with the merchandise offers that I made two subsequent purchases that very same night. These purchases were for myself, and I know enough to check the shipping address, which I did. I’m pretty sure I did because I’m very anal about ordering online.

I completed that order, and then the site shows me another offer. So I bite, placing a third order. They hit the jackpot with me, I’m still impressionable in my old age. Again, I carefully change the shipping address, because this dumb shopping cart keeps defaulting to the first shipping address.

Fine, so I’m waiting for my merchandise to arrive. I wait and wonder, thinking about it now and then. Eventually, my daughter-in-law tells me the gift arrived, and she wrapped it nicely. She doesn’t tell me she subsequently got my skinny jeans and beaded top.

Then when I see her at the birthday party, she says, “Mom, I got these jeans I didn’t order, do you know anything about it?” Voila, my order, delivered to the wrong address! Well, fine, I can finally slink into those jeans. But with all the booze and beer at the party, I forget the package and drive 70 miles home without it.

Next scene: Mom asks her favorite daughter-in-law to mail the package, which she does dutifully, at the cost of 8 bucks. Well, nevermind, mom is anxious to get into those skinny jeans. The package arrives quickly. She opens the sack, and guess what? The jeans don’t fit!

You know why? That’s another long story. Mom is not savvy at ordering these new age jeans, so she went to the trouble of talking to the chat person, a male, asking if the jeans were ordered by waist size as indicated on the site. He checked and said yes, order by waist size. But the jeans fit 2 inches below the waist. While the mom is no hippo, she does have larger hips than her waist.

But that wasn’t the only problem with this order. The top had beads that were so huge that she didn’t care for it. So both the jeans and the top had to be returned. She follows instructions, and goes to check both items in the online return form. However, the form only allows a check on one of the items. So she has to go through the return process twice, individually for each item — it took a while to figure that one out.

Subsequently, she starts getting emails from the retailer regarding the return. Seems there is a shipping fee and a restocking fee for each item. The items must be returned separately with two separate prepaid shipping labels. She can return the jeans in the original bag, but she has to buy a new shipping envelope to return the top.

Turned out she paid almost 20 bucks just to see this merchandise. Do you think she will order from this retailer again?

BTW, the third shipment, a chrome rainfall showerhead, arrived at her residence, and she likes it. No man around the house to install it, but heck, a waterfall in the shower sounds great, right?

Here is her list of gripes, which she communicated in the many emails to the nice customer service people, who gave her credit for one restocking fee on future orders:

1.    Why would a shopping cart ever default to an address other than the consumer’s?
2.    Why can’t two items ordered on the same ticket be returned together?
3.    Why is there a restocking fee?
4.    Why aren’t the product descriptions more accurate?

Despite all her travails, mom may order again from this retailer because it was a good deal on the gift and the showerhead. And she has $4 credit on her next order.