Justin Sanger from LocalLaunch is up first. He notes that MSN came out with Windows Live Local, he shows it off, some more info about msn local live. Local Search Perspectives; To effectively address local search, isolating its constituents and components is critical. The Local Search User; Local search is changing out behavior- what did we used to do? yellow pages, newspapers, word of mouth. The birth of a new savvy local consumer. Three broad classes of LS (local search) users: (1) need driven business look-up, (2) Purchasing research activity (distance, price,, rating, products, coupons, etc.), (3) Community-driven activity (community city pages feature time sensitive activities, top user recommendations, personalization and social networking. All human activity is inherently local. 20% of all search activity is local in its intent. Local Search Content and Data: So where does the LS content and data come from? (1) offline derived local content, (2) internet-derived local content, (3) syndicated-authority content, (4) user-generated local content. Kelsey Group Survey; most people believe LS business data is poor, most people believe that user-generated content is critical. Focus on user-generated content; rich content beyond standard contact info, content that is not easily obtained by crawling the unstructured web, food for pure unstructured local search, content for qualitative, comparative buying decisions, enables meaningful compare contrast and filter functionality. The SME (small medium size) Advertisers; 10M SEMs in the US, 75% of SMEs do business within 50 miles, they spend $22 billion local ads, 70% of YP advertisers are service based orgs, 46$ of budgets go to YP, only 3-5% use paid search.. Local Online Ads and LS Marketplace; 4.1 billion wil be spent this year on local online ads, newspapers claim 41% of the total local online ad spend, in 2006 local paid search ads will grow 161%, but the marketplace is very fragmented. LS Sales Efforts; controlling margins and dealing with SMEs is difficult and costly (SMEs have less than $6,000 per year to spend, volume/scale, automation required, significant capitalization). Self-provisioning of local search ads, SME local search sales is actually a big man's game. For the aggregators, interactive is both an opp and challenge. The LS Facilitators; a new breed of facilitators are empowering large, traditional sales orgs. The birth of the agnostic local search marketing platform and fulfillment teams (locallaunch, reachlocal, webvisible, trafficleader). Facilitators consolidate a complex marketplace; different ad set up, pricing, algos, strategies, and performance requirements amongst inventories). The Local Search Providers; Yahoo Local, Google Local, True Local, Local.com, Windows Live Local. Internet Yellow Pages. Soon we will no longer differentiate between LS and IYPs. Local Search Providers; LS and Social Networking, Classifieds and Shopping (craig's list, shoplocal.com), pay per call and call tracking. LS Tactics; local seo and ppc are very important but here is a new form of local optimization; the accuracy and distribution of core business data is critical to local search optimization, businesses must pay attention to and help generate published opinions about their business and study the SERPs and ride the coattails of the LS authorities. Clean your core business data; offline derived local content furnishers IYP and local search engines. Generated from local regional phone companies and telemarketing forces. Focus on your Acxiom, Amacai and infoUSA data, they feed yahoo, google superpages. Think of this data as your foundation. Updating is easier than it once was. Distribute your business profiles as far as possible (he shows yahoo business profiles and shows the vertical creep of the local listings into the SERPs of a traditional search results, he also shows Google putting Yahoo local result in its SERPs. He then closes; no web site is required to do this, it helps but not required.
Stacy Williams from Prominent Placement to dive into tactics. Different types of local search engines, the big engines and local only engines and internet yellow pages. Bruce Clay & TrueLocal has a local search chart to show the syndication; bruceclay.com/serc-local.htm (i think). Big Search Engines; three ways to get into editorial listings; add physical address to every web page, submit business details directly and submit address to large databases. She shows screen captures of all these things. Local-only Search Engines; local.com and truelocal (powered by GeoSign). Business Databases; shows how to get into them, lists URLs which I can not type down fast enough for you folks (but you can figure it out). I also may have the info in my coverage of this session from SES San Jose 05. Lots of how to add to here and there, most of it covered in San Jose.
Patricia Hursh from SmartSearch Marketing. Err, I seems like a very similar presentation to the one from last SES. Google Overview; regional targeting is available as part of all AdWords accounts. You must have a Web site. Physical address is not required. Advertisers can target by state or city or metro, or radius from address or custom (polygon). Google serves ads based on searcher's IP address, search query and other factors. Yahoo Overview; they run it as a separate product, so you need to open a new account. Web site is optional due to hosted locator page. Must have a physical business address in the targeted region. One targeting option, based on specified radius from address (0.5 to 100 miles). Yahoo serves local ads based on; search queries, yahoo registered members address, and location of specific yahoo local site. She then gives a case study, which I believe is the same as SES San Jose 05.
