Wednesday, 19 August 2009 15:45

If you think local search isn't an important element of your marketing mix, think again.

As the media and just about everyone else clamors around social networking, SEO and SEM, there is a largely ignored yet powerful marketing tool at our fingertips: Local Search. IACO Media creates strategies and manages listings for its clients and has proven evidence that local search is a marketing asset with measurable ROI.

 

Our team has developed strategies for national brands and individual proprietors since Google Local and Yahoo Local were launched a few years ago. We have seen our clients impression rates and action rates improve dramatically with our optimization. We see great growth opportunity in local search optimization as it gains traffic share on the internet.

82% of retail shoppers use search to find the businesses where they shop.

42-55% of searchers who found a local business made a purchase at the store they found online.

An estimated 5-15% of most business can be attributed to local search–if the listing is optimized.

Manually verified listings yield more impressions and higher action rates than unclaimed listings.

Better local business listing rank is good for branding in competitive markets.

While your local business listing may appear on local search results for your business or brand name it doesn't mean it will appear in the search results for your product or category high value keywords.

One client said that they "had spent more on toilet paper for each store than what they invested in this program" and the results far out weighed the investment. Another client saw his traffic double overnight after optimization. (This is exceptional. Please do not think we can do this for everyone.) We have seen positive results from each and every listing we have been retained to create or manage.

Our clients enjoy our turn-key operation, and the results we report give them all the assurance they need that they are getting the marketing ROI they were looking for.