the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

I was down for the count last week and missed a lot of great activity on my normal blog ’rounds’. ApolloSEM is changing their format somewhat, Joe at PPCHero walks us through a purchase in a customer’s shoes (not enough advertisers do this), and Clixmarketing dissects the Adwords content network post. Good stuff.

As I was reading semfire’s post on local australia google serps, I did a search of my own and I was struck by the percentage of screen landscape on page one that is open to traditional seo. 2 listings, out of 22 total. That’s 9 percent according to my accountant. Since I spent some time with folks in the travel industry last week, I searched for ‘chicago hotel’.

10 of these listings are pure local results. Obviously, these results are more relevant for the user, so this is a trend that isn’t going anywhere.

Beyond that, what do you notice about the paid results?

I don’t see one of these advertisers using “chicago” targeting for their paid search ads. Not a 1. We all know what that can do for your CTR when you are up against national advertisers. Shame Shame Shame. That’s an opening for one of these folks. How to take advantage?

For the beginners

Go get ‘em!

There’s some debate to it’s relevancy of late, but seriously, how can you question the value of quality localized search listings? The question is, when will it get over the hump? We’ve been talking about it for years! C’mon, Al Gore invented the internet in half the time it took us to even come up with yahoo.local and google.local. Hell, he’s even gone and solved global warming before we can come up with one single site that provides real quality local content (spare me yelp please).

What is taking so long?

I have no idea. That’s a question for people smarter than me. I’m more worried about Illinois basketball and their low seed in the tourney. And why can’t Bruce Weber recruit…

About 2 years ago Yahoo had Google smoked in local search features and usability (remind you of another product they had a lead with?)…now, Yahoo lets people game it just for fun by exploiting the most ridiculous hole in a search algo ever:

Search engine marketing chicago << this hole has been plugged

Google pulls data that has more integrity, and it's beefing search results with local bells and whistles, which is nice but it's far from perfect. If you have a business with a local address, you best pay attention to the improvements they're making at the local G.

Yes, taking care of these details will help the small business in the long run, but in terms of real traffic? Hard to say. It depends on your vertical. The effort of ranking locally outweighs the benefits in many cases. Why? Basically, too much fragmentation in the media. As Greg Sterling said recently, “complexity of local “on the ground” far exceeds that of national online advertising or general paid search”.

He’s absolutely right. Imagine it this way…you live in Chicago…you sit down in front of your TV tonight to catch the news on your favorite local college basketball team. Say it’s DePaul. You want to know if they’re getting into the NIT tournament. You enter into your remote “channel 37″, which you know is a local Comcast sports affiliate, the best place to get local sports news. Instead of landing on channel 37, you find a list of channels to choose from.

109,000,000 OF THEM!!!!

Is that useful? Unless Google starts to produce local content, we’re going to get a lot more of this unless some kind of shift takes place.

Anyone? Buhler?