SUMMARY: We wanted to better understand how local search was perceived in terms of effectiveness by search engine marketers. Check out this week’s chart to see your peers’ opinions on local search.
Year over year, we see that more marketers believe they have enough experience to have an opinion on the effectiveness of local search -- and the opinion is quite favorable. As a searcher’s location becomes a standard bit of metadata to be factored into the PPC bid process, geotargeting is likely to become the norm.
On the other end of the geotargeting search equation, we see that landing pages are somewhat neglected. Survey results showed that few marketers were taking advantage of geolocation-specific messaging once the searcher clicked through. For retailers, in particular, this is a huge missed opportunity.
For additional research data and insights about search marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2009-2010 Search Marketing Benchmark Report.