Searching for local products and information is a high growth area on the Internet -people are busily using search engines to find local information, and as a rule small businesses get the vast majority of their customer from within a 50 mile radius.

Actually, people have always been searching for local information, it just hasn’t been easy to find local information in the search engine results. That’s all changing though. 26% of all people visiting a search engine are directed to a Local search result, like an Internet Yellow Pages entry, Google Local information, or other local directory result.

More people using search engines click through on Local information than they do on travel sites such as Expedia or news services like the BBC.

I gave a presentation on Local Search at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in London, and you might want to take a look at the notes accompanying my presentation.

Date: 2nd June 2006

Time:

Susan has been invited to speak at the  premier Search Engine Strategies conference and exhibition taking place in London from 31 May to 2 June 2006.    The conference is hosted by SearchEngineWatch.com

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Google
• Jill Whalen of HighRankings.com
• Ask.com
• WebTrends
• SEOmoz.org

Susan giving presentations on two of the three days:

Local Search Marketing Tactics
This session looks at ways search marketers are tapping into an an audience using local search engines, online yellow pages and other local search methods.

Public Relations Via Search Engines
Many people rely on news search engines for information. Understanding how these operate is as vital to a PR campaign as understanding how to contact “real-world” reporters. In addition, how can you influence paid and unpaid listings to ensure the right message about your company is getting out, especially if others are employing them to hurt your image?

Register for the event and learn more at the Search Engine Strategies website.

Back to events

I’m at the Search Engine Strategies conference in London today, catching up on latest news and trends in the world of search engines.

It was particularly interested to see a demonstration of Microsoft AdCenter’s beta curently available in America, where you can target your PPC campaigns to display your ads to specific searchers, segmenting by gender, age group, city. In America, quite scarily, there are also options to display ads depending on “Lifestyle” factors, but that won’t be available at the launch of the service here in the UK at the end of this year.

The targeting is based on information contained in the searcher’s Microsoft Passport, so I’m not completely persuaded its usefulness, but time will tell. There is quite alot of extrapolation and assumptions being made to generate the predicted results. Folks on the Microsoft stand had been trained to say “statistically significant.” I smell something, but I’m not sure what.

The service also includes day parting – the ability to define when you want your ads to display: show my ads Monday to Friday only, turning them off for an hour over lunch, and no ads Friday afternoon.

It’s been an interesting day – I’d suggest you pop along to the conference next year if you can.