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Local Search: Convert
and Win
November 10, 2005
"My ROI on local search
advertising is literally 10 times better than my Yellow Pages ad."
With those words, my dad
changed my opinion of local search.
Truth be told, I've never
been a fan of local search. Local search prophets actually annoyed me. I didn't
believe them.
I watched local search
conferences emerge and scoffed at the research. I believed their growth figures
were self-serving and grossly exaggerated. Local search was myth, a market hyped
by those hoping to profit from carving out a niche using location. Its professed
power didn't accurately reflect the market's reality.
Man, was I wrong.
My dad operates Boston
Environmental, an environmental services company that specializes in mold
removal, site assessments, soil and groundwater testing, indoor air quality
testing, and the like. He spends $600 dollars a month on two Yellow Pages ads,
which generate about five phone calls per week.
Last November, he finally
got someone to build him a new Web site for his business. Due to a pending
acquisition, a busy travel and speaking schedule, and a ClickZ column, I was
just too busy to help him with a SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign, or even
to help optimize the site for natural search.
After months of his
nagging, I finally asked our paid search team to do me a favor, "Can you guys do
some paid search to get my dad off my back?"
Though we've made
significant investments in our automated bidding agent technology, the team
elected to manage my dad's account by hand, setting and forgetting bids on about
35 keywords. Campaign optimization consisted of raising the bids on a few
keywords that my dad indicated were more in-demand services, such as mold and
indoor air quality testing, to the point at which the ads were consistently in
higher positions.
Then, they turned their
backs on the campaign for a couple months and just let it run. No optimization,
no tweaking creative, no changing bids. Just monitoring to ensure it was
spending roughly $100 a month.
Very quickly, something
remarkable began to happen. Callers were telling my dad they found him online
using search. Not just one or two callers, but the majority. And he's selling
them lots of services.
Within a few weeks, my
father told me, "I'm getting nearly 25 calls per week from people who say they
found me on the Internet!"
The Yellow Pages were
only producing around five calls a week. "I'm still absolutely stunned by the
volume of calls I'm receiving from the Internet," my dad remarked.
My dad now spends about
$130 per month. That's it. The campaign runs on Google's and Yahoo!'s local
search products. It's limited as closely as possible to searchers within
Massachusetts Zip Codes or queries that include a local town's name. The
campaign's average CPC (Cost Per Click) is around $0.65 and generates about 200
clicks a month. The CTR (Click Through Rate) is solid for a search ad campaign
at 5 to 6 percent.
Here's the kicker: there
was no online conversion option on his old site (the new one has a form, but it
just launched). There was no form for anyone to fill out, no white paper to
download, no newsletter to subscribe to. Just a phone number. In spite of this,
the campaign is incredibly successful. In fact, our paid search group elected to
run the campaign manually precisely because there was no conversion event toward
which the agent could optimize the campaign.
As the Overture/comScore
study revealed, the greatest conversion opportunity in some markets is in
targeting keywords that don't convert on the Web site. On a micro scale, my
dad's site may further support that finding.
I'd doubted local search,
both in terms of the volume of people who were searching with local intent, and
the opportunity for marketers to benefit from local targeting. Personal
experience made me a believer.
If you operate a classic
Yellow Pages-oriented business, build a Web site, even if it's just a single
page, and experiment with local search advertising. It's still very affordable,
and you may find more prospects than you expect replaced their use of the Yellow
Pages with that of search engines. That's what my dad found out.
"Right now, four out of
every five phone calls I answer are from people who tell me they found me in
search. It's really incredible," my dad told our extended family at a dinner
recently. I love it when he's excited, and I love it when he gushes. Most of
all, I love the targeting power of search marketing.
http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/local_search/article.php/3562096
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