Studies show that nearly 1 billion searches related to local businesses occur on the web each month and that number is growing rapidly, making local search engine marketing essential for acquiring new customers and dominating competitors. In the modern world, the Yellow Pages are not the place where customers look for businesses.

Local search is the specialized use of Internet search engines that allow users to modify searches in a structured database of local businesses according to geographic conditions. Examples of local search include ‘Hotels in London’, ‘Shopping malls in Mumbai’ or ‘Indian restaurants in Boston’. Local search sites are primarily advertising for businesses that want to stand out when users search for a specific product or service in specific locations.

Studies have shown that most people use the Internet to find products locally. It is also true for people looking for local businesses that they might need the service of. If your business name appears in every relative search, it will ensure that you give it a chance to get as many customers as possible. Driving traffic to your website and business will help your business grow. Word of mouth is a very effective marketing tool that is generated by happy customers and in order to get as many happy customers as possible, one needs to make sure that your business is listed on the top of the search engines.

Local search engine marketing is much more effective than advertising in the local newspaper or handing out fliers to random people on the streets. A business gets much more exposure and value for money when it focuses its advertising budget on this native marketing. The first type of local search engine marketing that a business would be interested in is pay-per-click advertising. One of the biggest advantages of pay per click is that the results can be immediate. A business just needs to register with local search engines like Google or Yahoo, then choose a few keywords related to the business and the products and services it offers. Once the process is complete, ads will appear in the search results, usually above and to the right of the page. The only drawback of this type of campaign is that it involves a high cost to attract traffic. As soon as the money dries up, so does the traffic, proving that PPC is a more expensive local search engine marketing tool.