I’m often surprised at how few people know about local sponsored search. Well, I guess I’m not *that* surprised, given the fact that local sponsored search is a relatively new topic in the world of search engine marketing.

What is local sponsored search?

Local sponsored search is an extension of Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing that gives advertisers the ability to show their ads only to a limited, geographically specific audience.

This is achieved by using the IP address of each person who searches on Google or Yahoo to determine their location. Your IP address contains some valuable, geographically-specific information that allows the search engines to pinpoint your location to your specific county, city, and even zip code. This is made possible because the majority of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) provide geographic information relating to their IP addresses.

Before local sponsored search was made possible, many localized businesses were not able to show up in the sponsored results for Google and Yahoo. This is because if they were to advertise for keywords on Google and Yahoo, they would not be able to limit their audience; they would be paying to have their ad run nationally! That would be the equivalent to a local bank advertising on a nationally televised program. Not only would it be extremely expensive, it would also lead to a plethora of inconsistent leads!

With the ability to pinpoint the location of users based on their IP address, localized businesses now have the opportunity to use the powerful traffic generating products offered by Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, without the worries and costs associated with conducting a campaign on a national level.

The ability to geographically target web searchers from local markets unlocks a huge potential market to businesses who only offer their products and services to a small radius of potential consumers. They can target potential customers without spending outrageous amounts of money on advertising costs.

An additional advantage to using local sponsored search is that not many businesses know about it! As I mentioned earlier, there simply aren’t very many businesses that understand local search at this point. This creates an opportunity for market domination for those who do make the venture into local sponsored search!

Not only will brave local businesses be pioneers in local sponsored search, but they will also be able to do so for a reasonable cost. This is because Google and Yahoo both base their search marketing rates on a keyword auctioning system. This essentially means that keyword positioning is auctioned off to the highest bidder, and if there are few bidders, the keywords will cost significantly less.

It may take years for many localized businesses to catch on to the benefits of local sponsored search, if they catch on at all. At the same time, the number of people using search engines to do local searches is increasing exponentially! With little competition and a rapidly increasing user base, it is becoming imperative that localized companies consider using sponsored search as a way to compliment their current marketing campaigns.

I hope that you feel as empowered in reading about sponsored search as I did in writing about this exciting technological development. If you are interested in local sponsored search, but aren’t sure where you should start, feel free to contact Digital Mantis for a free assessment. We are well versed in the world of search engine marketing, and specifically local sponsored search.