The benefits of local search are growing and growing.

Why? Well, there’s a few reasons.

1) The local engines are spending more dollars on advertising themselves.
2) The local engines are also adding more features, interactive maps, skype phone access, more customer information, etc.
3) More services are interacting with the local engines. Services like mobile phone internet providers.
4) The main search engines like Google and Yahoo index the results from these local engines alongside their organic listings.
5) Local search is great for companies to advertise their websites and business but also great for customers to review the services by these businesses.
6) In July, 68 million Internet users (in the USA alone) performed yellow page searches online. That means they looked for a type of business in a local area or a specific business or a specific phone number. Over 60% of these called the phone number on the website they found. Only about 16% contacted the business via email.

The reason I mention #6 is because the #1 reason I get from my clients about why they DON’T want to be on local engines is because they prefer to get more phone calls than emails. (I know, it doesn’t make sense, but what can I tell you?) So, the fact that the website becomes more popular does not necessarily mean that it results in more emails. If you want your viewers to call you, they will!!

Local search benefits are also shown in the number of visitors to these types of sites. As an example, here are some numbers for you to ponder about local search engines:

CitySearch.com – receives almost 31 million visitors a month.
InsiderPages.com – receives almost 2.5 million visitors a month.
JudysBook.com – receives almost 200,000 visitors a month.
MerchantCircle.com – receives almost 4 million visitors a month.
Yelp.com – receives almost 18 million visitors a month.

Of these 5 local search engines, CitySearch is the only one that does not provide a free listing. Their basic package is $149.00/month but obviously, they also have the most visitors.

So, to get the most out of your Internet marketing campaign, look over these local search benefits and make up your own mind if it’s worth it for you! If your SEO firm does not provide you with submissions to these local search engines, contact us today.