Local Internet Advertising Guide

What’s the future for Adwords and local businesses?

I have seen the cost per click of adwords go up over 300% for some local business keywords in the last year, and i’m sure there will be examples of other larger increases in some cases.

Google have created a fantastic money making machine for themselves, but over time I’m certain that the front page sponsored results will become simply too expensive for smaller businesses.

As an example, searching for plumbers in (location) results in a variety of results, some are directory sites, some are independent businesses, some are larger operators.

There is only so much space on the right of the page, so taking or plumber example, there are 5 - 10 national businesses that operate plumbers in various areas, some as franchises or otherwise.  It stands to reason, that over time the bigger national plumbing companies will simply outbid the local operators… another channel for the small business bites the dust, or we will see.

My model with locallycompared.com is to provide unlimited enquiries, and randomised ordering of results for one fixed yearly price. This means that our paying businesses cannot reserve a top position, but will allways be at the top for a percentage of the time, ‘fair’ being the operative word.

How do we solve this? over to you Google…

This week we saw the launch of a new version of the site, and traffic is up 500%.  More and more businesses are claiming their profiles, and we will start mailing businesses next week.

We have a number of new number 1 positions in Google, and search positions in general are on the up. Good movement all round.