Citysearch and AOL recently announced that they will be working together. The partnership is a favorable one for all involved, especially local advertisers on Citysearch. AOL is still a big deal in many parts and now Citysearch´s local ads will be spread across the AOL network, a huge advantage for anyone who uses this company to advertise locally.

AOL is happy about this as well, since they can now boost the amount of local content on their pages, thanks to Citysearch.

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Under the agreement, Citysearch, a leading online local guide and an operating business of IAC, will provide its local content, including editorial reviews, user reviews, merchant videos, photos and offers for distribution across AOL properties, such as AOL CityGuide, AOL Local Search and MapQuest. AOL will integrate local advertising and content from Citysearch’s broad base of local advertisers into AOL’s leading local properties, offering advertisers access to more than 57 million unique users per month.

This is definitely beneficial to local advertisers who have already been using Citysearch, or contemplating it. You will now be able to reach many more millions of viewers with your local ads, making Citysearch a very good network to advertise with if you run a local business.

Having your business listed in the Google local search is a big deal. Many people argue that getting traffic to your business website isn´t the same as getting customers into your store, but it can help you out in a variety of ways. Google local search can really help increase your business, directly and indirectly.

People use Google local search when they are ready to buy. It´s something they do after having researched the product or service in a general search and are ready to find a location near them to buy from.

Being listed as a resource in Google local searches will help boost your reputation as a business. This can be invaluable for branding. When someone needs your product or service, your business name will pop into their head.

Sheer traffic volume has to result in some clients. Being at the top of Google local search results will send droves of traffic to your business site and eventually, some of those people will become customers.

There are plenty of advantages of making it big in Google local searches. Your business may not benefit tremendously at first, in terms of new clients, but as you become recognized and appear in more and more results, you´ll find that your business does indeed increase.

Local online advertising is definitely on the rise. Finally, people are realizing how powerful the internet can be for local businesses and are beginning to take advantage of this. It marks a major turning point in the manner of thinking with online advertising.

For years, people were impressed by the World Wide Web and the possibilities of reaching out to anyone in the world. Now, we are pulling back in and focusing on local online advertising and the ability to reach people in your specific town or area. This makes the internet infinitely more useful to local businesses and can be a great way to bring in more customers that might never have found you without the internet.

Here are a few places where local online advertising can reach those who may need your services.

On a mover´s website. You can request to be placed on the page that deals with your area, if there is one available. This way, anyone thinking of moving to your area will find your ad.

On real estate pages. Your local business could be of interest to anyone looking to buy in the area, so why not talk to some real estate offices that have their own website. As long as you are able to set up your ad on their pages, you can reach anyone who is planning to move or buy in your area.

On other local websites. Do a search online for other businesses that are not in direct competition with you, but might like to do an ad exchange. You put their ad on your site, they put yours on their site . . . it´s a win/win local online advertising situation.

Local online advertising is something that can prove to be very beneficial to your local business. Even if you are advertising online for your area, you are going to see more actual physical traffic to your store or business location. It really does work, which is why more people are starting to use local online advertising.

When you use local pay per click, you don´t really want to be getting accidental clicks (that you then have to pay for) from, say, Mexico. The idea is to bring in targeted website traffic and the best way to do that is to use Geotargeting, something that Google offers.

With Geotargeting, you select the country or area that you want your ads to appear to. Let´s say you have a dry cleaning business in San Diego. You probably aren´t going to be interested in clicks from someone in New York, so, rather than paying higher rates because out-of-area visitors clicked on your ad, why not use Geotargeting with your local pay per click campaigns? Not only will you stick to your budget, you will also have visitors to your website that are actually interested in your products or services . . . in your area.

How you use Geotargeting will depend on how your business is set up. Can you cater to people across the US? Do you ship only to Canada and the State? Limit your ads to appearing only on relevant searches done by people in your target area. This makes local pay per click as local as you want it to be! This can be very handy when you are on a tight budget and just don´t want to advertise to several states when your own city is enough.

Mobile phones aren´t just phones anymore and they are ripe for local mobile marketing. These days, people do everything on their mobiles, from storing their daily to do list to doing local searches online. You can use this to create a better system of advertising . . . putting ads where people are most often . . . on their cell phones.

The competition for local mobile marketing is still fairly low and spam hasn´t caught up with it yet. Though you can bet that this will be an issue in the future, right now is a great time to be involved with local mobile advertising. Here are a few reasons why you should get into this if you haven´t already:

Local Mobile Marketing Facts

• 94% of text messages are read.
• There are fewer land lines than mobile phones.
• Over 30 million Americans use texting on a regular basis.
• 24% of mobile phone users forward their text messages.
• Response rates with local mobile marketing range from 15-20%. Regular media is around 1%.

There are a lot of reasons why local mobile marketing is a good idea, but the main one is that it is a great way to boost your business!

With the recent news that Microsoft was making a bid on Yahoo, local advertisers who use the network to promote their business got a little nervous. How would this change things in the world of Yahoo local? Well, fortunately, you can relax a little. Yahoo has reportedly turned down the Microsoft bid, saying that it undervalues the company.

While Microsoft has claimed they will leave the Yahoo brand intact, very few companies survive completely unchanged when a takeover is this huge. Google is still quite big, but Yahoo was popular before the internet mogul developed and Yahoo Local is still a big draw to local advertisers and consumers alike. If and when the company is sold, we can expect to see some changes in this area, but that might not happen for a while yet.

The reported amount that Yahoo was offered is over $44 billion, or around $31 per share. The next move on the part of Microsoft is still uncertain, but most experts are betting that this isn´t the last we´ve heard of a takeover. What remains to be seen is how a change of hands will affect those using Yahoo Local.

Local search engine optimization is a great way to get your business some extra publicity, but it certainly doesn´t happen overnight. If you want instant results, you need something that costs a lot more, like pay per click advertising. However, nothing beats free, organic local search engine optimization for low cost marketing.

While you do need to be patient, there´s no reason not to continue tweaking and improving your local search engine optimization. Add more content to your website. If you have a blog, be sure to post to it on a regular basis. Work hard to get backlinks while you´re waiting for all your work to pay off. Once you get picked up by the search engines, you will move up through the ranks faster because you´ve already done so much to help your blog grow.

A huge part of local search engine optimization is the waiting. Waiting for your website to move up in the ranks, waiting for Page Rank or for your website to get noticed . . . but you should never sit still. Keep working at building those links and adding more value to your website. Search engines help with traffic, but people are the ones who make actual purchases, so make sure your website is built to keep the visitors that come to you via your local search engine optimization efforts.

With Google local maps starting to show up to ten results at a time, you have a better chance of getting your business into the first result for local searches now. Even if there is quite a bit of competition, it is still far easier than before.

Part of the reason that Google went to the higher number of business results is because most searchers didn´t realize they could view more results by clicking on the link below the top result. Before, getting your business into that top result meant you would basically get all the traffic, so if you were in the first place for Google local maps, you´re now going to have more competition, but for anyone who was appearing in the “more” results, this new format is great news.

With Google growing at an exponential rate, it would be daft to not consider getting your business on this mega search engine. Google local maps are already appearing on i-Phones and is the fifth most visited Google property. Though it only makes up 1.56% of all Google´s traffic in general, that still means a lot of people are looking at those maps in the search results and it can only grow from here. Now there are more options for using Google local maps and you need to get your business on it.  It will only better your local advertising efforts. 

Imagine that you´ve had your business listed on local live search for ages. It´s brought you a bit of local advertising traffic, but then it suddenly stopped. What could cause the abrupt halt in the flow of traffic?

There are several reasons your local live search listing would stop bringing in business, one of which is that it is no longer listing the right information. This could be because you changed things around at your business, got a new phone number or any other change in information. It is very important to update all your information if you want local live search to be able to give people a method to communicate with you.

Whenever a change is made to your email, website address or phone number, or even physical location, you need to make sure that your business information is updated everywhere. This means your business directory listings, local live search, website and anywhere else that your business is online. This is vital if you want to continue bringing in new clients that find you online.

After all, a business where no customer can find you is pretty useless!

Local advertising is often underrated by small business owners, but it can be an extremely valuable method of promotion. Though local online advertising is usually cheaper than offline promotion, that doesn´t mean it should receive any less attention. Each word still needs to be chosen to get your point across. Here are a few more tips to make your local online advertising campaign a successful one.

• Successful local online advertising solves a problem. Whether you can fix someone´s broken bike or offer them a solution to a cleaning problem, helping people solve a problem is the best way to interest them in your business. Your product or service needs to be something that people will see a benefit from.

• Don´t be too glitzy. Local online advertising can easily be turned into something flashy, with glitter banners and flashing text. While fun effects may capture people´s attention, that doesn´t mean people are actually paying attention to what you are offering. Sometimes, simple text ads are the best way to go.

• Write clearly. Don´t beat around the bush or use metaphores without stating what you are offering clearly. There´s no point in confusing potential customers, so tell them right out what they will get from you.

Local online advertising is an excellent way to promote your business if done right. You will want to create an ad campaign that will allow you to communicate the benefit of your service or product to your potential clients.

Local search engine optimization is something that every small business should learn to do. With Google bumping local listings up to 10 per search result, your local search engine optimization is far more important these days. There is getting to be a lot more competition, too, as more small businesses realize how powerful the internet is.

1. Use your keywords in your business name. This can be a rather extreme option if you have already named your business. Consider adding a word or two to the end. For example, if you have a salon called “Belle´s Beauty” consider adding “Salon” to the end of it, since many people will be looking for “beauty salon” and not beauty.
2. Have several listings. If you are listing your business in directories online, make sure you list under each town or area where you offer services. People usually look for local businesses that are nearest where they live, which means they could be searching in areas near you, but won´t find you because you are only under one location.
3. Include nicknames in your SEO. Local search engine optimization can be more effective if you use the local nicknames for your area. Let´s say you´re on the West Side, you would want to include that on your website, along with any other keywords. This helps when locals are searching for businesses.

These are ways to boost your local search engine optimization and local advertising that many people won´t even think of. That means you get a headstart on everyone else!

While it is free to list your business on the online Yellow Pages, there are several Premium options that will cost you a yearly fee. Many business owners look at the price tag and wonder if it is really necessary it is to add premium features to their Yellow Pages listing.

If you go into the online Yellow Pages to look for a business, you will end up seeing a list of business names with their basic info below, phone number and address. It works well for anyone who knows what they want and who already has an idea as to which local business they would like to use. For everyone else, it will pretty much be a random selection!

Having something to set your Yellow Pages ad apart from the rest can really help people decide to go with you. There are several options and you certainly don´t have to choose video if you don´t want to, but having an image of your product or even your logo will help those searching the Yellow Pages online make their decision.

Studies have shown that for the majority of people, 65% of the time spent looking at ads is used to examine the image or photo. The remaining 35% is spent reading the text . . . making images far more important. A picture or even a small graphic can set you apart from everyone else doing local advertising on the Yellow Pages and bring you more business over a long period of time.

Local pay per click, if not done well, can end up costing you huge money. You need your ads to be tightly written and specifically targeted at people who are interested in your product. There´s no use in having 500 people click on your ad and go to your website if you don´t convert a single one because they thought you were selling something else.

One way to ensure that your traffic that comes in via local pay per click is very targeted is to use negative keywords. What are negative keywords? They are keywords that you don´t want your ads to show up for.

Let´s say you sell hope chests. You don´t want your ad coming up when someone types in something like “bodybuilding techniques for a big chest”, so you would need to select keywords that would show up in that phrase but wouldn´t be applicable to your business. These would be entered as negative keywords.

To find which keywords should be used, it´s useful to use a service like Wordtracker or Google´s Adwords tool to find similar or related phrases that come up with your keywords. This will let you know what people are searching for with your keywords in it. Take any irrelevant keywords and use them as your negative keywords in the local pay per click campaign. This will help ensure that your ads don´t even appear for non-relevant local advertising searches.

Negative keywords are a great way to avoid paying too much for your local pay per click campaigns. Research carefully and choose the words that are most likely to send you poor traffic and make sure you don´t end up paying for too many of those types of clicks!

Could your local advertising be too passive? If your local online ads just aren´t making a big impact, you might want to revise the wording. These days, it´s very common for advertisers to forget about telling people to do something and just focusing on creating a really pretty ad.

It may seem cliché, but you do need to tell the people who see your local  advertising what to do, directly or indirectly. Having a nice looking ad, be it text or video or images, is important, but what you say is also vital. It can have a major influence on what happens when someone looks at your advertising.

Ads that actually tell the reader exactly what to do have been proven to be more effective. Telling someone to click HERE for their free report or to find out more is far more likely to get results than just a descriptive ad. Local advertising is soon going to be even more competitive, so getting your ad campaigns right at this point is a good idea . . . you´ll be far ahead of the competition in no time.

Will those viewing your local ads think “What a nice looking ad” or “I need to get one of those”? Think about that the next time you´re planning out the copy on your ads.