Local Search - Why Your Business Needs to bBe There & How at SES Local Search: ILM:07

Zorich Gordon (ReachLocal) - What you were buying historically is not working any more.  Local businesses really want to cut a check and let someone else do the work with local search, since their level of expertise is not there.  These people want to run their business not online campaigns.  When a campaign is launched for local, business are blown away by the amount of leads generated by local search ppc campaigns. 

Gib Olander (Localeze) - Local search in an inefficient market today.  Local search closes the loop on the buying cycle.  Creates engagement at the store level.  Local is where the buying poer is.  Supports all other forms of advertising and marketing.  68% prefer to buy a product at a local place, but 58% want to research it online first. 

Create a cloud of content for each individual business location.  Keep in mind that the content must answer both discovery & recovery local search queries.  Foundation is how you build your base data.  SEO and PPC then help spread that information. 

Business Listing database index, very important to having your business listed.  Organic web crawling is the 2nd piece.  PPC is the 3rd piece.  Think beyond local search being just the opportunity to optimize a website.

Eric Stein (Google) - Shows a listing for car wash in 94301, has listings with address, phone, some have photos, business contents, and coupons.  The advertising opportunities as well.  Businesses have the opprotuntity to upload content such as coupons which generates foot traffic.  Small businesses and medium business generally need help with this, because they are more focused on running their business, so they need an additional form of service through agencies and also Google.

Ethan Stock (Zvents)-  Zvents is a local search engine that includes "time".  Time based promotions are key marketing tool to drive foot fall and revenue today for local merchants.  Go somewhere, do something - NOW.  Zvents powers "things to do" local search - they why theat gets consumer out the door - for large and growing media network.  Business can put in information for free - basically information.  Zvents is highly optimized so this helps as well.

Chris Tolles (Topix) - co-founder of open directory project.  Topix launched and aggregated news site in 2004, didn't set out to do "Local" - boring, not our core competency.  51 % of traffic , 10% of content in 2004.  Local news is tough, because there are over 32k in zip codes. 

Topix allowed users to put in own stories, and the database grew, and engagement grew.  This isn't just working in big cities, it helps with small town America as well.  There's a huge market 7.68 billion market by 2001.  Investments like $55M ReachLocal just received.  Comments in 19,868 towns, 1,500 cities, 70k posts per day, 60% of traffic on commentary, 60% of comments original.  Partnerships with 3 major papers.