Those of you running paid search (or Pay Per Click) campaigns will have noticed a pleasant new feature in your Google Adwords account. Your keyword research tool now gives you numbers for Local search in addition to the standard Global metrics.

This should be really helpful for small businesses who regularly change or experiment with their ads. Quite often you’ll need to change them based on performance that doesn’t come anywhere close to what the keyword research would lead you to believe SHOULD be the better of the ads to run. The ability to see the which key phrases perfrom better locally should at least reduce the false starts.

Try it. I’ve run a few of my less popular phrases and have been surprised at the results, especially when you factor in spelling variations between US and Canadian English.

In case you missed the link to the keyword tool above, here it is again – Google Keyword tool.

SEMPO have released their 2000 State of the Market report and there are some nuggets that should be of interest to small businesses in London, Ontario.

You can grab the summarized version of the report here and have a quick look. To me there were a few points that stood out:

• Almost a third of respondents has tried locally targeted search ads and thinks “it works great”
• More than three out of five marketers (62%) are willing to pay a premium of 1%-5% for local targeting, up from two in five advertisers last year.

None of this should come as a surprise but it does confirm the increasing focus on local Search Engine Marketing by non local companies. This really reinforces the need for local businesses to get a foothold in their local market. Even if its not as part of a larger marketing campaign, at least do it so that searchers are not finding your competition after 15 seconds of easy searching.

Also not surprising were the dominant players in the local SEO/SEM market:

• Google AdWords Local Targeting has solidified its lead as the most popular local search advertising program, used by 80% of advertiser respondents.
• Some 56% of advertisers reported using Yahoo! Search’s Local Match paid placement program.

With the way local search is trending it still surprises me that most of the small businesses I discuss local search marketing with are still spending their local advertising budget with the yellow pages or printed classified ads.

If you’re a small business owner in London or Southwestern Ontario, talk to us about internet marketing, website promotion and Search Engine Optimization. We can ensure that you will be found when local customers are searching the web for products or services that you can supply.