Local Search- The Evolution of Local Advertising

I just read a very interesting article that pertains, somewhat to local search. It was more about local advertising as a whole.  TMP Directional Marketing’s Gregg Stewart wrote this article for Search Engine Watch. It basically talked about how people searching locally for businesses has changed.

Of course, we know that all of the options we have now for local search, or searching for local businesses didn’t exist in some of the past decades. Since there are so many options now, advertisers have an even harder task of deciding which media source to use and how much budget to allocate to each.

In this article, Gregg Stewart gave some statistics on what sources people use to find local businesses.

• Online sources - 60% – search engines (30%), IYPs (17%), local search sites (13%)  
• Print Yellow Pages – 33%                                
• Directory Assistance – 2%
• Other – 5%

Pretty interesting statistics. Local search had 13%, which was almost half of search engines. This just shows the growth in local search.

To read the entire article, which I highly recommend, visit: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3630329