Google has launched a new advertising platform geared toward businesses targeting consumers in their local areas. The program, which is rolling out in the San Francisco and San Diego areas, differs from Google Adwords in that businesses are charged a flat monthly fee based on their categories and locations rather than having to shell out dollars for every visitor who clicks their ads.
The listings will appear above unpaid local listings when users conduct searches as well as in Google Maps. With the listings, advertisers get a basic ad displaying their company’s information, address and contact details, a unique phone number that Google will use to track calls and regular reports on conversion. It’s unclear what the pricing will be for businesses in New Hampshire and New England, but it’ll likely be based on search volume. Make no mistake about it. This is clearly a first step toward Google doing what we’ve expected they would for years: charging local businesses for inclusion in the first page of search results. For now at least, small businesses with tiny marketing budgets can have some visibility in Google by creating and maintaining listings in the Google Local Business section. Now, we suspect, that section of free local results will continually be phased out in favor of paid listings. It might not be tomorrow, but it’ll happen. If you’re a business owner, it’s important to not rely on something that may soon be irrelevant, even if it is free for the time being.
Obtaining organic search engine results will now be more important than ever. Sure, it might be worth the monthly fee for a paid ad, but organic results are still more trusted by consumers. In fact, about 75 percent of search engine users ignore paid listings completely and instead focus on the unpaid ones. We’re not anti-PPC here, but we always recommend that our clients devote more of their resources to obtaining prominent organic ranking through honest SEO techniques. It’s wise to go after the results that the vast majority of click, and, unlike PCC campaigns, search engine rankings don’t automatically disappear if you pull the plug on funding your efforts.
When local listings are no longer free, the competition for organic results will be even more fierce. Some industries are already pretty cutthroat when it comes to SEO – real estate brokers, auto dealers and lawyers come to mind – and we could very well see the same level of competition trickle down to fields that even SEO novices can obtain high rankings in at the moment. And surely Bing and Yahoo!, which will soon use Bing as its default search engine, will at least consider charging for local listings if Google does so first.
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