Local Search Needs Local Advertising.™

Today, shoppers are more and more likely to begin their 'shopping experience' with a trip to an internet search portal like Google, AOL, Yahoo, eBay, or a local newspaper's web site.Certainly, consumers are looking for product features, descriptions, and prices. However, the consumer is also looking for places to buy.

If you take a close look at the results pages from these online searches, you very frequently will notice something is missing: the local merchant.

• Banner ad campaigns are heavily slanted toward awareness of internet-only businesses or national brands of products and services. The ads rarely drive traffic to a local merchant or local storefront. Small mechants who are not part of a chain or franschise have been shut out of this opportunity to attract more customers.
• Search engine marketing or search engine optimization (SEM/SEO) campaigns are similarly dominated by internet businesses or national brands.
• Local search portals such as local newspaper web sites do not fare much better. Local merchants may be listed in a directory-style listing which offers little timely information about the merchant's current offering. In the rare instance where a recent display ad can be seen, it is typically a rendering of a scanned print ad that doesn't blend in well with the rest of the web site.

It is not that case that local search and online advertising providers do not want to feature advertising for local merchants. It's just too hard to create and manage all the collateral that is necessary to get an up-to-date local merchant advertisement online... until now.

Linkage Systems makes it possible for local search providers to get local merchant advertisers into their revenue stream. Local search providers can feature local storefronts and outlets as an integral part of their search results and search advertising mix.

In the past, this wasn't possible because accommodating the large number of local merchants meant you had to have a large staff of graphic designers ready to create those ads before you could sell those ads. – our local advertising software technology – changes all that. Using the Linkage Systems solution, you can add more merchants and grow your sales without steep investment in human resources. Your designers create one or more templates for a merchant. After that, the merchant uses an online, self-service kiosk to keep their ad up-to-date and relevant. For the merchant, no special software or design skill is needed.

The result is a win-win situation for the local merchant and the local search provider:

• Local merchants become part of the local search phenomenon. Their ads can now be seen while customers are searching and shopping on the internet.
• Local search providers expand their customer base while controlling costs and giving their users more local and relevant content.

A Linkage Systems solution for local search lets a local search provider leverage the local market knowledge they already have.

Consider the case of the local newspaper web site. Someitmes, the 'local search' is explicitly performed by a user who clicks on the 'search' button. At other times, the local search activity is implicitly invoked when the web site determines which advertisement(s) to show when a story about a particular community is visited. In each case, the Linkage Systems solution allows a variety of sizes and styles of ads to be generated based on the locale desired and the merchants and categories represented in that locale. Behind the scenes, the  tools are used to generate a particular style of ad for the selected merchant. This ad is then seen on the resulting web page as standard web page content.

A Linkage Systems solution for local search uses the same underlying tools and technologies as a Linkage Systems solution for localized brand advertising. The only difference is that each local merchant is treated as thier own brand rather than being associated with a national brand.

Linkage Systems solutions level the playing field between national, regional, and local advertiser!

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