The year or 2008 was undoubtly content-oriented. In addition to simply creating content for users, the year witnessed more usage of rich media (optimised images, news, videos, products, etc).   It was also linkbuilding-oriented. We all promoted websites through partnerships and Social Media Optimisation in addition to on-page optimisations. The year 2009 will probably be all the same. Specificaly, you may want to get ready for Audio indexing by optimising the audio content of your videos. Well, we should actually be ready, because audio content will probably be very hard to optimise when Google decides to include it in its universal search. Nevertheless, I want to point out today that there is something new to take into account: local search marketing. Although it’s still in its early phase, advertisers are expected to triple the money they spend in local search marketing within 2 years, according to the Marketing Sherpa latest release.

Local search marketing can be divided into local search, geolocalisation and mobile search. The difference between geolocalisation and local search is about who excludes content based on geographical location. For geolocalisation, advertisers choose to promote content that is in relation with where the targeted internet user lives. The variable is the IP address of the internet user’s computer. Local search is different, in the sense that internet users are the ones deciding to add the name of a location in the query. For instance, I actively search locally when I Google pizza paris. Finally, mobile search comes into play through GPS – most mobile search engines now include GPS tracking and serve results based on your localisation – and the behaviour of users of mobile devices – they intend to search more local stuff surrounding them vs. internet users behind the screen of their pc’s.

I’ll go in depth into each of these 3 elements in the next posts   Happy new year to all of you and do not hesitate to post comments on local search marketing if you feel like it!