Google recently added the ability to search by location to its ever-growing list of search-sorting options. This will be a groundbreaking shift for local business owners taking part in paid-search.

Consider the following scenario:

You’re a dry-cleaner serving a metropolitan city and its surrounding areas, including suburbs, 2 or 3 counties, and countless incorporated town names. If you wanted to only advertise to people living in those areas who are searching for the term “dry-cleaner”, you’d have to guess what else they might type in (as it relates to their location). If your shop is in the city limits, and your customers are j

ust across the county line, they may not see your paid-search advertising.

But thanks to the change Google recently made, it won’t matter anymore.

Now, Google knows where someone is (via their IP address) when they submit a search and can return results based on their location, even if they didn’t type a location as part of their search. So someone searching for “dry-cleaner” can see results local to them whether they typed in a city name, or not.

Studies consistently show that the more custom-tailored an ad is to a searcher’s specific situation, the higher the click-through rate. Which means better results for you and your business.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on location-based search and the exciting opportunities it brings with it.

Read on to find out how…

In the early days of digital marketing, online display advertising was virtually the only kind of advertising being used on the internet. As time went on, many sizes and formats have provided additional creative opportunities for advertisers looking to create awareness, build brand and generate response.  The problem for most small and medium sized businesses is that buying advertising on any one website provides minimal opportunity to reach their best prospects.

People spend enormous amounts of time on the Internet, but there isn’t one website they spend a majority of their time on.  This is a problem for online display advertising because space for such ads is generally sold by the individual websites. If you’re an advertiser, you simply don’t have the time to go to multiple websites and make deals to place ads individually on each one. And then of course, there is the need to design and develop compelling creative. This is where South Central Media provides a solution.

In addition to developing effective creative, South Central Media simplifies the media buying process by forging relationships with the largest advertising networks powered by Google and Yahoo in order to reach over one million websites that collectively reach 90% of all Internet users. Through a real-time auction process, online publishers bid to accept advertising from South Central Media clients. Layer on top of that the ability to target advertising based on user interests within a geographic area and you’ve got the most cost efficient way to buy online display advertising.