For the Love of Local

ReachLocal.com launches an Internet marketing-in-a-box service for local search.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004
By Roger Park, Associate Editor

With Google and Yahoo! stepping into the local search marketplace, many marketers look to local as the next big thing. The Kelsey Group found that 22 million small and medium sized businesses spend 46 percent of their advertising budgets on Yellow Pages marketing and put only 3 percent into search engine keywords. The Kelsey Group also reports that 25 percent of every Internet search is local in nature, meaning local consumers are looking for local merchants. However, less than 1 percent of local businesses have established an online marketing presence.

ReachLocal recently announced the launch of their end-to-end advertising platform that makes it easy for local businesses -- and their representatives -- to reach customers online. ReachLocal.com provides local businesses with the following:

• A Web site (if needed)
• Prominent placement on search engines and online yellow pages sites
• Complete Lead and Return on Investment (ROI) reporting.

At its heart, ReachLocal is Internet marketing in-a-box for local businesses.

ReachLocal.com co-founder and Vice President of business development Rob Wright chatted with iMedia about the company.

iMedia: What does ReachLocal.com do?

Wright: Seventy percent of small and medium businesses don't have a Web site. We've solved that problem. We've centralized the creation, deployment and reporting of these local business Web sites. ReachLocal is a one stop shop in getting their presence online. These businesses can create their own Web site through our platform or they can be hand-held throughout the building process.

iMedia: Who is your main audience?

Wright: We're looking to get resellers and local businesses. We offer Web marketing in a one-stop-shop way. We build, launch and report back to the businesses. They just have to supply us with the information about their business. Our Web pages are templates with over 60,000 subcategories.

iMedia: How do marketers use this technology?

Wright: Ad agencies would use this on the behalf of their clients. But this is also a self-service center for smaller companies without representation. Let's say somebody wants to market their small business online and they ask an ad agency. A lot of these agencies will turn away these clients with smaller (less than $10,000) accounts. We have the perfect solution to deal with these clients because it only takes a few minutes to build them a Web site. So, instead of ignoring these small businesses, we tap into them and give them an online presence.

iMedia: Who do you see as potential clients?

Wright: Mostly any local business such as auto dealers, dentists, florists and attorneys. We have over 31 macro categories, 1100 subcategories and 60,000 subspecialty categories. We wanted to make ReachLocal have a keyword for any business out there.

iMedia: What are some of the technical limitations?

Wright: There were major hurdles in local. First, you have to be a technologist to know how to submit your business to Google or YellowPages.com. Second, many of these small businesses don't have a Web site. Third, there is a big gap of between online and offline. Local businesses could care less about clicks. What they care about are phone calls and emails from their Web site. These are the actions that local businesses care about.

iMedia: What are the search engine marketing aspects of ReachLocal's keyword creation?

Wright: We have 31 macro business categories (e.g Lawyers and legal services) that map to 1,100 sub categories (e.g. Criminal Law) that map to 60,000 sub specialties (e.g. DUI) that map to over 20mm keywords (e.g. DUI defense attorney). So as the advertisers give us info about their business and services, we automatically generate keywords for their campaign. Also their location and target areas help us modify the keywords (e.g. Chicago DUI attorney). Our local advertisers have on average 5,000 keywords depending on the amount of products or services they offer.

iMedia: Why should marketers care about these local small and medium size businesses?

Wright: If 25 percent of all Internet searches are local, there is economic activity on those searches that are not being met. Local will be 80 percent of advertising on the Web in the future. These local businesses are often looking for high lifetime customers. For example, dentists usually have high lifetime customers, returning patients to his business.

iMedia: How does ReachLocal track these actions such as phone calls and emails from the customer's Web site?

Wright: When we first started running campaigns for local businesses priced on a cost-per-click, we realized that clicks obviously mean nothing to the offline business. It?s all the actions that occur after the click that meant something to these people. Those actions were calls, emails, forms, and coupons. Once we started tracking phone calls we had a meaningful reporting metric to give back to these businesses. Now we needed a scalable way to implement this tracking for clients with and without Web sites. For clients without Web sites, our offer page creation tool allows advertisers or their agents to create simple template driven pages with coupons, logos, contact information, and any custom content they wish to add? in about 10 minutes. This page resides on our domain so it is very easy for us to replace their phone numbers and email addresses with special tracking numbers and tracking email addresses. For customers with existing Web sites, we needed a scalable way to swap out phone numbers and emails without having them contact their webmaster. This brought about our patent pending reverse proxy technology.

Here's how it works:

• A users clicks on our clients' ads on the search engine
• Our server at that time, grabs a copy of the requested page and puts it on our server
• Our server looks for the phone number and email addresses on the page, swaps them out with tracking phone numbers and email addresses, and displays it back to the user. Now we can track any event on any site without calling a webmaster or technical person.

iMedia: What about the future of local? What do you envision?

Wright: Local will be 80 percent of advertising on the Web in the future and everything is going to be digital. Now who owns these local customers is very important for marketers being able to distribute their messages.