If you’re business operates in multiple locations you can’t ignore the importance of local search marketing. It should be an essential part of your marketing strategy.  Local search marketing can help you significantly increase sales.

Here are the main reasons search marketing has such a high return on investment:

     *  Targeted - we can limit who sees your ad based on where they are, the day of the
         week, time of day and what they're looking for.
     * Pay for Performance - you only pay when the prospects actually goes to your
        website (no waste)

Most SEO companies will say anything just to have more clients but in the end they will suffer because of the empty promises they had made. Hearing all those promises can be quite disturbing, when you hear something that's too good to be true, probably there is a catch or drawbacks.

In case you are one of those who are in search to outsource your SEO efforts, provided here is a short list of instances when you must listen or question your online marketing agency

When we talk about New Year, we often re-evaluate our performance the same thing goes for SEO. It is important to keep track of what’s going on with your SEO; it must be evaluated to see if it’s still working to see if your business is benefitting from it. In order for you to measure your success, you must compare your progress from the past dates. It’s easy to see the high and lows of a business this way. As the year starts, take time to review the data you have in hand, assess the overall strategy - what works and what doesn’t. Rest the numbers and percentages for a while and take a closer look at your strategies.

Google never stops in thinking of ways on how users can maximize their services. Google+ launched Search plus Your World recently and since then, Google+ adoption increased. This new added feature in Google.com is designed to improve the visibility of public web content and personal content in Google search engine results pages.

The changes will benefit those who are lacking exposure, considering Google+ as part of the strategic PPC plan is a smart way to enhance visibility on the web. Currently, Google users are allowed to +1PPC ads and the Google Display Network it works effectively because once a user +1's an ad, it automatically appears to their contacts. Which means the user is recommending the ad to his friends. This is a good way to advertise, especially if the user has a lot of people in his circles.

Google has made it officially known that they will be using their +1 button to influence search results within their search engine.  This move puts Google’s search engine into the social networking era.  This will surely create a bunch of blackhat tactics within Google’s social network to help elevate websites within Google’s search engine.

This information has been confirmed within an email from Google to Wired.com.  The email said that Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results.  The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1’s and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.  Google also said in the email that +1 search integration will be just one of 200 signals that they use to determine the rank of a website.

There may be more than six but we’ve listed six different ways to capitalize your search PPC program during the Holidays and product seasonality.

1. Grab the Low-Hanging Keywords

Now that you know what’s popular during specific gifting seasons, if any of the popular categories correspond to your business, you can simply add the occasions as modifiers to your existing keywords.

If you’re selling on the keyword “video camera,” next spring you should try keywords like “video camera for graduate” or “video camera graduation sale.” It’s a volume opportunity for additional clicks, which often will come cheaper than your existing keywords.

The easy days of SEO are over and it's now important to include competitive analysis into every SEO effort to identify opportunities and set priorities. Having said that, a lot of companies haven't done competitive analysis. If you're one of those, here are some quick tips to get you started.

Why

Google added Instant a while back.  Instant is the new feature that displays search results as you type in the Google search field.  Well now Google has added a preview page to your search results.  If you roll over the results in the organic area or the PPC area you get a pop-up of the landing page without actually clicking on the link.

Now your prospective customers can view your landing page before they actually click on your link.  If they don't like what they see they'll roll-over the next result to see it's landing page.  If you're PPC advertising is not properly optimized you might be displaying a page that doesn't make sense with the entered keywords.

What better time than now to pull together two search marketing disciplines that have more in common than you might remember.

According to a study by iProspect and comScore, the presence of organic search results coupled with a paid search presence almost doubles the possibility of a user clicking through to a website.

In 2010, Google introduced Instant, Caffeine, SERP revisions to marry organic and local listings, and the Bing/Yahoo index merger to name a few. We listened and paid heed when Google said page load times would be the new ranking factor taken into consideration in 2010.

It's always fun to look back and see what was important to everyone.  We have the results from all the search traffic in 2010.  We show the top 10 searches within 10 different categories. 

Just one year ago, MySpace was No. 1 on this list. Some food for thought.

1. Facebook
2. YouTube                            
3. Yahoo
4. Yahoo Mail
5. Craigslist
6. Google
7. Myspace
8. Gmail
9. Yahoo.com
10. Hotmail

Most companies now recognize that SEO is important – it lays the foundation for your online activities. But it can be so much more than that if you truly integrate your marketing efforts – and to do that you'll need more than a few percentage points of growth in your budget.