The big innovation that drove the growth of search advertising was creating a competitive marketplace — bidding for the top ad spot, and being able to see what your competitors are doing. There’s arguably no space more competitive than local. Local businesses are fiercely competitive, e.g. bars during Happy Hour on a Friday.
The holy grail of online local advertising is harnessing that inherent competition among local businesses and using it to drive advertising volume and ad spending. Competition drives network effects, which is how everything on the web scales.
See it on Scoop.it, via Google Places Optimization & Local SEO News
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