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The 3 fears that all small businesses must overcome to be active in local search engine marketing are:

1. Local Search Engine Marketing doesn’t work.
2. Local Search won’t work for my type of business
3. Search Marketing won’t work for me.

Afraid Of The Unknown - Overcoming Fear #1

Sharing statistics is the best way to help a potential local advertiser understand the importance of advertising on the web. The ability to relate it to other media, as in this chart from Screenwerk is perfect.

Next, breakdown the traffic by site, this is getting a little old ( July 2006 from Comscore), but it’s still the best study I’ve seen on local.

Wouldn’t You Like to Be A Pepper Too! - Overcoming Fear #2

To overcome the fear that search isn’t right for the particular industry look at the competition.

Do a few searches on some of the sites mentioned above and look for others in that industry who are having success. Defining success is difficult… but the most convincing is time. If a competitor has been advertising on that site month after month… year after year… it proves it’s working for that industry.

Every Man Is An Island - Overcoming Fear #3

Copy is the key to overcoming this fear. Ask, “Why would someone choose your business over the competition?” The answer is very often the headline… and if you have a good headline… you want people to see it.

Small business owners are savvy enough to know that ad copy/promotional text/web design are important. They know it intuitively, but are not experienced enough to articulate it quite that way. So, this fear is the one that leads to procrastination… and if it’s a sales call… it will end with “I’ll think about it.” What they need to think about is the message but they don’t know it. If you don’t help them… then and there… you’ve missed it.

A small business will get involved with search, when they understand why and how:

Why they should advertise in Search Marketing.

And then…

How to do it effectively.

When these 3 fears are overcome, a small business will engage search marketing aggressively.

Presumably those writing and selling guides for Adwords are pretty good at it themselves, so let’s have a look and see if they care about the display url:

Notice the keyword is “Adwords guide” and each of these PPC Jedi have gotten the word Adwords into their URL.

It seems these folk think the display url is pretty important. But can it help for a local service business? Let’s go to the video tape…

This painter in Chicago used the url to get them to the top of what for them is probably their most important keyphrase. Notice that all of the advertisers in the coveted top 3 spots have the keyword in their url.

Now, let’s take a look at one of the more competitive phrases in local:

Here again, 3 out of 4 of the top results all contain the keyword in the URL. I particularly like the way it is used in the 3rd result. How the term is used in the url stem (the part after the slash). Perry Marshall uses this technique in his ad above. It allows you to maintain your url brand and still let the searcher know they will be taken to a relevant page. And reminds those setting up the ad to take a searcher to the correct page, rather than just the home page. Google does allow you to shorten the display url if it doesn’t fit. So, for instance, you could shorten:

JoeCoolPainting.com/InteriorPainting.html

to

JoeCoolPainting.com/Interiors

This should also benefit your ad’s Quality Score.

For a local site I also like to see the geographic indicator in the url. It seems to almost follow the convention of the yellow pages with an address as the last line.

Here is an example of how I would write the url for the search query: personal injury lawyer in manhattan

ManhattanLawyer.com/PersonalInjury

Of course, that domain is no longer available; but it gives you an idea of how you want to use the url when writing the 4th line of your ad.