One of the fastest growing areas of the web is advertising with a local search feature. Americans have become more and more dependent upon the internet as a go-to source for virtually all of their needs, and advertising plays a key role in determining which websites receive the heaviest traffic. According to Borrell Associates, a company that tracks local advertising and helps online companies develop marketing strategies, revenue from local search engines will double from $2.5 billion to $5 billion in 2008 and will hit $12.6 billion by 2012.

According to online research company Jupiter, however, local search engines will handle more business, but only about $8.9 billion worth of business in 2012. The estimates regarding the future of local search engines vary, with Veronis Shuler Stevenson estimating $6 billion in 2011. Although some of these predictions portend more growth than others, they are all in agreement that local search engines are a growing area of the web and are the next natural step for a society that is looking up addresses online more and more.

Either way, local search engines are the obvious area to target if you want to be in on successful online marketing in the next few years. More people are moving toward using local search engines when they used to use a phone book, and large search engine companies like Google and Yahoo are developing their own versions of local search engines wherein the algorithms are set to show results for businesses that are in a specific geographical area.

Why do people like doing business with a local search engine? There are several benefits to utilizing a search service that is geographically limited. Though world-wide searches are quicker and more efficient than digging through the yellow pages, they also return with hundreds of thousands – often millions – of options when you may simply be looking for a video store down the street. Localized search engines allow for more concentrated searches to be undertaken automatically, without having to dig through a ton of results or refine your search parameters over and over.

So what does this mean for your online marketing strategies? Start running campaigns with local search engines now and familiarize yourself with the game relatively early. As technology improves, local search engines are going to become the standard across the search engine industry. Features like local searching for mobile devices are already in development, some on devices that are location-aware so as to give you real-time directions to a type of business of your choice.

Most of these sites are supported by local advertisers who understand that a person searching for something specific in a specific location is more likely to seek out a local search engine than do five searches with a global search engine. It is probably only a matter of time before searches like these from devices like these are standard throughout the country. The increasing sophistication coming to local search engines run on hand held devices makes it possible for advertisers to reach anyone at anytime, pretty much anywhere.

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