Great Question! We are wondering ourselves after reading this article about it on Search Engine Watch. So we went to their site and Preregistered to get in on this if it is truly as the SEW article described “Google, Bing & Yahoo in Partnership to Sell Top Organic Local Listings”.
This sounds like a PPC program or Google Adwords Express for Local Google Places and can be huge for local small businesses. The best thing about PPC is you pay to play and with your set budget you can know what to expect based on supply and demand, ad rank and quality scores. It’s a lot more controllable since you are paying for it.
From the Local Paid Inclusion website they say you can rank for 30 keywords and deposit money and replenish as it used.
Local Paid Inclusion is a Google, Yahoo and Bing contracted service and is offered as an approved official program in cooperation with those search engines. Local Paid Inclusion promotes a local business’ profile page, like those found in Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local, into a top position on the search result page for up to 30 keywords per profile page. This is a NEW program offered by Google, Yahoo!, Bing and 18 other major directories and indexes that places a business profile into a premium area above all other local profiles. Combine this with all of your other optimization programs to maximize your traffic.
We will keep this post updated as we get more information. But this can be a great source of local website marketing for small business owners if it turns out to be what we think it is.
Makes us remember the good old days of Google Local Business Center before Google Places when you can actually add call tracking numbers and optimize to get 10% + click through rates on locally searched keywords for our websites and client sites.
UPDATE: Miranda Miller the author of the Search Engine Watch article makes a comment on the post that Google is not involved
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