A Fitting Fix to Local Search: Why the “Less is More” Approach Provides Real Pay-Per-Call Benefit

By Richard Rosen, published in adotas
There’s been a ton of news on the Google-eBay announcement around pay-per-call. The message is that pay-per-call is a way to apply pay-for-performance advertising to something small businesses actually want — phone calls. The publisher now has something else to package and sell to businesses —phone leads. But what no one is talking about yet is how pay-per-call can — and is — revolutionizing the search experience for the consumer.

Consider this familiar scenario: you need a plumber (or any service-oriented business). You search online for Los Angeles + plumber. More than 8,000,000 listings appear. You add the words residential + licensed + emergency. Still, there are more than 226,000 websites listed. Try local search and you’ll find 5,600+ plumbers in Los Angeles. From here, you start dialing, and probably make several calls before finding someone to fix your leaky pipe.

Local Search is a Poor State of Affairs for the Consumer
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