Study: Local Search Gets Local Businesses More Clicks, Calls Than Any Other Channel

Facebook may be doing more with is ads to help local businesses, but local search is still much more effective.

BrightLocal recently released results from a survey (via Search Engine Land) finding that local search drives more clicks and calls than any other marketing channel as well as greater ROI than any other digital marketing channel.

The firm polled local business owners in August in order to understand which marketing channels drive the most traffic, calls, and offline visits to local businesses. It covered "all types" of businesses including plumbers, accountants, dentists, etc. 477 people who optimized for 8,200 locations in the past year responded to the survey.

It found that local search and organic search deliver the highest quality leads and that 34% would choose local search over any other channel. It also found that social media, display ads and Bing Ads deliver the lowest ROI.

Here's a look at how much time respondents dedicated o various channels:

And here's how they rated effectiveness of each channel:

Businesses consider phone calls to be the most valued success metric compared to web traffic, search rankings, and significantly over customers actually walking through the door or inquiring via website. With that in mind, here's what BrightLocal's respondents reported about calls generated by various channels:

Be sure to take a look at the full report, which provides a great deal of analysis and additional finding.

Images via Thinkstock, BrightLocal

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Source: Study: Local Search Gets Local Businesses More Clicks, Calls Than Any Other Channel