Local Searches and Associated Ads Miss The Boat

Local search solutions and the contextual ads that appear with those searches have some wrong thinking about how they geotarget ads to the customer.

For instance, I don't live in Alabama but I'm trying to help someone I know locate a service in Alabama, such as a plumber. Go to Google and search for an "alabama plumber" and you get the proper results and appropriate ads displayed.

Now let's trying clicking on one of those ads in Google that takes you to some specialized local service which claims it's taking me to "alabama.whatever.com" on their site.

Do I get listings for Alabama related sites?

Hell No!

The local site picks up on the keyword plumber but shows me a page geotargeted to MY IP, not what I was actually searching.

Let's assume for a second that Alabama wasn't enough information, so I changed the query in Google to "Birmingham, Alabama plumber" and clicked through and got the same stupid results from the local site pointing me back to my local area.

What's worse is that Google AdSense will show you local advertisements when you're clearly on a page researching another location. In all likelihood you would NOT click ads for your local area when it's painfully obvious, even to dense people, that it's not what you're interested in finding. Google can't claim they don't know you were interested, or it's too complicated to geotarget in that way, because Google was the search engine that found that page in the first place and passed the query information to the page you clicked which contains AdSense that reads the referrer!

Yet, here you are looking for Alabama things, on a page all about Alabama, with a referrer and query passed by Google about an Alabama search, and there's AdSense showing ads about Nevada, California and the SF Bay Area.

HELLO?

Anyone can plainly see that THOSE ADS AREN'T RELEVANT to the topic!

Obviously the local search services have a way to go and Google is just losing money with inappropriate ads on those sites.

They better get it together on local sites before someone smarter steps in and fills the gaps.