• Screenwerk, Tuesday, December 18, 2007 12:16 PM

Greg Sterling uses his wife and her search for a pair of Emu boots for their daughter to illustrate how local search is actually better at driving offline conversions than e-commerce.

They'd tried to find the boots while out shopping, and called multiple stores to no avail, so Sterling's wife took to the Web when she got home. She did a Google search for "Emu girls boots" and found a retailer that had a local chain in the sponsored results.

Mrs. Sterling clicked through to the retailer's page and made a beeline for the store locator, then called the closest store and found out that they had her daughter's size in stock. But now came the moment of truth -- would she make the purchase online or actually go to the store to get the boots?

She chose to pick the boots up from the store, with Sterling noting that it was her need for instant gratification fueling the choice. With these kinds of examples, local search seems like the perfect online conduit to offline conversions. Business owners just need to be able to better track the correlation.

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