Many small businesses take advantage of Google Adwords to bring traffic to their websites. You set up a keyword list, create your campaign and ad groups, get your targeting done, and go live. That’s all fine an dandy, but Google wants small businesses to have a better chance of reaching out to their prospects (for money of course). Google is test driving Local Listing Ads in California in order to launch the service nationwide in the near future. The service allows you to pay a fixed fee to show up on Google business listings (maps) above the SERPs.

So here is how Google Local Listing Ads work. You will have to add your business to Google’s Local Business Center. The process is painful and is free. You will have to verify your business before being able to move forward, but that’s nothing to sweat on.

Once you are listed on Google, you can take advantage of Google Local Listing Ads to not only reach out to new prospects in you area (through Google and Google Maps), but also have Google track your calls and user interactions with your ads. So how’s Google Local Listing different from “local ads” on Google Adwords? Local Listing Ads are much cheaper and don’t require small businesses to deal with keywords, campaigns, and so on. You can think of it as Paid Inclusion, except these are ads and won’t show up in the search results but rather above them as ads.

Should you try Google Local Listing Ads? It’s not currently available in a lot of areas, so you may not have the choice. But for those who do, Local Listing Ads is yet another simple, affordable way to get your business in front of your local customers. How affordable? That depends on how you define “affordable” for your business as well as your location and the category you want your business listed in. It never hurts to test it out.