I had the occasion to attend Online Market World because Matchpoint President Peter Adams was invited to speak on a panel entitled, “The Truth About Local Search”.
Online Market World may not be top-of-mind for most of the hard-core SEMers that I encounter day-to-day, but their Hwy 101 billboards at least attracted attention. For those that don’t travel along that corridor, the question espoused was “Need more traffic?” So, if I were a company that is looking to drive more online visitors (traffic) to my website, then I would be intrigued. Conference coordinators expected 2500 people at this conference on 1-3 October at Moscone West in San Francisco.
While I don’t need to review the whole conference here, I did want to talk about the Local Search panel I attended. The moderator, Christopher Scott, author and e-Commerce expert, was quite lively and the crowd wanted to know: How to reach the local consumer? Who are the providers of local search out there? How do you get around the directories? and How can I get away from having to use yellowpages.com ever again! These were the questions the audience brought up at the start of the session.
In addition to Matchpoint, the panel included Zvents’ VP Marketing Paul O’Brien. The representative from Local.com was unable to attend, so Christopher went over Local.com’s slides including the typical list of Don’ts and Do’s.
Peter started his presentation by addressing the audience question about who are the players in the local landscape. He divides them into three basic categories:
- Search Engines—Google, Yahoo, MSN and a slew of vertical/alternative search engines;
- Directories, such as Yellowpages, Superpages, citysearch, Yelp and Matchpoint; and
- Content sites, such as WallStreetJournal.com, lasiksurgeon.com, petside.com, and washingtonpost.com.
Most studies will show that local intent coming out of each is fairly evenly divided: Search engines about 33%, Directories about 30%, Content has around 30%.
The biggest advantage of using Search Engines is that you have control of what you advertise; the “con” is that it’s hard to scale. SMBs and even large businesses would have difficulty managing millions of keywords over thousands of geographies. The biggest “pro” on Directories is the qualified audience. When someone is doing a search on a directory site, they are looking specifically for that service or product, which means there is commercial intent. The disadvantage is that your business will be listed with your competitors, but that is also true of search engines. With Content sites you have a massive audience, but they are hard to localize.
Then the question of qualification and relevancy was addressed. Stating the obvious, and sometimes frustrating point—people will click on anything. It’s hard for a business to create relevancy with 70 characters, so they get stuck with a lot of costly, irrelevant clicks. When looking for a service, it’s all about finding the right fit. Having extensively studied the click behavior of consumers, Peter reinforced the need to optimize.
The benefits of Directories for local search are many. Topping the list is that directory search forms qualify the commercial intent of users. This of course leads to higher conversion rates, bringing your prospect one step down the sales funnel. Most directories will qualify by category and geographic area. Matchpoint goes further to qualify with additional questions that are category specific—like a Yellow Pages 2.0 should be.
Peter’s conclusion: It is paramount for businesses to have multiple ways to connect – cater to consumer behavior. If you don’t have a website, you would miss those people that want to click for more information. There are people who want to call, and people who want to contact you by email. At Matchpoint, he sees an even split between the people that want to click, call or connect via mail. People want to contact you in the way they want to, so you need to be available in all three ways.
Zvents’ Paul O’Brien talked about how to optimize web pages—local SEO mirrors website SEO. To maximize how the search engines find and index your site, Paul advised the audience: don’t use java script, don’t use flash, don’t use PDFs, and don’t put important content information IN an image. Another secret tip is to handle the parameters at the end of your site so that they don’t show. Because the parameters dynamically generate web sites, Google automatically reads them and thinks it is not a permanent site.
Then the moderator opened the panel to questions from the audience. To state the obvious, local search is about being where people are looking for local but it’s been a tough nut to crack so far. You want to be there on a local level – go where all the eyeballs are. The audience received lots of helpful tips.
Peter addressed the question of local search on mobile phones. In the US, the number of people doing any kind of search from their phones is still very low. Other countries, such as Japan, it’s very high. But with web browser on smart phones, like the iPhone, you have access to local search even if you won’t have a special app.
Excellent reference sites on local search are Greg Sterling’s blog Screenwerk, and LocalOnliner from Peter Krasilovsky.
The audience must have enjoyed the conversations, as the scheduled 1.25 hour session extended into 2 hours. To summarize: Businesses need to be local, where the eyeballs are and available to connect with consumers in the way that is most convenient for them. To get the most from their online efforts, they need to maximize their relevancy and get qualification from searches. And businesses still need to blend their traditional marketing with online marketing. That’s the truth about local search.
