Infoserve Group

If you ever need convincing of the significance of local search, you only have to turn to look at the actual breakdown of Google search results these days to see exactly why it’s becoming so important.

Do a search on Google for a business or service and you would expect to find websites that link to these search terms.

In actual fact, the websites often appear towards the bottom of the first page and instead, your eye line is drawn towards maps showing the locations of local businesses, sponsored links and advertisement, and business listings from the local area.

So if you’re a business looking to target these potential customers, what this means is that SEO will only get you so far in drawing people to your website. When internet users today are demanding immediate and relevant results, they won’t spend long looking for the information, so appearing on Google maps or being one of the sponsored ads presents a priceless opportunity.

Ah, but is this expensive, I hear you cry? As we’re always telling SMEs with tight budgets, online advertising has one key advantage over others; you can find out exactly what gives you the best return on investment and measure its effectiveness, so even in these tough economic times, you’ll be amazed at how online marketing can help generate cost effective leads for you.

Being able to directly target your key audience in an online advertising campaign presents an incredible opportunity for SMEs.

And without the backing of big marketing budgets, any online advertising campaign should take advantage of this to exploit your strengths and weaknesses.

Unfortunately, running your own campaign on Google or Yahoo! can be quite time consuming and complicated to monitor. To maximise effectiveness and get the best return on your advertising spend, you need to have the ad-creatives that attract the consumer to click on the ad and then to phone or visit your business, and you need to ensure that your campaign covers all the various goods and services that you offer where you make most of the profit.

Most SMEs are great at running their own businesses but do not have the time or necessary skills to set up and run their campaigns but there are some great resellers of these campaigns who can help you through this potential minefield for a fairly low fee.

Consider:

• Time: Set your ads to run at specific times to suit you

If you run a typical 9am – 5pm type business, you may find you are wasting money by running ads that appear after work hours and missing any calls that come through.

Similarly, think about when your target market will be searching; for example, if you’re a recruitment agency, you would expect people to be searching outside of work hours

• Locality: Through IP settings, set up your ad campaigns to target people searching in a certain area

With 9 out of 10 people searching for businesses or service in a certain area, make sure your ads reach the people who are looking for you at that exact same time they are searching. You can read all about local search here.

To make sure you get the best attention try and find the Authorised Resellers of both Google and Yahoo! as the search engines themselves have picked them specifically for their honesty, integrity, and transparency of charges as well as their skills.

No doubt many of you will have read in recent weeks about Google’s 10^th birthday and the profound impact that it has had on our lives. Like our previous post about the history and future of local search, it’s hard to take time out to consider where we were a decade a go – and even more so, where we may be in another 10 years time.

Google has certainly shaped the way we search for information in the last decade; it has dominated the market, Google Adwords advertising has transformed how businesses can target their consumers and now Google Maps will be a huge source of information for users and business owners alike.

Can anyone envisage anything that will have such a big an influence on shaping our search patterns in the next 10 years? Various predictions have been circulating:

• - will social networking sites increasingly shape how people search for information about people and organisations?
• - can rival search engines, such as Yahoo! or even the new kid on the block, Cuil, challenge Google?
• - will comparison sites be used more and more to help us drill down on how products and services compare across the board, not only in terms of price but also consumers’ reviews?
• - finally, one of our predictions: will local search dominate our thinking? (particularly that of mobile local search, which you can read all about here.)

For SMEs, it’s a fast paced environment to keep up-to-date with and will be even more so in the coming years as technology improves. It’s important to think ahead about how your consumers may be searching for you in the future, so take that time out now to consider how best to market your business.

I came across a very interesting interview with Udi Manber, the Google vice president in charge of search quality, about how search has developed over the years.

It’s easy to forget that even five years ago, it wasn’t obvious to most people to turn to a search box on the internet to find what they are looking for. Now, search is the most natural starting point for so many of us.

For Udi, it was all very obvious;

“It was very clear that to have an information revolution, it’s not enough to store the information and move it around, you have to find it.”

And what’s more,

“We are finding that user expectations grow. The kind of searches people do now are more complicated than the kinds they were doing five years ago. People expect a lot more from us.”

So, what are the predictions about the future?

For Udi, its universal search that is “more in-depth, easier, and allowing you to control more of what you’re looking for, giving you more input, finding more things”.

For us, we think local search will continue to develop and in our eyes, the shift to mobile devices will change and shape user experiences the most. The biggest challenge will be keeping up with these expectations.

You can read Udi’s interview here

Just an interesting thought I wanted to share..

In August last year, Nielsen Netratings announced that 7.4 million Britons (23% of Britons online) visited at least one of the ten most popular national newspaper websites.

In the last month, there are some distinct difference of opinions over which is the most popular online newspaper, but one thing is for sure, now that the internet is a source of information for breaking news, newspapers now have no choice but to put everything they publish online.

This also creates an interesting future angle for online local newspapers;

With more and more people searching online for local information, and seeing as local papers are often seen as a resource for this (whether it’s community events, classifieds or what’s on at the cinema), do you think we are going to see local newspapers and Local Search engines merging?

We could even take it one step further; would this combination ultimately replace the traditional forms of print media and be a perfect one-stop-shop for us?

How do directories and search engines determine what information a consumer is searching for?

Without doubt, it’s one of the biggest dilemmas facing search engines today. A classic example is when someone types in “glasses” into Google - are they meaning opticians or crystal glassware specialists?

Very few people carry out one word searches anymore because they know they won’t be able to find what they are looking for. Typing in the exact term, e.g. “waterford crystal”, is one option assuming you know what you are looking for, but it’s clear that people are becoming wiser as they get more and more frustrated with irrelevant search results.

Changes in search patterns are showing that consumers are learning smarter ways of searching, moving to more specific four and five keyword searches. And as we have continually championed, more and more customers are using local search, looking for a business within a location. Marchex’s report sums it up:

“Consumers are increasingly relying on local search to make decisions about where to spend their money and time offline. In fact, 86 percent of Internet users search for local products and services, up from 70% in 2006, and more than 90 percent of the transactions resulting from these searches are completed offline.”

So, with nearly one in nine people searching in a particular location, can anyone tell me why businesses wouldn’t chose to tailor their marketing to local search? Surely this is becoming the most obvious strategies for businesses. All that remains to be seen how well the search engines keep up with demand and drill down on exactly customers are looking for.

It’s been a great internet success and it’s made some enterprising graduates very rich; Social Media has been the most recent dot com boom. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Bebo to name but a few have created huge communities online and become a modern phenomenon.

These places where you collect friends, post comments, images and videos, and share them with the world, have been great success stories and who gets bought by whom for the largest sum is hot news.

This success hasn’t gone un-noticed and social media is now an integral part of many a website. Building your online community is building for success is it not? Users want to get involved, be part of a site and part of a community!

It’s not just about collecting friends and posting videos though, Social Media takes on many different forms. Take Amazon for example, their user review system is an integral part of their site. They rely on the contribution of their users, and if we’re looking at buying something we don’t know a great deal about, it’s encouraging to see several people rating your intended purchase as fantastic or the best buy!

Amazon is fortunate though; they’re a re-seller, they’re not selling their own product so it doesn’t effect them if something gets a terrible review. People are writing reviews on Amazon even if they haven’t shopped there; there’s an inherent drive amongst the new breed of internet users to ‘be heard’ and have their ‘voice’!

The Amazon business model is not harmed by allowing users to speak their mind and cast their opinion; on the contrary it’s an invaluable resource for the shopper. But what happens when we try and move this review model into a local search arena?

They’re trying. Yahoo!Local and Google Local have both added a business review element to their local offerings in the US and now the UK as well. Neither Yahoo! nor Google make their money from providing a local search solution; they’re a search engine/portal and do not have the right geocentric data to offer a perfect ‘local’ solution. Their core business is not selling advertising solutions to SMEs. This is why we at Infoserve now work in partnership with Yahoo! Local selling featured listings and providing them with geocentric business data for the UK.

Google Local in the US came unstuck when they offered the user the ability to contact a business directly from the site free of charge via SMS. It wasn’t long before this service was withdrawn due to it being abused. Adding a social media elements is not without its problems, even for the likes of Google!

If you want to find a local plumber you really don’t want one that wears a Stetson, chews tobacco and arrives at your house on a horse wearing a pair of chaps! Ok, a little artistic license there, but we all want someone we can trust and can be sure will do a good job at a good price. Recommendations by word of mouth is how many of us would choose a tradesperson or business, but popping over to the neighbours and asking them if they can recommend where you can buy some sexy lingerie for the wife isn’t always possible! I jest, but for many services and products we’re interested in buying these days it’s just not possible to find someone you know who can point you in the right direction.

If I’m looking to buy a new LCD Display for my computer, I want to know how good it is and how reliable it is on top of the technical specification. With the popularity of user reviews this information is at my finger tips, and looking at the average score from multiple reviews allows me to make an informed choice on whether to buy.

It’s not without it’s pitfalls though! How do I trust the review of someone I’ve never met? It’s open to abuse is it not? What’s to stop me or you from writing a selection of bogus reviews on a product from one of my competitors?

If I’m looking for a restaurant online, I’m interested in what others have to say about their dining experience. If there’s only one review, and it’s highly negative, I’m unlikely to choose that restaurant. If there are several reviews, the majority of which are positive, then I’m more likely to visit that restaurant. But who’s writing the reviews?

Some websites are now trying to prevent abuse of their review systems by allowing the reviewers to be reviewed! They’re building an online community, users are making online friends with other reviewers, rating them on the quality of their comments. If I read a negative review from a user and that user has a large number of ‘friends’ that rate their reviews, then I can deduce that this is likely to be a genuine review, and someone who’s opinion can be trusted.

Here at Infoserve, our business model is based on selling local search solutions to SMEs. We offer a wide variety of excellent solutions, but as yet don’t allow users to post reviews of local businesses. Why not?

The sales pitch! When a potential client realises anyone can write a review about their business and they can’t remove or edit that review, they are understandably apprehensive. What’s to stop one disgruntled customer or competitor posting a highly negative review of their business?

The Holy grail of local search will be the product that offers the best possible results and experience for the users, and the best possible, cost effective, advertising platform for the business; a site which serves both the consumer and the advertiser in equal measure.

Reviews are great for the user who wish to make an informed choice about a service or product, but they’re a potential deal breaker when trying to sell a local search solution to a restaurant for example; they just don’t like the idea that they could be given a poor rating! Here lies the conflict of interests; we at Infoserve strive to provide the best possible local search solution for our clients, making sure the consumer can find them when they are actively looking for a product or service, and we do this very well.

However, one cannot exist without the other. Without high visitor numbers, we couldn’t put our clients in front of a large number of potential customers, and if we don’t offer the best possible user experience for people searching for businesses, they could potentially use another site. Our cityvisitor site has 4 million users each month so we certainly have the traffic, but can we improve the experience for our users searching for a local business?

With an ever growing database of 3 million UK business records, we offer the best local search solutions in the UK, but the holy grail is still out there, and we’re searching - pardon the pun - for that illusive perfect solution!

With predictions that almost 30% of the global mobile users will be using local mobile search services by 2013, Windsor Holden, principle analyst with Juniper, has summed it up perfectly:

The beauty of the mobile is that people have the handset with them all the time. From a local search perspective, that is almost a gold-mine.

Gone are the days when you have to be stuck at desk at home or work to be looking for local services and businesses on the internet, so it comes as no surprise that more and more people are relying on their mobiles to find local information.

So what are the next steps?

It will be interesting to see how many businesses target their advertising and optimise their websites for mobiles. If it’s true that response rates to advertising supporting mobile local search will be significantly higher than on general mobile web search, such forward thinking businesses will find they could gain a considerable head start on their competitors.

Yet the report is tinged with caution.

Despite predictions that local search is expected to account for 43% of mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013, the report refers to advertising overload and that;

In the end it will be the quality of the user experience that will be of paramount importance.

This could be the biggest stumbling block of any progress. Mobile handsets are not ideal devices for local search and attempts to format web for mobile phones are not yet up to scratch. Connections are poor, downloads are slow and with the information rarely presented in a mobile friendly format, “user experience” could hit an all time low. Hardly a glowing reference is it?

Don’t get me wrong, local mobile search is undoubtedly one to keep an eye out for in the future and with the strength of the content of locally based directories being tipped as the key to success, we’re well prepared for the challenge already. I just wonder how long users’ patience will last until technology catches up with the latest demands.

The power of online local search is making paper directories a thing of the past. Be it booking that last minute restaurant, finding your nearest florist or pinning down a reputable plumber, more and more of us are turning to the internet to search for local information.

Recent findings have found that a staggering 86 percent of internet users search for local products and services, which is why it still amazes me that paper directories are so full of ads. When you can get relevant, up-to-date results online, does is make sense to keep referring to paper directories?

Effectively out of date before they are even printed, it looks like it could be a real uphill struggle for them, especially when 35% of homes say they do not want to even receive a paper directory anymore.

I’m certainly not alone in thinking this. A report by the Kelsey Group suggests that 2008 will be a pivotal year for the global Yellow Pages industry.

Charles Laughlin, managing editor of the Kelsey Group, was quoted,

In the past, small and medium-sized businesses have protected their print Yellow Pages investment at the expense of other media. Given the structural changes in the local ad market, we believe the next downturn will favour media choices that are more flexible and provide a lower cost per lead than print directories, which would signal a profound shift.

Taking the “flexibility” and “lower cost per lead” argument, you can immediately see why that shift is taking place. Nearly half a million business today still spend on average just less than £1.3k every year to be in the biggest directory, yet for the same price, we can give an SME an unrivalled service. We can give them their own campaign on Yahoo!, Google and many other websites that provides a good return in investment, as well as being able to revise and refocus any campaigns at a click of a button. It’s an obvious choice to me.

I’ll leave you with one final thought. Do you think even the concept of Yellow Pages may be suffering just in general? It’s worth reading this article, which although not quite giving up on the industry yet, certainly questions its future. Will the new generation of young consumers even know what “yellow pages” means in years to come?