Local Searchers Don’t Go To Local Sites
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 29, 2006 | Share This
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On Thursday, comScore released a report showing that 63% of all U.S. Internet users (109 million people) look online for local information. Of those, roughly 81% use a search engine, 15.7% go to listings sites, and just over 3% visit “others”. Google and Yahoo! are tied for market share, each bringing in about 30% of local traffic. Overall, local search is up by 43% since last year. (for more stats, see comScore’s official press release).
Though industry analysts have been predicting the growth of Local for awhile, I’m suprised by the disparity between the engines and the listings sites. Highly-branded destinations like yellowpages.com, despite having similar (if not better) local search services, are pulling in miserable traffic numbers. This could be due to usability preferences, public unawareness, or perhaps the engines’ broader service reach. Regardless, the stats reveal a definite shift in search behavior. As engines amass larger media portfolios, users are becoming more accustomed to treating search portals as single-stop websites. Thus, it’s even more important for verticals to think of themselves as content distributors rather than destinations.
Consider the model established by top social search sites: YouTube, Photobucket, and Flickr are successful because they encourage the redistribution of their content, espcially within search results. As Traffick writes, “There is clearly going to be underlying strength in content-rich verticals — especially user-generated reviews and the like — which provide the meat on the bones of navigation.” In other words, listings sites like yellowpages.com should be as omnipresent for local search queries on Google as Wikipedia is for reference information.
Consider another stat (via Red Herring): “47 percent, visited a local merchant as a result of the [local] search. A smaller proportion of them, 37 percent, made online contact.” Thanks to competitive conversion rates, I wouldn’t be suprised to see user-generated sites (already optimized for distribution) make their way into next year’s comScore report.
Topics: Search: Local |