Local Search Trends
Over the past few years local search sites have popped up all over the Internet. From Merchant Circle and Yelp, to Hot Frog and Google Maps, these sites help you find more than a business’s listing. Searchers can see detailed profiles for businesses: what customers are saying about a particular business, links to the company’s website, photos, video, and more. Basically: a Yellow Book on steroids (but not the bad kind of steroids, the natural, good, user generated content type of steroids).
Online users have flocked to local search portals to find more information about businesses. The numbers of monthly visitors are quite alarming. Below you’ll find a visual representation of the overall upward trend on some of the most popular local search sites.
(All figures below are courtesy of QuantCast.com)
Google Maps
MerchantCircle
Yelp
Yahoo Local
HotFrog
InsiderPages
YellowBot
Understanding the Numbers
As you can see, the numbers and growth are pretty astounding in the world of local search. Businesses who don’t have a profile on any of the above sites could be missing out on a significant amount of traffic. An estimated 49 million users visit Google’s local search section monthly (Maps.Google.com). An up and coming star in the local search game is Yelp, with an estimated 9.9 million users visiting monthly. There’s no denying the fact that the trend to use local search engines continues to rise.
Even if your business doesn’t receive a lot of traffic from local areas, there are still benefits to having a listing. A link back to your site, for one, is a great benefit. In addition, having a place for your customers to go to rate your business, discover more information, and share more information about your business are just a couple reasons to put up that local profile.
Want more information about local search? Well lucky for you our very own Sarah and Jason presented on the very topic in this month’s webinar. Check it out on our SEO Webinars page.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 4:02 am and is filed under Local Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 26th, 2010 at 10:53 am
Kaila, this is great, it made me laugh. Because I too relieved a big huge fat yellow book the other day and found it really laughable. Part of me laughs because as an online marketer I know how outdated yellow pages are. But part of me is pained to see so many trees killed and so many resources wasted on these darned things. It was such a HUGE and lucrative business back in the day, practically gouging local businesses but those businesses realizing how many people would find them through this book and therefore paying for it gladly! It was basically the equivalent of there only being one single local business directory online and that directory is where everyone goes to. Fortunately there are many places people can look online, as stated in the above. I loved the traffic comparison stats too, I never looked at these and that is good data to guide businesses in deciding what sites they should be advertising in!
January 14th, 2011 at 3:23 am
I don’t even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was great. I do not know who you are but certainly you are going to a famous blogger if you aren’t already
Cheers!