Now is the time to get Local
Leann Prescott of Hitwise recently published an update regarding traffic to popular local search websites. The numbers show a 91% increase in traffic to Yelp and and 34% increase in traffic to Insider Pages (which was acquired this week by City Search). In addition after the inclusion of the ‘Local One Box’ in regular search results pages for some local based queries, Google Maps traffic jumped 26% above its already 10X market share lead over Insider Pages.
How does this effect your local business? It means that if you are not taking advantage of listings on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Yelp and Insider Pages you are probably missing out on a ton of traffic. Did I mention that listings on all four of those websites are FREE, so what are you waiting for, go sign up.
While the basic listing on each of these sites is free you may want to consider a sponsored or paid listing as well for a few months and see what kind of traffic you receive. In addition all the sites above, except for Google, allow customer reviews. It would be judicious to ask a few customers to enter reviews for you after your listings have been published.
Lastly it is possible to ‘optimize’ for higher rankings in each of these local directories. We’ll cover tips occasionally on this blog, but if you need professional help please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Hey Mike,
Thanks for that post. I’d heard of Google and Yahoo Local, but I wasn’t familiar with the other two. I just signed up for Yelp, I like the look of the interface, though the Google app is my favorite.
Comment by Brian Laks — March 6, 2007 @ 9:06 pm