Posts Tagged ‘Google search’

Consumers Use Search Engines For Local Community Information

Published by admin on October 3rd, 2011 - in Local Search

To cater to a consumer base that continues to increase its online media consumption, many traditional local media properties such as newspapers, TV and radio stations have made the shift to digital. But when seeking out local information and news online, consumers are less inclined to turn to digital editions of local newspapers, radio and TV stations, preferring search engines instead, findings from Pew Research Center suggest.

Overall, most US web users still rely on traditional media for their daily dose of community news and information: 49% tuned in to local TV news stations, 33% relied on radio broadcasts and 22% read local newspapers daily.

But today’s average consumer gets their local info both online and offline. September 2010 data from the Newspaper National Network (NNN) showed 69% of US local news consumers used a mix of traditional and new media sources, compared to 30% who used only traditional media. Given the boom in tablet and smartphone adoption over the past year, today’s percentage of mixed-media news consumers is likely even higher.

Online consumers were most likely to refer to search engines (28%) such as Google or Bing every day for local community news—a rate higher than that of US web users who read local newspapers for such information. Only 18% of web users surveyed said they had never used a search engine for local community news.

Though it’s likely search engines sometimes function as navigational tools for finding local information on traditional media websites, the data suggests such information sources often remain untouched. The percentages of internet users who had never turned to digital versions of local newspapers, TV and radio stations were 38%, 37% and 64%, respectively.

For local business information, search engines and portals like AOL and MSN were used by the most internet users, beating out local print newspapers and common word-of-mouth referral sources like friends and family.

Search engines were also the top resource for finding information on local restaurants and bars: 38% of online consumers said they used search engines for this reason; local print newspapers were the second most-used resource, cited by 26% of respondents.

Maintaining a search engine presence is a must for local businesses looking to drive traffic to their websites and stores. You must be listed in sources like Google, Bing, etc. for being found using local business map listings by major serach engines.  In addition, media companies should look to optimize and expand their search engine presence to drive additional traffic to their web properties.

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Google Places: What Else Went Missing on the Places Page in the Update

Published by admin on July 26th, 2011 - in Local Search

This is a great post by Understanding Google.

Last week Google Places updated the display of the Places Page. In doing so they removed the review summaries, review snippets and 3rd party citations from the page. They removed a number of other fields from the Places display as well.

Quite a few readers have asked where this field or that field has gone and whether it is returning or why it is not displaying so I am reposting Google Places Community Manager Vanessagene‘s comments from the Google Places forums to make explicit what else is not showing:

Seeing a lot of questions in the forum, let me just clarify a couple things about the new Place pages. The following info you provide may not appear on your Place page, but it’s all still used to help us understand more about your business:

• Email address
• Menu
• Reservations
• Optional attributes / Additional details
• Service area toggle “Show service area”

So just because we’re not showing it, doesn’t mean it’s not helpful for us to have — it helps our system ensure that your organic listing appears and ranks appropriately on Google and Google Maps when potential customers perform searches related to your service.

For more info about ranking, check out this blog post:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-local-search-ranking-works.html

Hope this helps,

Vanessa

Google has always contended that the content on the Places Page was informed by what searchers found useful. Whether this removal of the information reflects that ethos, the desire to make the page more visually streamlined or whether Google is making space for additional (money making?) features is unclear at this point.

A number of readers in the forum were displeased with Google’s decision to remove this data and the post comments are worth a read. The most salient being that it makes little sense to provide all of these details to Google if Google is not going to show them. Regardless, I would presume that the above fields of data are not coming back to the Places page any time soon.

On a related note there is still a bug on a number of Places pages where the business description is not showing. Google’s intention is to show the description on the page. They are aware of the bug and, one presumes, that they will locate and display that data some day.

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Why is Local Search Important to Your Business?

Published by admin on July 24th, 2011 - in Local Search

Google, Yahoo, and the other search engines have revolutionized how we learn, how we collaborate, how we shop, and in general have helped billions of people around the world harness the full power of the internet.

Today there are well over 10 billion unique searches done each month, and that’s just in the United States! Of those searches,

  • 40% of queries have Local intent (1)
    • 5% use the city and/or state name
    • 2% use informal terms, like neighborhoods
    • 0.5% use zip codes

On Yahoo alone, 100 Million unique visitors per month search with “local intent” (2). We can extrapolate that there are HALF A BILLION unique Local searches per month on Google, based on Yahoo’s ~15% market share (though we’ve not seen any “hard numbers” released by Google about its average Local Search volume). We’ve seen both Google and Yahoo make dramatic shifts in how they return results in 2008, and all the trends point to Local.

On top of that data, respected technology experts around the world think the world of mobile search is ready to take off in 2009 and 2010. In some places around the world, like Japan, many of these technologies are already in place. They’re in use even in the United States, with more sophisticated devices like the iPhone. Mobile searches are primarily going to pull their results from Local Search Engines.

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