In October of 2008 I spoke at SMX East on a panel with Mike Blumenthal, and Eric Stein, Director of Google Local Markets. The panel went really well and had a really great audience, thanks to all of you who showed up. One question that got brought up that I didn’t have time to address that I liked was, the value of a #1 positions in a Onebox result vs. the #1 Organic position on that same page. The answer may or may not shock you.
At the moment I am Director of Innovation at a Local Search firm, and have access to tons and tons of data due to the tens of thousands of customers we have. Recently I started doing a lot of data mining and found some pretty interesting results.
I went through 50 different examples where we had a #1 spot in the Oneox and a #1 in the natural section on the same page. Guess what? The organic result actually got 1.6x more results than the Onebox did.
One interesting fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under. This makes sense because the lower the resolution of the screen the more real estate the Onebox listing gets “above the fold.
We took time to make sure that all the stats we measured that the queries produced both a Onebox result and Organic result with both in the #1 position.
A lot of you may wonder how I differentiated the clicks from the Onebox vs. Natural because Google does not add an extra parameter in the offering URL that allows you to tell the difference between click in the Onebox. We were able to gather this data because our Local Listing was pointing to a different URL than the #1 organic result we had.
Does this mean that the Onebox is not as good as a natural position? Maybe. You see we were unable to track calls so in the sense of click through rates natural is better, but actual customers calls has yet to be determined.
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Tags: google, listings, Local Search
Steve - your subscriptions by email is not enabled for your feedburner. What I tell clients is that it’s on top, it gets SOME clicks, and currently it’s FREE. Can’t beat that. Cheers -
To answer your question, “Does this mean that the Onebox is not as good as a natural position?” I would say the onebox is great for local business’s to be on. Since there are only ten spots, it is a fight to the top. Take for example Hair Salons in New York. How many hair salons are actually there? ALOT!!!! So, if your hair salon is in the onebox you have a better chance of someone calling in to set up an appointment. It would be a major bonus to also be in the natural search results too, for the simple fact that it helps gives your business more visibility and online branding. When I ask people who know nothing about local search and ask them if they click or call. They mostly call for the info that they are looking for before they even think of clicking, others say they look at the website to see if they like it, and others have said that they saw the video of the business, so they picked them!
I am a little condused on the this statement “The organic result actually got 1.6x more results than the Onebox did.” What is your definition of “results”… clicks, leads, calls???
Found your site through the “Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search” blog.
Hey Brent,
Sorry about that. By 1.6x I mean clicks. Hope that clears things up for you.
Steve
well it would be interesting to see which click converts better. The ‘local’ click could be better targeted, funneling right into a lead or action, while the organic search result click might be more generic.
got any data on this?
I’m not surprised by this, I always suspected it, but never had the means to truly test it.
I think that a certain proportion of users may feel a tad weary of the quality of the local one box results. With many businesses simply having a small listing (sometimes unclaimed) with just an address and phone number, overall the local results can’t provide the quality and trust value that a full blown website about a particular local business can provide. Granted some one-pack links go direct to the businesses website, but in general, after users see lots of local listings just being a name and number pulled from a YP database, they will see it as slightly less valuable than the organic results.
@Martin BeiJk - I would imagine we are talking about using the same keyword phrase here, “city name business type” so it should represent that exact same searcher intent. That leads me to think conversions might again be higher on the organic listing (for that particular keyword) due to the increased trust factors.
In fact, if the user happens to see the business listed twice and in #1 for both one-box and organic, that should build a very significant trust factor in users eyes. Heck, for the right kind of business you could also throw in a PPC listing over on the right hand side too. Cover more real estate on the SERP, more brand exposure, and build even more trust.
Steve: That is great information. Was that the result of studying a lot of those fifty sites, all of them, or just one. Was there any qualitative difference in the types of businesses that got more traffic from the map than the organic ranking or vice versa. Mike B and I have discussed this for a long time. I’ve salivated for a long time for this type of information. Great data. I think Will Scott would love to know this as well, if he hasn’t already seen it, as would so many others.
Of interest, I have a site with lots of high organic rankings, strong maps visibility (lots of #1’s in both for all sorts of local searches) and some authoritative map appearances on top of #1 organic and usually #1 adwords for the local term. Of interest, after years of study and comparing of terms the phrase with the authoritative map showed roughly 50% more traffic than a couple of other phrases that had long been comparable in volume (pre maps days).
Makes sense. Still the 50% increase in traffic is a lot, more than I would have imagined. Maybe the combo of #1 organic and authoritative map combined to dramatically improve click through for that particular search.
[...] can only wonder based on our previous research of Onebox vs. Natural traffic that is the entire result set was changed, how much would this effect truely local traffic to [...]
I’ve always held that the best SEO practice is to get as much page one real estate as you can get for a client. The best practice for a local business is to have onebox results, natural results, and paid results.
The fact of the matter is, that different searchers treat all three of these areas differently so be in each.