The inaugural Local Search Summit_took place last Thursday in San Jose and was jam packed with top notch speakers and attended by the top companies in the local search industry. With representatives from both Search Engines and the one Decision Engine 
The day also included a much anticipated white list program for Google Maps bulk upload which you can read about here. Here is a wrap-up of all the sessions and important notes.
Keynote with Google TV’s Steve Stukenborg
The Summit got off to a roaring start with Steve Stukenborg’s dynamic presentation about Google TV. While not directly applicable to Local, it was an entertaining look into one of Google’s newer product offerings.
Google is essentially trying to bring a “Googly” mindset of trackability into a medium that has to-date been largely untrackable. Through their partnership with the Dish Network and incoming data from viewers’ set-top ID boxes, they’re able to charge advertisers on an Adwords-style CPM auction model. TV’s increasing fragmentation (compare American Idol’s 25% share today with the Cosby Show’s 49% market share in the 80’s) means that it’s harder and harder to reach large audiences, but easier and easier to target exactly the demographic you’re looking for. Time for new ads to go live and reporting on reach and audience is typically right around 24 hours, and integration with Google’s web Analytics appeared almost automatic.
I was disappointed to learn that despite Google’s ability to use set-top ID numbers for tracking purposes, it is not possible for SMB’s (or even national franchise-model companies) to geo-target campaigns. It would seem easy to parse out geo-targeted content to those markets in which advertisers were bidding, and back-filling “empty” markets with national content. But I readily admit that I don’t understand the technical side of TV distribution one bit!
Local Search Ranking Factors
Localeze’s Gib Olander and I presented the key points to consider when optimizing for Local Search. Of particular importance (at least in my opinion) is the need to shift one’s mindset from optimizing a website to optimizing a location.
Gib did a terrific job of explaining the two main modes of Local search – those of REcovery and DIScovery. 45% of all Local searches fall into the former category, where people know the business they’re looking for, and are just trying to find “NAP” (Name, Address, Phone) details. Thus it’s absolutely critical to make sure this basic footprint is accurate across as many search engines as possible. Tieing back into my own presentation, doing so will also ensure that these additional listings get picked up as citations by Google Maps.
These citations are one of the most important ranking factors and will help immensely with the 55% of searches involving DIScovery—where searchers are looking for a particular type of business but don’t have one particular company in mind. Properly categorizing your business and adding keywords or tags for a richer profile (pet-friendly, happy hours, wi-fi, etc.) will help your business show up for longer-tail searches around those phrases.
In the Q&A, an audience member raised a question about the use of keywords in business title, which was rated one of the most influential ranking factors by the panel of experts. I got the chance to ensure that people understood including a descriptive keyword in your business title was a best-practice across ALL listings (including offline occurrences like dba’s), not just at the Local Business Center. Gib correctly speculated that the reason keywords-in-business-title is such an effective ranking tactic is that the Local search engines don’t currently have enough rich information to rely on for the vast majority of listings, a situation that Localeze (and other major data providers) are trying to improve.
What Kind of Online Products Do SMB’s Need?
Unfortunately, I was answering questions related to my presentation one-on-one out in the hallway for much of this session, but I did get to witness a highly-entertaining interchange between Todd Johnson of eLocalListing and Ben Saren of Citysquares.
Moderator Greg Sterling asked these two panelists to role-play a typical sales call to an SMB. Ben accurately portrayed some of the difficulties in reaching the SMB owner (lack of understanding of the internet, lack of time to discuss marketing, and reliance on a friend or family member for everything web-related). Todd demonstrated eLocal’s typical strategy of a request for help with servicing search clients and repeated calls and follow-ups to try to bring the SMB up-to-speed with available internet product offerings.
All the panelists rightly asserted the typical SMB’s lack of interest in the process or even the results of optimizing (i.e. rankings or trackable emails) and pure focus on how much additional business am I getting as the only metric that truly matters.
Pay-per-call was briefly discussed with a representative from Marchex whose name I didn’t catch…my own two cents (as well as Gib’s, stated during our Q&A) is that call-tracking local phone numbers have a negative impact on the consistency of one’s listing footprint across the web. In my personal opinion, call-tracking should be done at the offline level during or after the phone conversations themselves.
Q&A With Google Maps and Bing
Jen Chin of Google Maps and Kevin Hagwell of Bing Local were on the hotseat for this session. Moderator Jason Calacanis did an admirable job at trying to tease out the mindsets of two of the three biggest players in Local Search.
Bing seems to see a Local profile more like a property, and will likely be taking steps to make their profiles indexable and more static than they are currently (closer to Yahoo’s model). Google clearly sees Local profiles more as search results and as such, they have no intent to static-ize them any time soon.
With respect to mapspam, Jen reiterated Google’s abiding faith in its community members to police bad results, mark closed businesses as closed, and the like…feeling that Google users will be “highly motivated” to fix what’s wrong. It should be said that those of us in the Local Search community typically have far less faith in this strategy than Mountain View seems to.
And with respect to data feeds and trust, Kevin posed a preliminary indicator of Bing’s mindset in this session and expanded on it during the Q&A. He feels that Local data from any source will always have flaws in certain places; even business owners mis-type their addresses or phone numbers on occasion. There will always be a need for Local search engines to attempt to cluster and merge business data in order to present a “most likely to be accurate” result for a particular business. While Bing would like to move towards a trusted-bulk-upload feature (which Google announced later in the conference) they’re not there right now.
Using Facebook and Twitter to Drive Local Leads
Sadly, I was answering emails for much of this session and only had my ears halfway open…
Will Scott mentioned some excellent tools for finding Local followers on Twitter—a popular question in some of SES’ small business sessions on Wednesday. WeFollow and Twellowhood were two mentioned that I’d seen before.
He also emphasized his concept of “Attention Deficit Twitter Disorder” and the need to repeat your message at various times of the day to ensure that you reach all of your followers, most of whom are probably checking-in and checking-out of Twitter frequently. (I guess only total geeks like us are on throughout the day!)
I didn’t necessarily agree with some of Will’s recommendations for auto-tweeting and auto-following, but his full slides on Using Twitter for Local are available on his website.
As far as tracking, one of Will’s particularly interesting insights was to use Lo.ly rather than Bit.ly for tracking, due to Lo.ly’s map overlay of where people are clicking in addition to what they are clicking on.
LBS and Mobile: What to Realistically Expect
Mike Boland of The Kelsey Group led off this session with what I found a pretty surprising stat: there are 63 million mobile web users in the U.S. That is a HUGE audience, and given the natural affinity between Mobile and Local search, we Local Search practitioners are in a great place going forward. The difficulty will lie in the fact that search volume may not be high for obscure categories or obscure locations.
Greg Sterling’s assertion that 1/3 of all Google Japan searches come from mobile devices only suggests further where we’re headed.
Sanjeev Agrawal of Aloqa added an interesting dynamic to The Summit with his conception of Local Search as not necessarily being “pull” based (i.e. it might not involve search at all). In Aloqa’s mind, “smart” phones should actually be smart. They should be displaying opt-in content like specials, points of interest, friends, etc. at all times. Location, time, and social context are more important for mobile ad serving than is text or perhaps even intent-based content.
Q&A with Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman
Kudos to Jeremy Stoppelman for attending what seemed like his first search engine conference. He shared some interesting insights into Yelp’s founding mindset and where they might be headed.
- Yelp now has over 7 million reviews and 25 million unique visitors per month. Their traffic is a “testimonial to the model of User Generated Content.”
- They’re in 28 cities and now several countries.
- Yelp’s “secret sauce” so far has been to focus on specific communities and to build a core group of evangelists (the Yelp Elite Squad) for which they throw parties and encourage offline interaction. The highly-successful Portland Community Manager was recently shipped to London to help seed the community there.
- Stoppelman’s impetus for starting Yelp came from his difficulty in finding a reliable doctor using the extant search engines in 2004.
- Yelp does its best to keep its algorithm opaque. The obvious factors are proximity, rating, and volume of reviews. There’s no set number that “tips” a profile into popular status but Yelp does look at rating trends.
- Yelp isn’t really worried about Google and Yahoo stepping on its toes…Stoppelman feels that Yelp will always be able to provide a deeper level of engagement for users (echoing Google’s mindset that its own results are just that: search results, rather than deep business profiles).
- In five years, Stoppelman hopes that Yelp is “the premier brand in Local Search.” At this point, Yelp has no plans to enter the much-hyped arena of HyperLocal News.
Q&A on Local Search: Where Are We Today?
Rather than duplicate content, I’d prefer to direct readers to the semi-live summary I wrote of this session on Thursday evening.
Kudos to Steve Espinosa & his partners for a truly phenomenal day. The level of networking and intelligence of the panelists throughout the day was exceptional; LSS alone made the entire SES conference worth attending, in my view.
