Local Search – An Overview

A few weekends ago, a pipe burst outside my office building.  The office manager was on vacation and I, as her assistant, was the next emergency contact.  Unfortunately the battery in my cell phone had died, our director was also out of town, and the landlord wasn’t answering his phone either.  A capable volunteer contacted a plumber to fix the worst of the damage, and within a few days everything had returned to normal.  But how to know which professional to contact in a pinch?  More and more people are turning to their local search results to find highly rated services and shops.

“Local searches” are search terms with local qualifiers, such as city names, zip codes, or street addresses.  In this case, “Plumber, Raleigh NC” did the trick.  We’ve all gone looking for something along those lines and, more often than not, the first results have been area directory websites.  Using one of the search engine giants (Google, Yahoo, Bing) tops the results page with listings drawn from their own local databases. Businesses and organizations can submit their information to Google Local or Yahoo Local for free, without even needing a website, and enjoy the benefits of searchability.  Granted, the listings with sites typically rank higher, but there’s a very good reason why local search has all but replaced the phonebook: if it’s faster, and you’d find the same results either way, who wouldn’t opt to use the digital method?

Scrolling down a little further reveals results for Yellow Pages, Super Pages and plumber-specific sites like ELocalPlumbers.com.  Regional business listings like Citysearch and Triangle 411 are also in evidence.  These sites, as well as business homepages like Schwartz Plumbing, are known as “organic search results.”    Organic search results are usually a healthy mix of directory and business links, depending on how well their site practices SEO, how relevant their backlinks are, whether or not they’ve been verified by engine analytics as credible sources, or any combination of the above.

The existence of these directories is one thing, but the user driven content is what makes them such a valuable and rapidly expanding resource.  Patrons and clients can rate businesses (usually on a scale of 1-5 stars) in their opinions on quality, cost, customer service and their overall satisfaction with the business.  Text fields are available for those who’d like to explain their experience in detail.   It’s a great way to get a feel for a company’s performance from fairly objective sources.

It’s worth noting that these rankings aren’t always reliable.  Anyone with internet access can leave a review, and businesses aren’t above stuffing their own listings with five star ratings, or slamming a competitors with negative comments.  A good way to determine whether or not a review is genuine is to check for common phrasing throughout the page; spammers don’t typically put a lot of thought or effort into their comments, especially if they need to post a dozen times to affect the ranking.

On Friday, I’ll take a look at how some of the search engine giants are taking advantage of local searches and how SEO plays into their efforts.