SES NYC Session #1 - Local Search
Local Search: Are Partnerships the Key to Success?
Moderator: John Kelsey, Chairman and co-founder, The Kelsey Group
Speakers:
- Bruce Crair, President and Chief Operating Officer, Local.com
- Justin Sanger, founder & president, LocalLaunch
- John Keister, President, Marchex
…and we’re off! This is live blogging, so all typos are intentional. 
John Kelsey:
Their conferences are on the Conference Calendar in the AltSearchEngines’ forums.
Local search / interactive advertising / paid search is growing (shows many stats).
Justin Sanger, President LocalLaunch! (part of RHDonnelley)
Local Search: Are partnerships the key to success? (Hint: Yes)
See also DexKnow.com and Business.com (sister RHD sites).
The Internet will influence a Trillion dollars of local spending by 2011, 93% of which will be completed off-line, in person, at a local merchant’s store.
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See: HouseValue.com, Cars.com, Oodle.com, Local.com, Krillion / The Find.com, Yelp, City.com, MetroMix.com, et al.
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Rich, structured content (small business web sites) aids users, the businesses, and the search engines.
Partnerships are key - #1 example - RHDonnelley (Yellow pages) reps travel with Google reps; they help each other - Google results drive users to local businesses and Yellow page ads can connect to local business’ web sites.
Bottom line: partnerships are critical!
John Keister, President Marchex
“Local” is the online equivalent of local newspapers, Yellow pages, TV, and radio, etc.
Every day, millions of people are searching for local merchants and millions of merchants are searching for customers!
Marchex’s business model is to be right in the middle, to gather those national and local advertisers and deliver them to the online users. They create search campaigns for tens of thousands of advertisers and manage 150,000 websites.
Head on competition is rarely the smart way to go. Again, partnerships are the new paradigm. (Yes, hate that word)
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Bottom line: partnerships are critical!
Bruce Crair, President Local.com
The Local Search market is very promising and very fragmented <pie charts>.
A familiar model: major search engines drive users to Local.com, and on the Local.com site, they are steered to Local.com’s partner merchants.
Pay Per Click, Pay Per Call, Pay Per Action. Getting that store’s “phone to ring,” “feet in the door,” or online sales.
Bottom line: partnerships are critical!
Q&A
How do you document success? There are many different tools, and it varies by advertiser. Web site analytics (of which there are many - clicks, impressions, bookmarking, maps printed) call tracking, coupons, merchant queries “How did you hear about us?”), and so on.
Terms: Pure plays - no stores in your town. National locals (Best Buy store), and “Local local” e.g. Bob’s TV.
Hmmm, if you move customers on-line too aggressively, they’ll cancel their Yellow Pages ad and you’ve screwed yourself!
Carefully ‘bundle’ the two. The paper phone book yellow pages are slooowly shrinking while online commerce is rapidly growing. It’s Not just print ad + on-line ad. They won’t simply increase their “ad spend” or marketing budget. This requires skill on the part of the marketing firm.
Note to self: When I was an SEO I was always taught that you can pay to have an ad on the right of the search results, or optimize you site to rank higher on the left ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ listings. Apparently with Yahoo! there is a middle ground where a large merchant may be able to influence their ranking in the regular 1 - 10 search results. Any comments readers?
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