Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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October 04, 2006
Social Local Search Sites Up 44% in Past Year
Last week I spoke at Search Engine Strategies Local on the Local Search Landscape panel. One of the slides I presented showed that traffic to directories with user generated content (UGC) is growing at a faster rate than yellow pages directories. I used Hitwise to create two custom categories: one of the top 5 yellow pages sites and one of the top user generated content directories. The chart below shows that growth over the past year to the yellow pages custom category has been relatively flat, while the market share of visits to the custom category containing Yahoo! Local, Yelp, Judy's Book and Insider Pages has grown by 44% when comparing August 2005 to August 2006. While standard yellow pages sites are receiving significantly more traffic in terms of volume, these newer directory services, with maps, reviews, and community features are quickly catching up.
Here are the sites in each custom category and how they rank against each other:
The panel following mine was called "When Local Gets Social," and Chris DeVore from Judy's Book, Stu McFarlane from Insider Pages, Paul Levine from Yahoo! Local, and Blake Williams from Topix.net talked about how they were engaging communities with their content. Insider Pages, for example, has a particularly active user base in Pasadena, CA, where users have created communities of their own inside the directory. Topix.net has engaged users in small towns, particularly those too small to have an online news site, to the extent that people are meeting each other on the forums and taking those relationships offline. I think that UGC directories have the potential to become like social networks in local areas - serving the purpose that maybe a barber or store clerk did in the past. In addition, I believe that it will make the quality of service improve in many locations, since negative reviews could have such a big impact on a business' success.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 04:19 PM
Posted to Business and Finance
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Comments
Interesting analysis - but I have to ask, what about Google? Also, if someone searches on Yahoo or Google or MSN for 'restaraunts new york', that is basically a YP search - any way to tracking that?
Posted by: AhmedF at October 6, 2006 10:54 AM
What about Citysearch?
Posted by: Brandi Bormuth at October 24, 2006 07:39 PM
