March 04, 2008

Local search in the UK

Whereas the 'general' search market is dominated by a limited number of players (the combined market share of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask in the UK was 97% in the January), the market for local search is much more open. In addition to the local search properties of the major search engines, there are two other categories of provider: the ‘traditional’ phone directory players with a presence online (e.g. BT, Yell, Thompson), and the newer entrants that primarily ply their trade online (192.com, Ufindus, UpMyStreet). The table below contains a list of the top 10 properties in our Business Directories category during January and contains a mixture of sites from all three of these types.

Of course, individual sites can and do outperform their category, so in order to understand how the different types of local search engines are performing I created three custom categories. ‘Directories: new web properties’ consists of the 10 largest new web properties; 'Directories: search engine properties' includes the three largest local mainstream search engines sites; and 'Directories: traditional players' includes the five largest online properties owned by telephone directories.

As you can see from the chart above, while the market share of the traditional players and new web entrants has been flat over the last year, the search engine properties have more than doubled theirs. There is a similar trend when looking at downstream traffic from search engines to the three categories, although the one difference is that the new web properties are more reliant on traffic from search engines than their traditional rivals.

So does that mean the search engines have won the local search war? Well, no – it’s not quite that simple. The search engine properties have an unfair advantage: maps. Although they do provide local search results, Google Maps, Local Live and Yahoo! Local Maps UK also compete with the likes of MultiMap and Streetmap in the online mapping space. To try and understand the extent of the split between basic map traffic and actual local search, we analyzed the top 500 terms sending traffic to our Directories: search engine properties category for the 4 weeks ending in the middle of February over the last three year. We tagged all of the terms that were specifically local searches (e.g. 'swindon cinema', 'hotels in chester', 'restaurants') rather than map or banded searches (e.g. ‘google maps’, ‘edinburgh map’, ‘directions’).

Although the percentage of genuine local search queries sending traffic to our Directories: search engine properties category is on the rise, they still only account for a small minority. However, this doesn’t mean that only 5% of their activity is local search and the rest is maps. Many of the people getting to Google Maps et al via other search terms will then conduct a local search when they get there. Plus, there a still lots of people searching for local terms – for example 'plumber in Bristol' – on the search engines’ main page who find what they want without going to any kind of local search engine or directory at all.

So, the local search market is still pretty open. However, there is little doubt that the biggest threat to the specialist local search providers and directories comes from the search engines, and the advent of universal search has only increased that pressure. One final data set that sheds a little more light is the table below, which details the proportion of upstream traffic from our three local search categories to three key categories for the sector. The Entertainment industry already receives more traffic from the search engine properties than the other two combined, although one reason for this may be the high number of cinema related terms sending traffic to search engine properties. The Business & Finance and Shopping & Classifieds categories both still receive more traffic from specialist local search providers, but the gap between them and search engine properties is closing.

Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
Posted to Search

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» Local search in the UK from Research News Jul 2007- Jul 2008
Whereas the 'general' search market is dominated by a limited number of players (the combined market share of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Ask in the UK was 97% in the January), the market for local search is much more open.... [Read More]

Tracked on March 4, 2008 04:15 PM

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Posted by: Duncan at March 6, 2008 02:56 PM

Posted by: Robin Goad at April 3, 2008 08:37 AM

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