By Greg Sterling
New research suggests that internet users are increasingly relying on search to find local service businesses, potentially taking mind-share away from traditional print yellow pages and classified advertising.
Nielsen//NetRatings and local search engine marketing firm WebVisible conducted a survey in August to determine whether and how U.S. consumers were using the Internet to find local service businesses. Using Nielsen’s consumer panel, respondents were qualified in terms of whether they had used the Internet to find a local service provider and whether they had done so within the past 90 days.
There were 2,866 survey respondents overall, 70% of which had used the Internet to search for a local service business. Forty-six percent (1,319 respondents) had done so in the past 90 days. The survey emphasized the use of sponsored links as a part of this process.
The following discussion of the data pertains almost exclusively to the 46% of survey respondents who had conducted one or more searches online for a local service business within the past 90 days.
The missing geo-modifiers
One of the issues with local search is defining what constitutes a “local search” in the first place. It’s not as obvious as one might think. In its definition of “local search” comScore has historically tracked traffic volumes on Internet yellow pages sites, mapping sites, selected “local search engines” and general search engines where queries have geographic modifiers. As inclusive as that definitions may sound, it’s a fairly “conservative” approach that, in my view, fails to capture a broad range local search behavior where the query is ambiguous but there’s a local intent behind it.
While I was still at The Kelsey Group we developed the first market estimate of local search volumes based on my conversations with search engines, together with empirical user research that sought to capture their intentions and behavior.
The estimate we developed was that about 20% of search engine traffic had a local intent. Others had higher estimates (Nielsen) or lower estimates (comScore). But this was a number we felt fairly strong about.
I subsequently asked Jim Larrison, then of comScore, to do a more in-depth analysis of user behavior from their data. I argued to Larrison, for example, that queries for lawyers (e.g., “divorce lawyer”) are inherently local because they involve almost exclusive offline fulfillment and should thus be considered local searches even if there is a missing geo-modifier. Beyond lawyers, there are numerous other examples of “implicit local searches.” What Larrison eventually determined, looking more deeply and broadly at actual user behavior, is that local intent was behind up to 40% of online search/”directional” lookups.
Now back to WebVisible’s research, which appears to support the idea that a large percentage of searches with a local intent don’t appear as such because they lack geographic modifiers. Here’s what the research determined about respondents’ local search query formulation:
* 51% used a general service term to search (”dentist”)
* 49% used a general service term and regional term (”dentist in Cleveland”)
* 23% used a specific business name (”Dr. Bob’s Dental”)
* 19% used a specific service term to search (”root canal”)
(Respondents had the option of answering more than one)
Interestingly, younger respondents (18-24) were more likely to use a geographic modifier than older users in the sample. But overall 51% of the actual, local search behavior didn’t carry a geo-modifier - that’s striking.
It strongly argues that search engines should be serving locally targeted ads against commercial queries in almost all service categories where there’s no local modifier because the probability is extremely high that the user is looking for a local business. In addition, geotargeted ads tend to perform better for the engine and the advertiser.
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