Posts Tagged ‘Search Marketing’
Internet Yellow Pages and Local Search in 2009
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Local Search, Mobile, SMBs, Search Marketing, advertising
I was doing some late night number crunching and data research and I came across some interesting points. A few I touched on earlier in the week, but I’ve had some more time to address some of these and I wanted to talk about them. There are huge numbers involved here, and some interesting theories that I haven’t quite finalized in my head. Maybe these thoughts will help clear that up.
Check out this post form Conde Nast in February talking about the Yellow Pages. It is fairly amusing considering how just about anyone you ask in the Northeast will admit that they don’t care much for print advertising. (We hear this all the time) Note the comment:
If Nielsen can’t get TV viewership right after all of these years, how on earth can the Yellow Pages Association know how many times anyone “references” the Yellow Pages?
Thats exactly the point, you can’t track how people use the yellow pages, you can’t see which people read your ad, or how many times people read it and took action, or no action. There is no data to support their continued use.(or even to figure out why people aren’t using them anymore)
However, people still need to find stuff; restaurants, clothes, hotels, doctors, lawyers, whatever… simply now people are turning to the web for a quicker, easier search experience. And search is dominating the web these days. Google is raking it in, Yahoo and Microsoft are scrambling to get a bigger piece, and startups like Cuil and Mahalo are trying to get break into the scene. But however they’re gonna find it, people are going to use search, more specifically local search.
Local search will soon be the king of search, as the economy tightens, people are traveling less and are generally more concerned with whats happening in their community. (and thus more willing to spend their x dollars locally) A particularly powerful quote from A new report by Borrell Associates (which I referenced in an earlier post):
“Local online advertising,” defined as search, “local banners,” and video (classifieds are also in there), would reach $12.6 billion in 2008, with “local search” contributing roughly $5 billion to that total.
Those are big numbers, and there are big players already in and entering the local search market. But there are a lot of nuances in local, people are different, politics matter and most often they have no idea who Marc Andreesen is, they don’t care who backed your startup, they dont care about the fancy rails technology your site runs on. They want results and they want to talk to a person.
There is no concrete answer to the question of who will succeed in local search, there are many verticals and plenty of niches to tackle, but there is certainly going to be a battle over it in 2009. And I didn’t even touch on mobile, which Google’s Eric Schmidt thinks will one day be more profitable than anything else they do. Thats a scary thought.
Will the general population move towards mobile search, are we still two or three years away? Or will local search dominate 2009? I know there are other much hotter topics, but seriously if you are reading this you probably aren’t Joe Cleveland. (Ok, easy)
Google to Drink Yahoo’s Milkshake
Posted by Jamie Hutson | Filed under Search Marketing, advertising, marketing
My take on the Yahoo/Microsoft deal remains the same. It was a very good deal for Microsoft, and I believe ultimately would have been a good thing for consumers. Microsoft needs to come up with some new technologies to keep their brand relevant in the long term, and purchasing all of Yahoo’s was an easy way to do that.
What I am afraid of now is a Google/Yahoo relationship. If Yahoo hands Google the reins to the second largest search engine, then what happens? Microsoft online becomes irrelevant (live.com might as well be now), and as a marketer I know have little choice where to spend my search marketing dollars. If Google is controlling Yahoo’s search budget, that essentially makes them irrelevant as well. So now Google essentially controls the entire search market and they can do whatever they want.
I don’t really know what this means, but it doesn’t sound good to me. Now Jerry Yang says Yahoo wants to focus on display ads. Did he forget that Google just completed its integration with DoubleClick and Tim Armstrong wants “to have advertisers load their entire ad budgets into Google’s system, which would allocate spending across media whether online or offline.” Judging by how well Google has dominated the search market and stolen millions of users from yahoo.com to gmail.com, I would be concerned if I was Yahoo.
Google already controls enough of the internet, and if they control Yahoo’s search advertising they will essentially be drinking Yahoo’s milkshake.
