Al Gore Save Us Please!
Filed Under (Google Local, Local Search, the PPC Book) by Jeff Hudson on 13-03-2007
There’s some debate to it’s relevancy of late, but seriously, how can you question the value of quality localized search listings? The question is, when will it get over the hump? We’ve been talking about it for years! C’mon, Al Gore invented the internet in half the time it took us to even come up with yahoo.local and google.local. Hell, he’s even gone and solved global warming before we can come up with one single site that provides real quality local content (spare me yelp please).
What is taking so long?
I have no idea. That’s a question for people smarter than me. I’m more worried about Illinois basketball and their low seed in the tourney. And why can’t Bruce Weber recruit…
About 2 years ago Yahoo had Google smoked in local search features and usability (remind you of another product they had a lead with?)…now, Yahoo lets people game it just for fun by exploiting the most ridiculous hole in a search algo ever:
Search engine marketing chicago << this hole has been plugged 
Google pulls data that has more integrity, and it's beefing search results with local bells and whistles, which is nice but it's far from perfect. If you have a business with a local address, you best pay attention to the improvements they're making at the local G.
Yes, taking care of these details will help the small business in the long run, but in terms of real traffic? Hard to say. It depends on your vertical. The effort of ranking locally outweighs the benefits in many cases. Why? Basically, too much fragmentation in the media. As Greg Sterling said recently, “complexity of local “on the ground” far exceeds that of national online advertising or general paid search”.
He’s absolutely right. Imagine it this way…you live in Chicago…you sit down in front of your TV tonight to catch the news on your favorite local college basketball team. Say it’s DePaul. You want to know if they’re getting into the NIT tournament. You enter into your remote “channel 37″, which you know is a local Comcast sports affiliate, the best place to get local sports news. Instead of landing on channel 37, you find a list of channels to choose from.
Is that useful? Unless Google starts to produce local content, we’re going to get a lot more of this unless some kind of shift takes place.
Anyone? Buhler?
