The challenges of local search
Cory Bergman August 27th, 2008
Gib Olander works for Localeze, which helps local businesses excel in search engines. He wrote a column for MediaPost that does a great job outlining the challenges and semantics of local search. For example, people don’t just search for “Oakland plumber” but “Oakland leaky faucet.” Or a golfer may search for “PING putter Elmhurst, IL” instead of “golf store Elmhurst, IL.” Local search now represents 25 percent of all searches, and nearly 90 percent of people will research online and buy offline, according to Comscore. There’s even an acronym for it. “ROBO is changing consumers’ definition of ‘window-shopping,’” Olander writes. “Now the Internet is becoming the vantage point through which consumers gauge the retail landscape, and if a business is identifiable in local search engines through only its name or category, it is not going to be found by the things that make it truly unique.”
2 Comments Add your own
1. Michael Goetz | August 27th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I think this brings us to a point where the content providers and the search services should meet each other half way.
The thought of adding hundreds of possible search cominations or keywords to each piece of content reminds me of the invisible keyword tagging of spam pages that want to sell me Viagra.
At what point does the content creator’s responsibility for proper search results stop and the search engines begin?
Wasn’t this the problem with the desolate search landscape before Google? Searching for one thing and not getting my espected result?
I agree that keywords and SEO are a necessary part of any content creator’s publishing duty, but c’mon, if I write more keywords than words in the article, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of search engines?
2. Ed | August 27th, 2008 at 10:38 am
This is where things like Microformats (click my name) become very useful.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed