Jul 30, 2012
A Research Unveiled What Changes Local Search
At the beginning of last year, the Pew Research Center performed a deep study which goal was to better understand how people get to know about their local communities. The research showed that the way people communicate in the local communities has considerably changed. There is no doubt that the Internet has become the main source of information, news share, access to events.
According to BIA/Kelsey, the local ads are valued at nearly $130 billion. So it’s evident that big data is shaking things up, starting with local search, by the way. For quite a long period of time, stakeholders, who added publishing of big reams of locally-targeted content to a steady stream of inbound links, had a strong impact on local search.
Regarding our days, the leaders of local search are websites with rich content that is threatened by big data. First of all, the Big G (Google) encouraged huge content sites to start taking care of the user experience. Drawing upon the massive corpus of the collected user data, Google will have a possibility to make more exact illations about increasing content quality. It seems that such user metrics as bounce and share rate or time-on-page may have a great influence on local search rankings, which could be stronger than traditional ones (domain age, etc).
A couple of the farseeing legacy players in the local search field, including Google, Yelp, Citysearch, etc. have recently begun opening their data. Instead of that, these companies get high search rankings as well as info distribution through the incredible amount of apps.
