The State of Local
Bob Chandra, co-founder of Site605
If you're living in South Dakota and looking for a new restaurant to try, you can skip a trip to the Internet if you are interested in user reviews. Why? A 2008 local search advertising study by Palore ? a content provider for local search sites ? reveals that in the Restaurant Yellow Pages category (the most reviewed type of business online), less than 5% of restaurants in South Dakota receive reviews.
Now if this dynamic were limited to South Dakota, perhaps we could bemoan our lack of travel planning options when we visit Mount Rushmore. But the data shows something else. With the exception of the few West Coast states and Massachusetts, the rest of the country has less than 20% review coverage. Essentially, less than one out of five restaurants has a single review. Now, if this much is true about restaurants, one can only hypothesize what the user review distribution is for Pet Care or lets say, Timber Industry Professionals.
The Bay Area is the center of gravity for high technology, and local search is no exception. In fact, the West Coast has been host to most of the new entrants into local search such as Yelp, Insider Pages, and Judy's Book. However, living in these ?connected? enclaves, it?s easy to lose sight of the fact that outside of San Francisco, people don't tell a restaurant to get their order right or they will exact their revenge on Yelp (?Yelping for Free Food,? San Francisco Chronicle, 7/10/08). On one hand, Yelp's ascent has been tremendous ? growing to 16M unique users in June 2008, according to Compete.com. It has overtaken Citysearch, which has stagnated at 12M uniques over the last year.
Yelp's popularity is in part fueled by the social networking functions designed to make the site viral and often bookmarked. But a brief glance at Yelp reveals that, outside of the Bay Area, nearly half the reviews in its service involve restaurants. Thousands of categories receive scant attention. And perhaps more importantly, much of the country is effectively ?dark? and unreviewed. A large city such as Detroit has fewer than 500 reviews ? total.
It is unclear what path is ahead for local to broaden community feedback. Naturally, as someone who has been involved in this space for several years, I have been paying close to attention to new developments. There are a variety of novel approaches ?
1) CityVoter partnering with traditional media to encourage voting contests for local businesses;
2) Praized licensing a local search engine to independent Web sites and blogs, thereby inviting feedback from a broader array of sites;
3) DoneRight pre-screening contracting professionals.
The field is wide open for innovation in this area, and judging by the recent Palore study of user feedback distribution, the industry could certainly benefit not merely by redoubling the effort to collect direct user feedback, but also by innovative approaches that uncover new means of giving customers signals on which businesses to patronize.
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Bob Chandra is the co-founder of Site605 ? an Internet trends reference site. Prior, Chandra served as vice president of marketing for grayboxx, a local search Web site.
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