We talk a lot about local search and local search trends here at SEW and in the industry as a whole. How have consumers changed the way they interact with local businesses? How can local businesses respond? And what can we anticipate about future trends? Yext recently released some interesting findings on local search trends based on their internal data. They analyzed a sample of more than 300,000 customer business locations active from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018. What can we learn from this data about how consumer search behavior changed in 2018 versus 2017? And what might these changes tell us about the year ahead? Key local search trends from their analysis include:
We spoke with Zahid Zakaria, Yext’s Senior Director of Customer Insights and Analytics. Zahid leads the data team behind these new findings. He’s been at Yext since August 2015, and spends nearly all of his time focused on client data. How can they unify data? What are the right metrics? How does an impression on a listing compare to an impression on a page? How can they understand the insights in local search trends? These questions and more led them to this analysis. They’d seen that the local search market has been consistently growing, but wanted to find what insights demonstrated that growth. First, about the data set and the approach“We deal with tremendous data here at Yext,” Zahid said. “We power more than a million businesses globally. And we do quite a bit to ensure that all the work we do is based on a very complete data set.” For these local search trends, the data set includes:
Timing: Every data point included in this set remained live for the entirety of January 1, 2017 — December 31, 2018. So it wasn’t affected by clients opening new locations, etc. Distribution: They examined business primarily located in the US, and also had significant representation of businesses in Western Europe (mainly the UK, Germany, and France). In other words, quite a clean and thorough data set to work with. They examined how metrics compared from the 2018 calendar year versus those same metrics for the same businesses for the 2017 calendar year. So what did they find about local search trends?The biggest takeaway was that consumers are interacting more with businesses via local search and local listings. Local interactions as a whole have increased. Perhaps because search technology has gotten better, perhaps because SEOs are nailing it, but this rang true across the board, including Google, Alexa, and Siri. As Zahid said, “There is unbelievable consumer interaction data happening on websites.” What do those interactions look like? 1. New reviews per business location increased 87% in 2018 versus 2017In other words, the volume of reviews per business nearly doubled this past year. Whatever the reason, consumers seem to be feeling more comfortable treating an online business page as the representation of the business itself. And they seem to show little reserve in expressing their opinions there. Beyond that, though, consumers take time and effort to leave a comment. They want to return the interaction. And these brand interactions only increase the value of focusing on these listings. 2. More interactions via AI-enabled services than business’s own websites“AI-enabled services” includes any consumer-based service powered by AI. This could be traditional search, voice search, voice assistants, chatbots, Google, Alexa, Siri, Facebook, Yelp, Bing, etc. Yext found that across nearly all industries, businesses have seen a greater proportion of their brand interactions happening via AI-enabled services rather than on their own websites. 73% percent of high-intent traffic occurs off a business’s own website. Most businesses see 2.7 times the traffic on third-party sites verses on their own website. (Caveat: these two stats were actually isolated to May 2017, in a survey of 20,107 business locations. We’re including them here as they represent a portion of the broader data set and local search trends as a whole.) Consumers may find a business in an off-site interaction. They then would visit a business’s local page to take action. This represents a fundamental shift in how consumers find out about and interact with a business. Marc Ferrentino, Chief Strategy Officer at Yext, commented on this point:
3. More consumers took action in search resultsWithin search results, there was a 20.1% increase in clicks to call, clicks for directions, and clicks to a business’s website. Yext called these “Customer actions per business location.” As we’ve seen since the beginning of local search, many consumers search in “micro-moments” of need. They’re often ready to make a purchase, walk into a store, place an order, etc. Yext’s data shows that this trend is becoming even more prevalent. 4. Actions on transactional local pages saw increased 30.4%Some businesses have “transactional” local pages, where consumers can book appointments, place orders, sign up for information, etc. Increasingly, these pages are where the action is. On this, Zahid elaborated, “When I as a consumer click the website link that shows up in a listing profile, what do I do? Surprisingly, it’s not get directions or make a phone call. It’s actually everything else.” Consumers, it seems, increasingly want to complete their task — whatever they went searching for — via the page itself, without having to call or visit a location. At the beginning of local search, we met consumers who wanted to make a phone call or get directions. What we’re seeing as a trend, however, is that consumers don’t want to call to make an appointment, or get directions to a store to buy something. They want to take those actions from the local page itself. Zahid advises:
Key takeaways for SEOs based on these findingsSo we’ve seen the above local search trends. Customers interact more with local business pages. They leave reviews. They take actions — increasingly beyond just calling and getting directions. And they come through a different point of entry than they have for the last twenty years. With that information, what can we do moving forward? Zahid pulled these four takeaways.
Based on these local search trends, how should we act in 2019?Based on this data, what can we predict about the rest of the year? And what can we do with that information? Zahid drew three primary conclusions. 1. Understand the interactions of local pages and listings — understand what works and what doesn’t
2. Think about consumer questions and answer those
3. Map data sources to answer future questions the right way
What are your go-to methods for data analysis?Given the general influx of data marketers have to deal with, and given that Zahid heads up a data team that has to deal with swarms of data points from millions of individual businesses — I couldn’t resist throwing in this question. His answer? No secret sauce. Like most of us, he first turns to Google Analytics and Google Search Console to look at his own website data and ask what trends are there. Then he moves to other website sources: Google My Business, Facebook, etc. He’ll also use listings such as Yext’s own Intelligent Search Tracker, Brightedge, and various other rank trackers. After that, he’ll look at third party industry level sources of information: Google Trends, publications. Taking all of those things together, he’ll take a holistic look at what’s happening.
One of the most challenging things?
Final thoughts to keep in mind on this data setIn closing, Zahid gave one friendly caveat: These are trends, not benchmarks.
The post Data: Local search trends from 2017-2018 appeared first on Search Engine Watch. from https://searchenginewatch.com/2019/01/18/data-local-search-trends-from-2017-2018/
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AuthorPleasure to introduce my self i am Sean Webb i am 27 years old from Manchester, UK.I am doing affiliate marketing and have spend lots of time learning how to rank easy to medium competition keywords. I have recently started PPL and Video Marketing and learning more about it. ArchivesNo Archives Categories |