SearchForecast is managing an increasing number of local pages on Google for clients. These “Place Pages” present fantastic opportunities for retailers to create ‘free’ pages on Google and appear highly in targeted search listings. One of our real estate clients has over 3M impressions and 250,000 clicks in the past 9 months. That’s $500,000+ in free clicks!
Google are increasing going Local with the acquisition of Zagat.com and as Wall Street demands more ads as a percentage of their webpages to increase revenue, they’ll continue to focus on taking market share away from Yellow Pages, Yelp and other business directories.
On Friday, 23rd September, I’ll be moderating a panel at the DailyDealsSummit in San Francisco on the “Impact of Deals on Yellow Pages”. We’ll be discussing the deal space and even though companies like GroupOn focus primarily on local, they aren’t a natural competitor to the beleaguered Yellow Pages whose advertiser base is 3/4 service oriented businesses. Deals though seem to be an avenue for growth for the local sales force strong yellow page companies.