02
2007
Local Search Update: Yelp up 91%, Insider Pages up 34% in Past Six Months
This week Insider Pages was acquired by the Citysearch division of IAC. Hitwise data shows that the market share of US visits to Insider Pages was up 34% in the past 6 months (August 2006 vs. February 2007). The market share of visits to Yelp, another user-generated local review site, was up by an impressive 91% in the same period. Judy’s Book did not show an increase, although traffic jumped in September and October 2006 when it received a substantial increase in traffic from Local.com, suggesting a content deal that was turned off.
How do these smaller UGC-focused review sites compare against the bigger players in local search? Yahoo! Local and Google Maps, which includes local content, received more than 10X the market share of visits of Insider Pages in February 2007. Traffic to Google Maps increased by 26% from January to February 2007. It appears that this increase was due to an increase in upstream traffic from Google, which occurred on February 7, according to this daily clickstream chart shown here. Did anyone notice a change in how Google drives traffic to Google Maps around this time?
Based on traffic to Local.com, Yahoo! Local and Live Local Search, it does not appear that interest in local search is increasing, but the substantial growth in Yelp’s traffic indicates that the social networking/local search combo is an effective means of engaging users around local content. The demographic and lifestyle differences between Yelp’s user base and that of other local search sites are quite interesting, and merit another post – look for one next week.
Great info., LeeAnn. On your Google question, January 29th was the day we first noticed the bigger Google Maps display in Google.com SERPs. Details here:
http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2007/01/29/google-maps-push-further-into-regular-serps/
That’s gotta be the reason for the spike in traffic.
I wonder if it’s possible for a national site to out-do great local sites for local content. Sure, there are many similarities that presumably would scale, there’s no guarantee that a national site will win the local game.
“Did anyone notice a change in how Google drives traffic to Google Maps around this time?”
Believe this is the time frame when Google started putting local listings in the OneBox spot at the top of the SERP.
The upswing in Google Maps traffic (and clickstream from http://www.google.com) is almost certainly due to the new ‘onebox’ for local search that injects the top 3 Google Maps results in the SERPs.
The spike, however, might even be under-reported. A search on http://www.google.com for ‘pizza in Chicago’ displays the Maps onebox as expected. However, every link that points to Google Maps from the onebox is a http://www.google.com URL, not a maps.google.com URL. Is Hitwise recording these as Google Maps views or just plain old Google views?
Two questions:
1)This large increase in Google Maps visit occurred one week after the radical shift in the way that the Local OneBox was constituted on the main results page…offering up 12 or so additional links into maps … is there any way your data would lag that change by a week?
2)Does your counting take into affect the fact that on many links off of the main results page from google the link go to http://www.google.com/maps?…..rather than http://maps.google.com/maps?…?
Mike
Mike,
If the Local One Box change happened in the middle of the week, there may be a lag. It also may have been rolled out in different markets separately.
Mike and Colin,
http://www.google.com/maps is included in maps.google.com.
LeeAnn