Today at 1:30 PM PST I will be moderating a panel on Local Search Marketing at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. In the introduction, I’ll be sharing some Hitwise traffic data on local search.
Over the past year, the market share of US visits to the top 5 yellow pages sites has declined by 7%, while visits to the next-generation local search sites have increased: for March 2007 versus March 2006, visits to Google Maps/Local were up 70%, Yahoo! Local up 20%, Local.com up 29%, and Windows Live Local arrived on the scene.

The primary way users navigate to local search sites is through search engines, which make up more than 50% of the upstream traffic for Local.com, Yahoo! Local and Google Maps/Local. Both Google and Yahoo! provide links to local search above the search bar, as well as one box links in search results for locally oriented searches. In contrast, the largest source of traffic for yellow pages sites (and Live Local) is the Portals category. The search traffic coming to yellow pages sites is largely from navigational terms (ie, ‘yellow pages’).

More of search engines’ downstream traffic is going to local search sites than it was a year ago: the Hitwise Business Directories category accounted for 1.36% of traffic leaving the Search Engines category in March 2007, an increase of 37% from a year ago. Standard search engines are increasingly the starting point for local searches, underscoring the importance of SEO and inclusion in local search sites for small businesses.
Today’s panelists are Frazier Miller, Director of Product Management at Yahoo! Local, Jennifer Black, Vice President of Marketing at Local.com, Perry Evans, CEO at Local Matters, and Kendall Fargo, GM at Intiut (Step Up Commerce). I am sure they will have some fascinating insights into the future of local search, so please stop by if you’re at the conference.