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Kelsey ILM Coverage: Convergence of Local Media and Directories
By Doug Jakobsen | November 29, 2007
Giving users and consumers the opportunity to search the way they want while delivering the experience they want with the most relevant results is a continuing focus for IYPs. Combining local print media, portals, local listings & social networks, among others, has proven difficult when trying to gauge which of the many sources is more / most relevant to each individual searcher. What is the user actually looking for?
Robyn Rose from Idearc (Superpages.com) stated that “while trying to bridge [this] gap it also remains important to continue to balance the needs of the consumer and the advertiser while providing functionality and utility”. Plain and simple: Getting advertisers and consumers what they want, faster: conversions and relevant results.
Different search metaphors
People may use a 4 word search term on Google where as on IYPs users have been trained that over specifying can hurt your initial results. They use a one or two word search and refine or re-filter as they go. This kind of functionality is something that the search engines don’t allow / provide.
Elaine Kunda, CEO of ZipLocal stated “users tend to be much more forgiving when using a search engine thinking the reason they may not have gotten the right results was a fault of their own”. The opposite is true of IYP sites making their task even harder.
Relevance, ease of use and taking the interaction from need, awareness, research & consideration, (local) selection & purchase is the common goal. Making the user’s experience as concise and locally focused as possible while at the same time providing the user with broad functionality that they are becoming more used to, is paramount. You can’t make everyone happy all of the time…but we can sure try.
Topics: The Kelsey Group, Data, Local Search |