3. Local Portal Sites
Web Marketing Today Premium, Issue 86, Winter 2005
Over the last several years we've seen a number of local portal sites open.
These sites often have reviews and peer ratings of various restaurants and bars, ticket outlets for sports events and theaters, etc. You'll also find local personal ads, weather, and job listings. Each site also has various advertising options. One option in the Yellow Pages section (in which all businesses are listed) is to pay for featured listings (placed at the top of the listings) or an enhanced listing (bold, color, website link). Text ads are sometimes available for a category or search word, as well as banner ads.
If you want to determine which are the most important portal sites for your city, search Google for your city name and see what comes up on top. Then search Google Directory (http://directory.google.com) for your city name and look for a category that ends with "Guides and Directories." When you click on this category, you'll see directories listed in PageRank order. Another approach is to check the Alexa ranking for each portal site to see how popular it is in relation to the city's other portal sites (www.alexa.com).
For example, I live in the Sacramento Metropolitan Area. Here's how I determine the most important local portal sites.
|
Website (in order of Google search for "Sacramento") |
PageRank |
Alexa Ranking (1 is high) |
| City of Sacramento |
6/10 |
167,994 |
| Sacramento Bee (local newspaper) |
8/10 |
5,205 |
| California State University, Sacramento |
7/10 |
15,822 |
| Sacramento.com (local portal site) |
7/10 |
71,650 |
| County of Sacramento |
6/10 |
96,119 |
| Sacramento Kings (basketball) |
6/10 |
- |
| Old Sacramento |
6/10 |
809,035 |
| Sacramento Metro Chamber |
6/10 |
994,602 |
Let me characterize portal sites into five categories, though there's quite a bit of overlap between them:
1. Internet Yellow Pages
SmartPages.com (www.smartpages.com/cityguides/), owned by SBC, provides City Guides for 20+ cities which offer some of the basic information commonly provided in Yellow Pages. But we'll discuss Yellow Pages in detail in a later chapter. Just be aware that Yellow Pages listings often feed into other types of portal sites.
2. Nationally-Based City Guides
The
largest of the services that drive local content sites is
CitySearch
(www.citysearch.com), which partners with MSN, Yahoo! Local,
Overture, Ask Jeeves, and others. CitySearch provides local arts
and entertainment content featuring each city's best rated
galleries, events and museums. It also offers user opinions and
professional reviews on everything from restaurants, bars and
nightclubs to boutique shops and spas. Since CitySearch is
operated by TicketMaster, it offers live music
event calendars and reviews, plus information on local sports and
recreation events, including dates and locations. Other companies
owned by the parent company IAC/InterActiveCorp include:
LendingTree, Expedia (until 2005 Q2), Hotels.com, Match.com
(dating), RealEstate.com, Home Shopping Network, and Hotwire.com,
so don't be surprised to find their local products and services
being sold via CitySearch powered sites. CitySearch and others
offer various types of ad packages for local businesses as well
as national chains -- both PPC ads plus CPM ads.
Some additional city guides include AOL CityGuide (www.digitalcity.com), AreaGuides.net (www.areaguides.net), world cities TimeOut (www.timeout.com/), Cities.com (www.cities.com), OnlineCityGuide (www.onlinecityguide.com), Live.Net (www.live.net), Boulevards City Guides (www.boulevards.com), Verizon SuperPages.com City Pages (www.superpages.com/cities/), and AssociatedCities (www.associatedcities.com). Each of these covers dozens of larger cities, which makes media-buying for national store chains easier.
3. Newspaper-Based Guides
The media-based sites tend to emphasize news, classified ads, and local shopping. Examples are Sacramento.com (a search site sponsored by the Sacramento Bee), Charlotte.com (home of The Charlotte Observer), and Boston.com (the home of the Boston Globe). If you have a local business that relates to residents rather than tourists, consider advertising on the newspaper's site. Since their bread and butter is advertising local businesses, they may offer ad packages that include print advertising along with ads on the paper's website.
ShopLocal.com (www.shoplocal.com) partners with
many of these sites to offer specials available in local retail chain stores.
In most communities, TV station sites rank far behind local newspaper sites.
It
is possible to purchase advertising on a network of media sites
through RealCities
(www.realcities.com). This network includes major newspaper, TV
and regional hubs including those owned by Knight Ridder Digital,
The McClatchy Company, Media General, TBO.com, MediaNews Group,
Scripps, Ottaway Newspapers, and others (including the Chicago
Sun-Times and New York Daily News). A network of city business
journals in 42 cities is available for advertising,
BizJournals.com
(www.bizjournals.com/), but their sites are scarcely dominant in
their regions.
4. Other Locally-Based City Guides
The sponsoring organization differs from city to city. Sponsors might be a convention and visitors bureau, a media company, or a private business. You'll see quite a bit of variance in quality. Convention and tourist focused sites tend to emphasize hotels and restaurants rather than local shopping. Examples are Denver.org (sponsored by the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau) and FortWorth.com (sponsored by the Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau). If your business is tourist related, consider advertising on one of these sites.
5. Search Engine Local Portals
Perhaps most significantly, an increasing number of search engines are providing significant portal tie-ins to local searches, especially Yahoo, Google, and AskJeeves. In this chapter I'm just looking at advertising opportunities on localized search sites. In a later chapter I'll discuss local PPC advertising using geotargeting on search engines.
Yahoo! Local
There are four aspects to Yahoo! Local (http://local.yahoo.com), which make it confusing for advertisers, if not users -- Yahoo! Local itself, Yellow Pages, Maps, and City Guides.
Yahoo! Local (http://local.yahoo.com). From Yahoo's home page one of your choices is to search for local businesses. The results page shows a list of businesses which can be displayed on a map. The detail page gives more information about the business. While basic listings are free, an enhanced listing in Yahoo! Local (not to be confused with Yahoo! Yellow Pages), costs $9.95/month as an introductory rate (http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/marketing/ylocallisting.php). It includes placement of your business in up to five categories, links to your business website, a paragraph of operating information (FAQs, accepted payments, etc.), an explanation of services provided, your company tagline or motto, a business description, 2 links to special offers available on your website (such as a coupon), and up to 10 photos. In addition you receive performance reports detailing the number of users and leads generated. At such a price it may be a bargain for many businesses, though it's difficult to track results. You may also purchase Pay Per Click ads from Overture that appear on local searches, above and below the local listings. These ads can be tracked for performance.
Yahoo! Yellow Pages (http://yp.yahoo.com) receives data from SBC SmartPages.com and InfoUSA. A basic listing is free, with a details page that shows the location of the business on a map. Yahoo! offers three tiers of ad enhancement (http://edit.yp.yahoo.com/learnmore). All tiers offer better placement, increased geographic coverage, maps and driving directions, and enhanced text on the details page. Tier 1 -- top placement, logo and text line, and a photo on the detail page. Tier 2 -- Text line on the results page and better placement. Tier 3 -- Placement above the non-sponsored entries. For a single city, monthly rates are Tier 1 $60, Tier 2 $40, and Tier 3 $25.
Yahoo! Local City Guides (http://cityguides.local.yahoo.com/) are enhanced by Citysearch.com with reviews and ratings. They provide links to local autos, real estate, HotJobs, personals, tickets, and movies. CitySearch listings can be searched as well for the type or name of a business. Results pages allow text ads, as well as local listings shown with ratings. Detail pages offer a generally positive editorial review, plus member reviews of restaurants and some other businesses -- hotels, bars, movie theaters, department stores, shopping centers and malls, grocery stores, pharmacies, florists, and banks. To get enhanced listings in the City Guides, contact CitySearch.
Yahoo! Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com). Yahoo! Maps provide an easy path to local offerings. When you search on an address and city or ZIP, a location map comes up with the opportunity to request detailed directions. From the map page you can find various kinds of businesses displayed on the map or more entries from Yahoo! Yellow Pages. Categories displayed on the map include: Food & Dining, Recreation & Entertainment, Community Services, Shopping and Services, Travel & Transportation, and Financial & ATMs. Each of these has subcategories which, when checked, show the actual locations on a map surrounding your location. The name of the business shows up when your mouse hovers over it, with a place to click for "More information," a web search, or driving directions from your map location. The "more information" selection takes you to the detail page for Yahoo! Yellow Pages.
I found Yahoo's local advertising possibilities quite extensive but rather confusing. In short, to show up fully on Yahoo!, advertisers can advertise with Overture for PPC ads, Yahoo! Yellow Pages for enhanced listings, Yahoo! Local for enhanced listings, and with CitySearch for enhanced listings. Wow!
Google Local (Beta)
In contrast to Yahoo! local offerings, Google's local sites are rather simple. First, you can't get directly to Google Local (Beta, http://local.google.com) from Google's page, which may limit traffic. However, if you do a regular Google search that includes a ZIP code or place name, a link to Google Local (identified by its compass logo) will appear at the top of the results.
At present, Google doesn't have any city guides or city sites. To find a local business you need to search on the type of business (such as, "coffee shop") and the location. The results page shows a listing of each of those kind of businesses, sorted by distance from the supposed center of the city or zip you searched on. A local map shows the location of each business, plus links for MapQuest directions to each location. When you click on a business link or map logo the detail page provides a small map of the business location plus links on the Web that reference this business. If the business has a website, presumably it will be near the top of this list, plus links to other webpages that mention the business.
Unfortunately, Google's list of local businesses doesn't seem to be complete or up-to-date. When I searched on "coffee shops" and "Rocklin, CA," my hometown, the list omitted two Starbuck's locations in Rocklin. When I searched on "coffee," however, I found one of the locations. A search for "hotel" differed somewhat from a search for "hotels." Here's Google's explanation:
"Google Local takes a new approach to helping users find geographic information online. We analyze the content in our index of more than 8 billion web pages and combine that information with Yellow Pages data to provide the most comprehensive local search experience available."
Results and detail page enhancements are not yet available, but Google AdSense text ads show up across the top of the page. We'll discuss Google PPC local advertising in a later chapter.
AskJeeves Local
AskJeeves Local (http://local.ask.com) is pretty new. The results page shows local businesses sorted by distance from the supposed center of the city or ZIP. You can also choose to see businesses mapped on a local map. Business listings on the results page have links to a map, directions, and website (if that is available). PPC ads on the results page are fed from CitySearch. Detail pages are served from the local CitySearch website. For enhancements, contact CitySearch.
To do effective local business advertising, you need to assess your own city or metropolitan area to determine whether there are important and dominant online portals that you need to add to your advertising mix in addition to Yahoo! Local.
