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First Principles of Local Search |
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This principles encapsulate years of learnings and experience in the local search industry and describe the virtuous cycle that exists in the local search advertising business between users, advertisers, and sales people.
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Principle
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Explanation
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| Aid in Discovery |
Content should be:
- Educate users about what's important.
- Help users make a buying decision
- Provide context and scope to the search
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| Content is King |
Content should be:
- Complete (contain all businesses)
- Current (information should be correct)
- Comprehensive (product, service, and other information)
- Deep
Make it simple to gather more information and encourage users and businesses to contribute
Establish Unique Content Value Propositions from Businesses and Advertisers
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| Respect the User |
- Results should pass the “dummy test”
- It should be clearly communicated to users - why a result was found
- Only display "meta" information that is relevant and useful
- No Dead-Ends - why should a system present a link that results in a dead-end?
- Don't make user go through silly/extra steps
- Where possible and makes sense offer choices i.e. Did You Mean
- Interface should educate user and help make decisions
- Advertisements should not GET in the way of respecting the user
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| Performance is Paramount |
- Man should not have to wait for machine
- For users to engage in interactive behavior the site and experience have to be lightning fast
- As Google says, faster is better than slower.
- Hardware is cheap - sites these days should be fast no matter what
- Browser, JavaScript, Graphics, are all part of the performance experience
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| Be Available Anywhere |
Local information needs to be where the users are and where they are looking.
- Available on any device - desktop, mobile, voice
- Available on any medium - via search engine, vertical and geographic portals
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| Guide Buyers to Sellers |
Help users make a buying decision - through whatever means
- Keywords about the business
- Products and Services
- Brands and manufacturers
- Location and Maps
- Hours of Operations / Business Attributes
- What Other's Are Saying - Editorials, Rating, Reviews, Tags
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| Enable Businesses to Differentiate |
Businesses need to be able to say something about themselves to attract end-users.
On this basis national and local advertisers naturally deliniate themselves.
Businesses with unique offerings are able to make their case to the users.
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| Maximize Inventory |
Traditional search engine paid placements can only provide limited value and have a ceiling in terms of revenue potential. Innovative search engines provide advertisers with multiple ways to reach users. Businesses should have options to maximize their exposure potential to new users. Be innovative with how you present search results that are both useful to the end user and provide advertisers with many points of access along a user's search.
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