Jennifer Lind

On Thursday I attended a Webinar from ZipLocal. On the call, our ZipLocal reps ran through their site, the products, and service areas.

ZipLocal is one of Canada’s largest local business search directories with over 1.3 million business listings across Canada.

Unique features of Ziplocal.com include:

• adding pre-populated, related keywords to your category searches
• BestPicks, which are generated by user voting that occurs on an on-going basis (rather than other sites who only update once per year)
• easy to view profiles of ZipPeople
• neighborhood & city search
• proximity search
• user reviews remain on for all advertisers. ZipLocal has not had major issues with negative reviews. Most people use reviews on their site as a way to promote the businesses they like.
• French bi-lingual site

ZipLocal Partners include: LavaLife, Astral Media, Urban Mapping, Careerbuilder, Sweetspot.ca, etc.

One comment that really got my attention - one of the ZipLocal reps commented that there is no tolerance for error in local search. ZipLocal prides itself on having the most relevant information. Their system searches the internet for any changes and quickly updates their site. I don’t know how many times I have found a business and drove to the store only to find nothing there, or called a number that was disconnected, etc. This is very frustrating and looks poorly on the business rather than the search tool.

Another comment I found interesting is that ZipLocal claims to have minimal duplication over major competitors. 98% of ZipLocal users do not visit Canpages.ca, over 70% of ZipLocal users do not visit Yellowpages.ca, and 55% do not use Google Maps to find local businesses. If you are a Canada business, and you’re not advertising on ZipLocal, there is a high chance you are missing potential customers.

When will ZipLocal start servicing the US?

According to an AT&T Press Release regarding Yellowpages.com:

2008 FIRST-QUARTER HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:

• 70 percent year-over-year increase of unique visitor traffic to the site, according to comScore Media Trends report for March 2008.
• 25 percent year-over-year increase of monthly searches delivered through the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network — there are now more than 125 million searches a month.(3)
• Sales of YELLOWPAGES.COM online video ads have exceeded company projections.
• Mobile searches increased more than 50 percent from September 2007 to March 2008.(4)
• YELLOWPAGES.COM added Microsoft Corp. to its ad network though an exclusive arrangement, publishing YELLOWPAGES.COM advertisers across Microsoft local search sites, including Live Search, Live Search Maps and MSN Yellow Pages.
• Being ranked No. 31 in comScore’s top 100 Web properties for March 2008.

Read the complete press release here.

How do you market a purely online business in the local search realm? I’ve seen many of these companies turn to national advertising when faced with this challenge, but there are other options that will lower your cost per click.

Although you are a national company, you still have specific local market areas that you are targeting. It is important to still think locally because your advertisement should be focused on the local buyer on an IYP site. For example, a hotel comparison site like Priceline.com has hotels where you can reserve a room, it just happens that they are not specifically Priceline.com’s hotels.

A national buy will cost you tens of thousands on any IYP site. However, if you focus on specific metro markets that make sense for your company, you could drastically decrease your CPC and increase your relevance. For example, a site like jobweb.com, which is a career and job-search site for college students, could only target the big university towns like College Station, TX, Berkley, CA, Iowa City, IA, etc. Then if your CTR meets your expectations you can consider going to a national ad to draw in those smaller college towns.

Yelp is a great local search site, that is really focused on customer reviews. As a Yelp user, you can connect with friends, become part of the Yelp Elite Squad, have a local conversation, tag your favorite reviewers, add bookmarks, and add a list of favorite businesses. You can also use Yelp on your mobile devise to find businesses on the go.

Yelp has strict guidelines for writing reviews and gate keeping which advertisers they allow to post on the site. This is very appealing to users because they know that reviews are being written by real people and not managed by the business owner who asked friends and family to post a review.

Yelp will remind you of Citysearch, but is more trustworthy because of their strict advertising policies. Yelp also has a better layout and has a more personal look and feel, with pictures of the reviewer and better descriptions on the lookup page.

Advertising on Yelp

As a local business owner, all you need to do is claim your business. You can then see how many people are viewing your profile and update your business information. Also, since very few businesses are promoting on Yelp, you have a good opportunity to make your business really stand out. More info on Yelp for Businesses.

Yelp has some options for sponsored listings, which allows you to add a large image slide show or announcements. This will also move your listing to the top of the page under your relevant category.

Yelp Syndication

Yelp is prominent on many social networking sites, including Facebook and Squidoo.

Info on Yelp’s Facebook syndication:

Facebook has recently launched a new feature called Beacon which allows Facebook to request information you might want to share with your Facebook friends from sites like Yelp. If you are actively logged into Facebook, your Yelp reviews can be shared with your Facebook friends automagically.