Local Search | Jennifer Lind

In response to Seth Godin’s blog yesterday “Let me see,” in which he created a list of ways marketers could make the consumer’s life easier – not necessarily good for the company – I would like to expand his list to ways search engines could make search easier and more productive for searchers:

1. Show ecommerce websites by the number of people who purchased products and let me sort by number of returns, frequency of customer visits, and standard shipping rates.
2. Let consumers rate 1-5 stars next to the search results for how closely the site/landing page matches with common search terms. Filter out sites with many 1 ratings.
3. Let me sort websites that advertise the least/most.
4. I want to know how highly the company is ranked within their industry amongst industry leaders (bloggers, commentators, etc.).
5. I want to know what price points their products are at – should I expect high quality at a low price, low quality at a low price, etc.
6. I want to be able to sort the websites by informational content, transactional pages, and navigational pages (pages that simply link to other pages) results.
7. Establish relationships with sites that allow me to compare products and only allow these quality sites to place sponsored links.
8. Sort websites by the number of friends they have on Facebook or similar social media sites.
9. Show me how many informational webinars are sponsored by the company and their next event.

Is your website currently set up to help move us in this direction?