Google Maps Listing Quality Guidelines

Some good info from Google on how to submit good listings to their maps site and avoid being Map spam...

Google Maps Adds Business Listing Quality Guidelines

IYP Reach in the US (according to Google)

Via TechSoapBox:



IYP Reach in the US (according to Google) - Tech Soapbox

Medical Categories Slowly Moving Online

For traditional yellow pages companies, Doctors, Dentists and related categories are huge revenue generators. Online, though, they've been very slow to adopt (as with Real Estate, which we discussed yesterday). Several companies have tried different approaches to bring these categories online, like HealthGrades and several competitors, which offer reviews of medical professionals. Looks like there's another new site moving into this space, called ZocDoc, which has information on doctors, the insurance they accept and allows you to schedule appointments. Like many Local startups, I suspect this one is going to run into a Sales issue, with doctors being very busy people and their front offices not really being equipped to spend their marketing money. Like all categories, this one will eventually be fully engaged online, but for the time being, I think the YPs, IYPs and Google will be the primary resources they'll use.

ZocDoc Gets $3M to Help You Find a Doctor

Optimizing Google OneBox and Yahoo! Shortcut Local Listings

Good article talking about how to best optimize your business listings to get good Google and Yahoo! local placements.

Optimizing Google OneBox and Yahoo! Shortcut Local Listings

How Google Ranks Local Businesses

Here's a really informative paper on how Google ranks local businesses for their maps site (and I'd assume for other local searches as well).

Local Search Ranking Factors « Screenwerk

Women are more likely than men to be IYP users

I saw an interesting tool on another website today (it can be found at the link below). You activate this tool and it will go through your browser history, analyze the sites you've visited, and tell you if it thinks you're male or female. When I ran it, it said with 100% probability that I'm male (I am). But more interesting to me was the male/female ratios it displayed for various IYP/Local sites I've visited. Here they are:

• Yellowpages.com - 0.72 male/female (1.38 women per man on that site)
• Yelp - 0.77
• Yellowbook - 0.8
• ServiceMagic - 0.71
• DexKnows - 0.79
• Google - 0.98

As someone working in the local space online, this tells me that, across the board, 55-57% of our users are women. That's without any specific outreach effort to that group. Perhaps we should consider market more directly to them, or at least focus on the sites they're using, as they seem more predisposed to using us to start with.

Mike On Ads » Blog Archive » Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

iPhone Apps - 4 of Top 5 are Local

There are now over 1000 apps in the iPhone store and if you look at the top 5, 4 of them are local applications:
1. Google (the only non-local)
2. UrbanSpoon, with its cool "shake me and get a surprise result" feature
3. BoxOffice, with an easy to use local movie time application and Rotten Tomatoes critic ratings
4. WeatherBug
5. Yelp, which in my view has the nicest local implementation, with the ability to easily search near you, a map view, and the ability to read every review in detail (so many apps do shortcut reviews, including the iTunes store, which doesn't give you anything beyond the star rating

It really seems that the iPhone is the platform that will finally drive broad acceptance of mobile applications and mobile search. Approx 10MM iPhones are out there in the US right now and with their ease-of-use and full-time access to the Internet, they will become the local platform of choice. And they're just scratching the surface of what they can do.

» Local Mobile Search