I was thrilled to be able to take the stage with greg email list sterling, dana ditomaso and conrad saam for “the new realities of local search” at smx west in san jose. The smx team shared some of the questions posed during the session, and I'll do my best to channel the collective wisdom of my co-presenters by addressing a few of the questions that I found particularly interesting. For a full recap of the session, you can read greg sterling's column here. Question 1: we all understand that google my business is important in local search.
What about bing, apple maps, or even waze, etc.? This is an excellent question. I don't know of any definitive metrics that can tell you exactly how much local traffic each of these sites and apps receives, based on which you can determine how much time email list and energy to spend on each. We know, of course, that when it comes to organic search in general, google has a dominant market share, followed distantly by bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and others. In february 2019, google's search dominance in the us was 88.6% according to statcounter. Overall search share isn't a bad indicator of google's relative importance locally, although in my opinion google should be considered a little less dominant in local search than in general search, considering due to various factors. Mobile phone usage patterns are significant here.
Since apple maps is the local app in place on email list millions of iphones, apple is in a position to capture a much larger share of the local search market than a competing search engine could hope for in an office environment. Similarly, phone users are accustomed to using waze, yelp and other apps directly rather than accessing these services through a browser,so the short answer to the question is that there are a lot of sites besides google my business and you need to spread your efforts across all of them. Luckily, they're not all created equal, which makes things a little easier for marketers. On apple maps, for example.