local search - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Yell.com launched another revamped version of its website last month, just months after launching a new homepage (May 2007) and about a year since it last rolled out a new site. 

We caught up with Matthew Bottomley, Head of Strategy for Yell.com, to find out the reasons behind the relaunch, and what the future holds for Yell, and local search in general...

Welovelocal launched in June this year, and provides local listings for the London area, though it plans to expand its coverage to the rest of the country by the end of the year.

Unlike more established local listing sites, such as Yell.com, welovelocal.com provides more context to the search results by displaying user reviews and allowing local businesses to add information to their listings.

Welovelocal was created by eMomentum, a privately-funded internet company based in London. We caught up with Max Jennings, co-founder of welovelocal.com ...

The re-launch of Yahoo! Local in the US this week saw the search giant try to regain its footing in the battle for local traffic by firmly aiming to position itself as a major local portal.

Google has turned to a new tactic to boost its local search services, offering people money to go door-to-door and collect information about small businesses.

The Google ‘Local Business Referrals’ programme, now launched in the US and expected to be introduced in the UK at some point, will see independent contractors gathering data for its Google Maps database.

The release of Google Maps Mobile last week in the UK got a distinct lack of coverage, yet it is a tool that underpins the huge opportunities for local mobile search.

These are currently drastically under-exploited - indeed, local mobile search is where the real value of mobile search lies, i.e. search in relation to your physical location.

Local is getting hotter by the day. More people are using search to find local businesses, and the Kelsey Group seems to report on a new potential value ($31.1bn in 2010) of the local search industry each week.

US startup Zvents, a site that allows users to search for events in their local area, has announced that it has raised $7 million in venture capital.

This has raised eyebrows in E-consultancy Towers, as it is a large sum of money for a site which currently covers only a small geographical area, and has established competitors in the market, such as Eventful.com, Meetup and Upcoming. 

A study by ComScore , focusing on the US, has shown an increase of over 40% in the number of users performing local searches online in the last year.

According to the research, 63% of US internet users (around 109 million people) performed a local search during July, a 43% increase over the same month in 2005.