The 2013 Local Search Ecosystems (and a GetListed Upgrade)

Well, it's been nearly a year since I published the last version(s) of this graphic. That's a long time in a space that evolves as quickly as Local Search, but frankly, 2013 hasn't seen quite the turmoil of 2012, in which Google+ Local, Apple Maps, and Facebook Nearby were all released within seven months of each other.

We'll be adding all of these graphics to the GetListed.org Learning Center in the next few weeks, with full references and screenshots showing attribution. But while I had a bit of time before the fall conference season—I'll be speaking more about these at Local University Advanced in just a few weeks—I thought I'd consolidate my thoughts and get them into a blog post.

My thoughts on the U.S. ecosystem

The Big Three are now the Big Four

Since I first started researching the local search space back in 2006-2007, Infogroup, Localeze, and Acxiom have been the undisputed primary data suppliers in the U.S.

Although multiple independent sources heard from Yelp this summer that they no longer actively ingest data from Acxiom, Acxiom is one of only two suppliers mentioned on Google Maps' legal notices page, and they've fed data to Apple Maps since it launched.

It's always been difficult for me to recommend an answer to the question, "Which data aggregator would you pay to manage data with?" My standard answer has always been "all three." But if you are looking to prioritize your local marketing spend, I hope the graphics below showing each provider's publicly verifiable network assist with that.

Factual is a relatively new player on the scene—they were barely on my radar less than two years ago. And yet today, if you visit their homepage, you see a who's who of local search portals, including Yelp, Bing, and TripAdvisor. It's clear they're a force to be reckoned with, especially globally (more on that below).

Aside: the GetListed upgrade

As a result of Acxiom's resurgence and Factual's emergence, for the last several months we've been working to add both to the roster of data platforms we display on GetListed. I'm excited to announce their release today. Big thanks to Adrian, Frank, and Josh for making those additions happen this summer.

Foursquare as a data provider?

The fragmentation of the location-based app market is only going to increase, and like Factual, Foursquare has turned its sights on becoming "the location layer for the Internet." Its API has been quite reliable for GetListed, at least, and it surely counts a healthy percentage of web developers among its 40-odd-million users, whom it's now enlisting in a quest to provide extremely fine-grained venue data.

If Foursquare can expand its typical venue categories beyond food, drink, and entertainment, it could become even more of a key player despite a declining rate of user growth. I still wouldn't be surprised to see Foursquare purchased by the end of the year, but the list of companies who both need and could afford it is slimming considerably as its dataset continues to get better.

The traditional IYPs have it tough

From a citation-strength standpoint, few traditional directories are competing favorably with Yelp across a broad array of categories. Citysearch, Superpages, Yahoo, and YP.com are still very strong players, but with Citysearch laying off a substantial percentage of its staff recently and Superpages' merge with Dex, it's pretty clear that a lot of consolidation and reconfiguration is happening among the major players.

It also seems that vertical and geo-focused directories, and even unstructured local citations, are playing a larger role than ever in competitive search categories. With so many traditional local search sites offering free listings to business owners, citations from traditional providers now appear to be "table stakes" in Local SEO...but the sites that offer those listings are continuing to have a hard time monetizing them.

What's Apple up to?

It's been almost exactly a year since Apple's less-than-impressive release of Maps. The good folks in Cupertino went silent for a good long while before making a couple of key summer acquisitions: Locationary and HopStop. For our little world, Locationary is the more relevant purchase. Grant Ritchie and his team essentially built their own version of Map Maker (see below)—an efficient system of ingesting data from multiple sources and making sense of it.

I don't see the Locationary acquisition affecting any of Apple's existing data relationships imminently, but expect we'll start to see a lot faster pace of innovation with their mapping platform in the coming year. And the quality of data will get considerably better as Apple beefs up its Ground Truth and engineering forces.

The continued importance of Google Map Maker

One of the least-heralded but most important stories in the last year has been Google's unification of its backend location database. There are now effectively four (and possibly more) public front-ends to this database: "Report a Problem" reports, Places and Google+ Page Management, and the Map Maker interface itself.

There's still no substitute for querying Map Maker directly if you're having persistent issues with incorrect business categorization, PIN placement, or duplicate listings, and Map Maker's release in many, many more countries—including longtime holdout Italy—making it a relevant and useful tool for SEOs almost no matter where your clients are.

Internationally speaking

One of the least-obvious facts for newcomers to local search is that other than Google's central position, every country's ecosystem is different. Factual is one of the very few companies with a reliable global dataset, and the search giant relies on a completely different set of providers in each country that Maps operates. Typically these are established yellow pages players, such as YPG in Canada, Telelistas in Brasil, and Sensis in Australia.

Secondary and tertiary relationships can be considerably harder to tease out, but the graphics below represent my best effort to reconstruct these markets. I received a considerable amount of help on both Germany and Australia from Nyagoslav Zhekov of NGS Marketing, who may have more experience building citations in international markets than anyone in the world.

Thoughts on Canada:

In my introduction to the international section, I already mentioned the primacy of YPG in supplying data to Google, and in few markets around the world is there a single provider as dominant in its country than YPG. The number of prominent local search sites under the YPG umbrella is impressive, and may be a reason its digital revenues are responsible for a comparatively large share of its overall earnings.

Canada's also relatively unique in that an arm of the Canadian Government, Industry Canada, offers such an easily-crawlable database of business information to the public. Whether Google has a formal relationship with Industry Canada or not, it's clear that this data makes it into Google's index. Thanks to Jen Salamandick of Kick Point for her empirical confirmation of this relationship.

Thoughts on the UK:

The UK features the most complex ecosystem of any country country in the world. At first glance, Google should have a dominant provider in BT, but my experience during a two-month sabbatical in the UK in May 2011 indicated that The Local Data Company, Market Location, and 118 Information were all more influential sources for data that would eventually wind up at Google. TouchLocal's acquisition of Scoot in 2009 makes that duo a significant citation source as well. Qype and Yelp are both extremely well-crawled, and there are a number of geographically-focused directories, especially in Greater London, that Google is surely looking at.

Similar to Canada, there are two governmental entities—Companies House and the Royal Mail—whose datasets provide the backbone to a number of location indexes, I’m sure.

All this means a lot of work for UK SEO’s trying to clean up or establish citation profiles for their clients.

Thoughts on Germany:

In preparing for my SMX Munich presentation earlier this year, the primary providers in Germany clearly seemed to be the Deutsche Telekom-GelbeSeiten-Das Ortliche trifecta. German SEOs should not overlook infobel, however, the owner of Kapitol S.A., which is mentioned on the Google Maps' legal notices page.

There are a myriad of secondary local search engines in Germany and in my research, their strength depended on the industry I was investigating. Qype was essentially the only dominant consumer portal horizontally, but Varta Guides and Restaurant-Kritik were exceptionally strong in travel and cuisine. If I'm a German SEO, I'm paying special attention to my client's phone contract records and their listings on the associated GelbeSeiten, Das Telefonbuch, and Das Ortliche, updating Qype, and then I'm going straight for industry-specific directories, before circling back to the secondary search engines. That's quite a different workflow from what I'd recommend here in the States.

Thoughts on Brazil:

The Brazilian market strikes me as one of the biggest global opportunities in local search. It's a huge country with a lot of urban population centers, a relatively well-educated population, and high percentage of smartphone ownership. And from an SEO standpoint, it appears to be about four to five years behind the United States.

Certainly the complexity of the Local ecosystem is nowhere near that of more established markets. Telelistas and Apontador are the clear market leaders, and Yelp's purchase of Qype looks like a smart investment in this market.

Conclusion

As I said in the introduction, we'll be establishing a permanent archive for these ecosystems in the GetListed Learning Center in the next several weeks, but in the meantime, I look forward to hearing your questions and feedback in the comments below!

A final thanks to Gregory T'Kint of James Hargreaves Plumbing, Tom Lynch of Location3, Russ Offord of Orion Group for their correspondence regarding these ecosystems in the past year.