Vivante - new search engine [split] Article

From: David Yancey
Subject: Geo search

Rich Dudley's very comprehensive post in LED #1695 raises some key
points for geo-focused sites and smaller businesses when considering
how to use search engine marketing (SEM).

Rich goes right to the heart of the issue, IMO, when he talks about
the need to be able to target his promotion to his specific market -
both locally, and also (for his specific florist business) busy,
generally older folks.

Our approach with Vivante.com is to build the whole search
experience around the needs of the affluent, 25+ consumer,
professional and business owner audience. Does this "exclude" the
students and casual surfers? Not really, but we won't water-down
the search experience to meet their expectations. Who needs another
youth-oriented, hyper-busy, entertainment-focused portal full of ad
clutter?

The fact is that a massive portal, where search is really just an
incidental service, like MSN, Yahoo or AOL, or a true,
all-things-to-all-searchers engine like Google or the great
www.alltheweb.com site, simply cannot afford to *tailor* their
search tools to the specific needs of Rich Dudley's typical
customers.

Not only do they have trouble targeting an "audience segment", but
the more that "search" becomes locally focused, the higher will be
the proportion of listings that are commercial - local businesses in
short who have a website. This is not something Google or the other
"national" search sites are set up to deal with. Indeed, until
Overture proved the practicality of paid search ads, Google and the
rest wanted nothing to do with them.

Rich also points out, for his www.bloomery.com florist site, the
ineffectiveness of paying up to $5 per lead as the national floral
sites do. We agree with Rich - that's why I have often ranted
against the competitive keyword bidding model for all but the very
biggest national advertisers.

For more perspective on how local businesses like Rich's are
starting to adapt their promotion to the web, here is some newly
published hard data on where local businesses are putting their
promotion dollars: http://snurl.com/321d [emarketer.com]

As can be seen, spending on websites is respectable, but the money
earmarked for actual search marketing is just 3% compared to 46% for
Yellow Pages. We cannot see the portion of the Yellow Pages spend
that is earmarked for "online" Yellow Pages, but my guess is that it
is no more than one twentieth of the "46%".

What these numbers show is that "local" geo-enabled web search has a
great distance to go before Rich and similar locally-focused
businesses can make effective use of the web, or see a compelling
reason to switch more of their ad budgets to "online".

So far, the major search players have only responded to this huge
potential expansion in "online finding demand" by importing cute
little driving instruction-type maps that can be appended to their
primary products. None (apart from ours) has dealt with the actual
needs of searchers who need *both* local and "national" info. If
searchers only needed store locations, that is already available in
dozens of online Yellow Pages sites.

Nor have the search leaders considered the needs of local-area
advertisers and how they might differ from those of a conventional
(non-geo) "national" website owner. Rich Dudley's www.bloomery.com
has requirements that go beyond those of a typical web publisher
site.

For example, a local business may need to change its listing or
title with each season. The big PPCs make this difficult, even
expensive. Is a florist site like Rich's supposed to wait and pray
for the Google spider to notice its new seasonal words, before the
season is *over*.

When even vaunted Google has no visible design strategy for
local-area search, this is a great time for LEDers to express their
requirements, as Rich Dudley has done. I'd like to think with
www.vivante.com we have covered all of them, but for sure, we have
missed some features that will ultimately be important to search
users or website owners or both.

What are *your* criteria for a competent, user-friendly, geo-smart
search site?

David Yancey
http://www.vivante.com