{"id":117627,"date":"2019-01-18T14:30:48","date_gmt":"2019-01-18T14:30:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/?p=117627"},"modified":"2020-03-16T17:31:09","modified_gmt":"2020-03-16T17:31:09","slug":"data-local-search-trends-from-2017-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2019\/01\/18\/data-local-search-trends-from-2017-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Data: Local search trends from 2017-2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

We talk a lot about local search and local search trends here at SEW and in the industry as a whole. <\/strong><\/p>\n

How have consumers changed the way they interact with local businesses? How can local businesses respond? And what can we anticipate about future trends?<\/p>\n

Yext recently released some interesting findings on local search<\/a> trends based on their internal data.<\/p>\n

They analyzed a sample of\u00a0<\/span>more <\/span>than 300,000 customer business locations active from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018.<\/span><\/p>\n

What can we learn from this data about how consumer search behavior changed in 2018 versus 2017? And what might these changes tell us about the year ahead?<\/span><\/p>\n

Key local search trends from their analysis include:<\/h2>\n
    \n
  1. Consumer interactions with businesses increased<\/strong>: New business reviews up 87% YoY.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  2. Businesses across industries saw more interactions via AI-enabled services than their own websites<\/strong>. Up to 2.7 times as much traffic on third-party sites.<\/span><\/li>\n
  3. More consumers took action in search results<\/strong>: 20.1% increase in clicks to call, clicks for directions, and clicks to the website.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n
  4. Local pages saw increased consumer actions<\/strong> (i.e. pages for booking appointments, placing orders, etc.): Up 30.4% YoY.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    We spoke with Zahid Zakaria<\/span><\/a>, Yext’s Senior Director of Customer Insights<\/a> and Analytics<\/a>. Zahid leads the data team behind these new findings. <\/span><\/p>\n

    He’s been at Yext since August 2015, and spends nearly all of his time focused on client data.\u00a0<\/span>How can they unify data? What are the right metrics? How does an impression on a listing compare to an impression on a page?<\/span>\u00a0How can they understand the insights in local search trends?<\/span><\/p>\n

    These questions and more led them to this analysis. They’d seen that the local search market has been consistently growing, but wanted to find what insights demonstrated that growth.<\/p>\n

    First, about the data set and the approach<\/strong><\/h2>\n

    \"local<\/p>\n

    “We deal with tremendous data here at Yext,” Zahid said. “We power more than a million businesses globally. And we do quite a bit to ensure that all the work we do is based on a very complete data set.”<\/span><\/p>\n

    For these local search trends, the data set includes<\/strong>:<\/span><\/p>\n