We talk a lot about local search and local search trends here at SEW and in the industry as a whole.
How have consumers changed the way they interact with local businesses? How can local businesses respond? And what can we anticipate about future trends?
Yext recently released some interesting findings on local search trends based on their internal data.
They analyzed a sample of more than 300,000 customer business locations active from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2018.
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?
Key local search trends from their analysis include:
- Consumer interactions with businesses increased: New business reviews up 87% YoY.
- Businesses across industries saw more interactions via AI-enabled services than their own websites. Up to 2.7 times as much traffic on third-party sites.
- More consumers took action in search results: 20.1% increase in clicks to call, clicks for directions, and clicks to the website.
- Local pages saw increased consumer actions (i.e. pages for booking appointments, placing orders, etc.): Up 30.4% YoY.
We spoke with Zahid Zakaria, Yext’s Senior Director of Customer Insights and Analytics. Zahid leads the data team behind these new findings. [1]
He’s been at Yext since August 2015, and spends nearly all of his time focused on client data. How can they unify data? What are the right metrics? How does an impression on a listing compare to an impression on a page? How can they understand the insights in local search trends?
These questions and more led them