Local search strategies - king of your area, or prince of the realm?

[Edwin]

When you're thinking about building out a network of local sites, do you think it's going to be more effective to get all/most of the domains relating to a specific limited geographic area (e.g. the top 20 towns nearest to city X, and have city X as the centre of the network)? Or is it a better strategy to focus on acquiring as many larger/more commercially interesting places no matter where they are with respect to each other?

In other words, are there likely to be commercial benefits (e.g. acquiring "regional" advertisers) to building a localised local network, or is it better to fight each battle separately but choose the best locations for those battles?

I'm assuming that from a resource perspective, the 2 strategies above are likely to be mutually exclusive i.e. you can't simultaneously buy cities all over the map and also buy up "clusters" of areas around all of those, as that would be far too cost-prohibitive.

 

[retired_member13]

I'd have said that local search is being decimated by Google local at present - ie owning LocationService.co.uk or similar is becoming obsolete as G moves to a more Yellow Pages style format featuring actual local businesses that are registered with them.

I might be wrong of course, but the tests I've seen G running in the US wrt to these geo + subject searches are becoming almost solely geo business listings / indicative maps and sponsored links on page 1, especially on the above the fold placements.

As such I think any strategy would need to be a very flexible one to stay on top of the game

 

[Edwin]

Sorry, I meant Location.co.uk not LocationService.co.uk

 

[mreeves]

Dominate an area. Makes much more commercial sense to have 50% market penetration in an area with a population of 100,000 than have 10% market penetration in an area with a population of 500,000.

 

[mally]

When I type my surname (3 letter .co.uk) it goes to the following

any-village.com/UK/Scotland/Highland/Ord/home.aspx

it must work for them having a central domain name inc a dash and just forwarding the domain name to it.

 

[rob]

Dominate an area. Makes much more commercial sense to have 50% market penetration in an area with a population of 100,000 than have 10% market penetration in an area with a population of 500,000.

Agree.

 

[aZooZa]

I've often thought about this. To me, it makes sense to concentrate on an area which you can travel around in, and do face-to-face business comfortably each day. Of course a camera is essential. I still think there's money in it; and actually plenty of it, if you're prepared to hit the road, or employ someone to do that side of it.

 

[domainking]

local areas

very intresting post.
would say that running a geo location area does have its problems, first the local newpapers hate you as your the new kid on the block so forget about them advertising or promoting your business. local council and tourist boards dont like it as you have something the want.

So before you start your geo your up against it allready with big boys now thats the bad things out the road.

One things you have to do and this why I prefer Geos, is buy a geo location that you know. the more local to you the better, forget about buying somewhere stupid like overseas or even here in UK if you dont visit the area a few times a year.

I agree with TY that google is rolling out its local map listings with its free one page website to business now this will affect the big guys like yell, newspapers, TV locals, and everyone else and would say even you the geo owner.

Now how you can win this battle is do the footwork get to know the local business owners, tell them what your doing, collect the proper info from them, name business name, e-mail ect ect, opening hours, give them free listing then upsell them a page advertisment. sample free listings http://www.milngavie.co.uk/local.html I just started wisiting the local business owners last 2 weeks can say you have to do this and make sure you know the area inside out.

Hope that helps some of you out.

 

[domainking]

Local area post 2

Now onto our Glasgow network some people asked us when we bought Glasgow.com why did we still buy up other Glasgow domains the answer was to try and have amost of the domains that where of value to us for our business. If we own good % of the names it makes it harder for anyone else to sell there services into the area, so we basically protecting ourselfs, but also we can offer more services to local business, sample this would be 1. we own some areas inside Glasgow and this how our plan will work.
your a small business based in anderston in Glasgow. We have that area so we can list your business on there. if your an accountant we can list you on GlasgowAccountants.co.uk and GlasgowCharteredAccoutants.co.uk then we can list you on Glasgow.com main site that how we plan to make this all work. hope thats of some value to you geo owners

 

[RSK3000]

I'm with Azooza and the others on this. In general geo domains are monetised by private advertising. As others have said there is a massive benefit in being able to sell ad space direct to businesses. So if you are going down the regional network route you need to pick locations near where you live (or somewhere you are prepared to move to).

On the other hand from an investment point of view, if you were investing in larger town and city dot coms /.co.uk s your portfolio might be worth more and appreciate more. It might not matter that your revenue may be lower because you cant spend as much in each location. For example, I'd guess that Domain King's Glasgow dot com is probably worth 10 times more than all of his other west of Scotland domains added together and will appreciate faster, too.