Local Search in South Africa will Mushroom When People…
- Have access to “always on” broadband connections. Get ready… it’s coming! The fact that only a small percentage of the population have access to “always on” is a major reason why Local Search is lagging way behind the rest of the world. To use online search effectively means it must be easy and immediately possible to do the search otherwise people will revert to the previously used systems such a Yellow Pages™
- When the Smartphone arrives and that’s anytime now… Get ready… it’s coming. This is where South Africa could see a step change in use of Local Search since a high proportion of the population are very mobile savvy. It’s necessary for smartphones to become more readily available and data bundle costs to come down.
Introduction
There is a real opportunity just starting to open up on the Internet
in South Africa. This opportunity will be to the benefit of both
merchants and to those Internet marketers who gather the skills
necessary to capitalize on the opportunities that will be available to
hundreds of thousands of businesses.
The opportunity lies in the realm of Local Search.
When I refer to Local Search I’m referring to a deliberate search being made using a search engine (and unless stated otherwise I mean Google search) by a consumer who specifically wants to locate a product or service in close proximity to the searcher’s location.
As
an example I live in Bedfordview and if my hot water heater bursts at
10pm then I need to find a plumber within a short distance from where I
live. If I search for Plumber Johannesburg using Google this is what now
appears (see image left). The map locators immediately allow me to find
the nearest plumber.:
Until around early 2004 I had only one hope of finding such a service and that was to use the East Rand Yellow Pages™ (or Johannesburg Yellow Pages™ ) book.
For many years printed Yellow Pages™ had almost no opposition in the Local Search space. As a result it was able to charge what I consider to be high space advertising rates.
By high I mean the cost of driving a referred visitor to a business has been high.
Printed Yellow Pages™ also provided no mechanism for a customer to track performance of an entry in the Yellow Pages™ .
It was probably necessary to charge high rates because the costs
associated with creating, printing and distributing Yellow Pages™ was
undoubtedly high.
In my view Yellow Pages™ is a good example of inefficient advertising.
Consider the following information obtained from Yellow Pages™
published information:
• Annual referrals to customers via Yellow Pages™ = 120,000,000
• Printed Versions of Yellow Pages™ distributed = more than 8,000,000
• This means that on average every directory was used only 15 times per
year on average.
I’m sure that Yellow Pages™ recognized an impending threat to their
traditional business model and for this reason probably around late 2003
they wisely decided to invest in an online strategy.
Other local advertising (local newspapers especially) and referral businesses need to do the same.