With more people dumping their Yellow Pages and instead turning to the internet to get information on businesses in their area, the emphasis on local search is increasing which may have some people reconsidering their search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and which engines they should monitor.
Local.com, a search engine and portal which focuses on business results specific to zip code, says it had a record number of unique visitors during the second quarter of this year with 63 million unique visitors to the site during that time.
Although search engine optimization (SEO) is important for any company looking to gain traffic, it would appear that it’s a particularly important tool for websites like Local.com as the site says organic traffic is driving much of its record-setting visitor totals.
"One of the most important goals for our organization this year is to increase organic traffic across our site and network," said Heath Clarke, Local.com chairman and CEO. "This initiative represents high margin revenue to Local.com and we continue to make significant progress in this area."
Local businesses benefited earlier this year from tweaks Google made to search engine results when the default settings for searches were set to bring back results that were local to a person’s IP address.
"We try to make our guesses as good as they can be so that whether you’re shopping for groceries, sporting goods or flowers, or looking for your bank, your gym, or the post office, you can just say what you want, and we’ll try to find it right where you are," the company said in a blog post in April.
