How Podcasting Impacts Local Search Relevancy

ClickZ has an article today from Patricia Hursh regarding the relevancy of local search. The article breaks down personal decision criteria, proximity and vertical search sites.

Regarding proximity, Patricia says:

"Today, proximity is typically the most important factor in presenting local search results. If a searcher includes a city name, Zip Code, area code, or address in her query, listings are usually ranked according to proximity to that particular location.

Unfortunately, with this approach consumers often have to sift through thousands of returned listings. Certainly not all these businesses are really relevant. Yet they're included in results simply because they have a name, qualified address, and phone number."

It's important when looking at the metrics of your web or blog traffic to identify the keywords and phrases people use in search engines to find your site. (If you do not have a good log file analysis tool, try Google Analytics, it's free and generates great data.) As Internet empowered consumers become more adept at searching in ways that cut through the clutter of millions of irrelevant results, they become more specific in the criteria they use. As mentioned by Patricia, street addresses are an example. We've known for some time now that a well distributed podcast feed provides an impressive amount of direct referral traffic to our client's web sites. In fact, one client receives over 3 times as much direct traffic from one podcast directory as they do from Realtor.Com. That's just the tip of the Iceberg. If you look at the long tail of direct traffic from their podcasting effort, they generated in the month of December a total of 138 direct referrals from podcast directories, 37 direct referrals from the local MLS site and a total of 28 direct referrals from all Realtor.Com sites including realestate.aol.com. (Yes, this client pays for enhanced listings with Realtor.Com) This client has also shown a steady increase in total page views since introducing podcasting from an average of 3,000 to now over 4,000 per month. Pretty impressive.

Now let's take a look at the impact of locality on organic search results in Yahoo and Google. The top referral by far to our client's site was Google organic searches. We know that a large portion of organic searches are the result of the widespread distribution of their podcasting RSS feed.

We decided to do a test using the street name of a podcast as an example of how someone might search. We used just the street name (no numbers) of the listing along with the name of the subdivision or neighborhood in Google. It was absolutely amazing. In almost every instance the search results dominated not only the first few results of the page, in some cases the first three pages generated results from a podcasting directory, or directly to the XML file used for the feed.

Digging further, we started using phrases from the descriptions of properties, specific community phrases and more and we were pleased to find our client show up in the top results just about every time. As I've mentioned before, the underlying technology of syndication that helps make this happen is nothing new, in fact it's been around a long time. It's just recently that it has become an integral part of the web and computing in general.

I've found the "RE.Net"* to be somewhat infatuated with web video lately. And that's great. But most of the fawning is over media that assumes someone is looking at property listing or web content in the first place. Video podcast distribution, when done right, provides not only a means to enhance a listing or content, it provides a a powerful new way to drive relevant, local traffic.

Want to know more? E-mail me. I'll be glad to give you a personal demonstration.

*I'm not sure if it was Greg Swann that originally coined RE.Net, but it sounds a damn site better than "blogosphere", wouldn't you agree?