Google Moving Into Local Search

Google has made a couple of moves recently that show it is serious about moving to defend it’s turf in local search. Google dominates search in general and efforts by other companies to carve out a local search niche have not gone unnoticed!  While Google maps have long provided excellent local search functionality there are two relatively new releases or enhancements that demonstrate Google’s commitment.  And THAT is the really scary part if you are Yelp…  Google is likely to continually enhance and improve their product as fast or faster than anyone else can keep up.  Here are the two developments that have recently rolled out:

• 1) Google Place Pages – Place Pages take the previous bubbles in Google Maps and gives them their own page.  Who cares right?  Not quite… it also gives them their own URL.  That’s where the big change is.  Now Google can index those pages and start serving them up in non-maps searches for businesses or categories in their main search results.  Over time, this probably means that top 10 results are really just top 9 results because a Place Page will likely take up one spot most of the time.
• 2) Improvement to Mobile Search – Google added functionality to improve the ability of users of their mapping application to do business searches on smartphones.  Yelp had previously offered superior functionality in this regard and appears to have perhaps hoped it could be an ongoing source of differentiation and value.  So much for that idea.  Just like the mobile GPS manufacturers just found out… Google isn’t going to stay satisfied with their current offerings for very long in any area.  The moral of the story is that if you have a business that remotely competes with Google you had better sprint full-speed ahead on innovation and improvement.  In a tie, Google will win with consumers due to the comfort level of their brand…

I’m looking forward to seeing how Google continues to develop in these directions… I don’t really know if there will be long-term survivors from the mix of companies that were hoping to find a home in the local search or directory niche.  Things are going to get a lot worse for them before it gets better.  I assume Microsoft and Bing can’t be far behind in this area either.