September Theme: Broadening Local
Street Fight covers the whole of digital marketing, but our roots lie in local search and media, and we’re returning there this month with a focus on what we’re calling Broadening Local.
The theme takes as its point of departure columnist Damian Rollison’s observation that Google, the kingpin of local, is broadening the local search experience to encompass many aspects of the customer journey that previously would have played out on websites and local listings platforms.
Of course, Google is not just broadening the local search experience; it is also deepening it by tailoring it more effectively to the needs of each consumer. So, this month’s theme is not just about SERPs with more applications; it’s also about a more sophisticated search experience that anticipates the consumer’s needs. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai once put it, Google increasingly wants to be a company that “helps you get things done.”
In a series on Google and local search, Rollison will cover personalization, verticalization (increasingly distinct experiences based on category of business), socialization (the growth of UGC in local and Google’s local-social strategy), and federation (the evolution of the GMB API into a family of APIs and what this means for local listings management).
Beyond that series, we will have our regular news stories and guest contributions on the topic. Please get in touch with me at [email protected] if you would like to weigh in with a byline or interview with one of the reporters on our team.
