The Good and Bad of Local Discovery on Our Summer Road Trip
Greetings from a summer road trip in the Pacific Northwest. Amid games of twenty questions and alphabet animals, we have faced the typical needs of the traveler: shelter, food, gas, and fun. Naturally, we’ve turned to local search, just like the other 31% of leisure travelers (up from 18% in 2010). I’ve written mainly about local search on the homefront and travel is another kind of use case entirely, one that in many ways has been “solved” by existing services — but has it? In our experience, you often have to be creative to get what you need…
The Website Is No Longer the Center of Local Discovery
For years, multi-location brands built local marketing around a fairly simple model. A customer searched, clicked a result, visited the website, and made a decision from there. Visibility was measured through rankings and traffic. Persuasion was expected to happen on the site. Performance was judged largely by what could be tracked after the click. That […]