IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009

National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic.  The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings.  Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword targets.  Many IYPs even use their Google rankings as part of their sales pitch.  When I got an email from one asking me to advertise and take advantage of their rankings, it got me thinking about which IYPs are the best at SEO, and thus the IYP SEO Rankings report was born.

Here’s what I did:

1. Searched Google (with personalization turned off) for 20 of the top yellow pages headings in the top 20 U.S. cities.
2. Each query was in the following format – <City>+<Category> (e.g. “Chicago Doctor”)
3. Each top 10 ranking was scored in reverse order, so a #1 ranking = 10 points, a #2 ranking = 9 points, etc.
4. The points for each IYP were added up and averaged across all queries for all cities.  The IYP with the most points was crowned American IYP SEO Idol of 2009.

And now, without further ado, here are best SEO IYPs of 2009 in rank order along with their scores:

1. Superpages
2. Citysearch
3. Yelp
4. Yahoo Local
5. InsiderPages
6. YellowPages.com
7. BizJournals
8. AreaConnect
9. MagicYellow
10. Switchboard
11. MerchantCircle
12. GetFave
13. Yellowbot
14. Yellowpages.Lycos.com
15. Kudzu
16. Discoverourtown
17. Loqal.com
18. Local.Ingenio.com
19. YellowUSA.com
20. IAF.net

I should note that after the top 6 the scores dropped significantly.  The top 6 represent 75% of all the rankings for these queries.  Superpages has 19% of the rankings, CitySearch 18% and Yelp is coming up in the rearview mirror with 14%.  So if you are thinking about marketing your site on an IYP seems like you need to be on these three.

I was also impressed by the performance of the sites that are not particularly well-known brands – AreaConnect, MagicYellow, GetFave & Yellowbot are all playing the SEO game well.  Not particularly surprising was the relatively weak performance by some of the big Yellow Pages players such as DexKnows (#40) & Yellowbook (#25).  In Dex’s defense they are more of a regional player and in Yellowbook’s defense, well the whole David Carradine thing must have been distracting.

Rankings by Site Type

We also looked at the different types of sites that the National IYPs were competing against for rankings. As you can see from the list below, local business sites are doing the best with 32% of all rankings, while national Vertical search sites (e.g. doctoroogle.com) are also doing well.  I was surprised to see that the local yellow pages directories (LYPs) were not doing as well.  My guess is because most of these have not gotten aggressive with their SEO strategies.  I was also surprised that video results barely showed up as these are some of the easiest rankings to get at the moment.  One of the biggest changes I expect to see the next time I do this is with the Social sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook, etc.)  .  Sooner or later these guys are going to catch on to this local thing.

% of Top 10 Rankings by Site Type

BTW nice to see that “Unrelated” is a fairly small percentage of results.  Well done Google.

Of course there are inherent limitations to this type of analysis.  The fact that the searches were not conducted from an IP address located in the searched city is a big flaw, but c’est la search.  I am going to continue to dig through the data and provide some more analysis by category and by city.  If you have any questions or want to see specific info, please post requests in the comments or else email me.

And here are the cities and categories I used:

20 Popular Yellow Pages Categories

1. Restaurant
2. Doctor
3. Hotel
4. Auto Repair
5. Florist
6. Car Dealer
7. Dentist
8. Auto Parts
9. Beauty Salon
10. Hospital
11. Pizza
12. Plumber
13. Insurance
14. Department Store
15. Veterinarian
16. Bank
17. Pharmacy
18. Attorney
19. Theater
20. Tire Dealer

Top 20 U.S. Cities

1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. Houston
5. Philadelphia
6. Phoenix
7. San Antonio
8. San Diego
9. Dallas
10. San Jose
11. Detroit
12. Indianapolis
13. Jacksonville
14. San Francisco
15. Columbus
16. Austin
17. Memphis
18. Baltimore
19. Ft. Worth
20. Charlotte

I will also be speaking about my findings tomorrow at the Local Search Summit on the “Local Search: Where Are We Today” panel.