Domain Masters Radio Show

TrueLocal.com: New Local Search Engine

Monte: Well, give us a little bit of background about how you got into the industry, how you got into SEO, and I learned a lot about your other company and venture that you were in, which is in the dye cast cars industry, which is a huge virile collectors item, you know, industry, and pretty virile there and how you got into the TrueLocal.

Jake: Yeah, the story’s a little bit weird. I ran an ISP for five years in Cleveland, and when I got out of that business, one of my clients came to me and they said, “Hey, we have this dynamic website thing, can you help us with it,” and played around with a lot of rewrites, solved their problem, but nobody had written about it at this point. And I said, hey, this is pretty cool, you know, this SEO thing, maybe it does something. So I was fairly late to the SEO game, I didn’t get in it till about 2002, but got really, really good at the dynamic site stuff, and with that came the Dye Cast Car Collectors Club of California. They approached us and helped SEO their site, we got their name, DyeCast.org, which is a pretty good domain name, and once I got out of the client service SEO business, Tim Nye [ph], up in Canada, brought me on to manage the technical and marketing aspects of TrueLocal.

Monte: Right. And tell us a little bit about TrueLocal, and what it’s purpose is and what it’s gonna be in the next one to two years.

Jake: Well, we are trying to make TrueLocal the best local search experience out there. TrueLocal is a local search engine that’s focused on businesses with physical presences or storefronts or offices. We don’t allow directory sites, we don’t allow affiliate sites, no information portals, etc., etc. in the engine. So it’s really, really focused on business to consumer search and really, really--

Monte: So brick and mortar--

Jake: Exactly.

Monte: --brick and mortar presence?

Jake: Exactly.

Monte: Okay. So no online-only identities?

Jake: No.

Monte: Okay.

Jake: None at all.

Monte: Okay, great. And give us a little bit, you know, of information about why you think there’s a true need for this, where you think you’re gonna set yourselves apart. Obviously, people are now starting to do a lot more local searching in Google and a lot of the other search engines. Where do you separate yourselves?

Jake: Well, first of all, I think our interface makes the most sense out of all of them. Google and Yahoo I think have--they put too much prominence on the map and not enough prominence on the information. So we’re trying to--we’re coming at this with a different interface, and also, I think the way we do it is a little bit better. The major local players start with all the pages in their index and try to map those to local businesses. We start the other way. We start with the big base file of local businesses and then map URLs appropriately, so we come at the problem a little bit differently.

Monte: Wow. And so how--are there a bunch of businesses jumping on board and how are you making your money? I understand you’re profitable, which is a great success story at such a short little time, because you just started the business, right?

Jake: Right. Yeah, well most of it at this point has been word of mouth and organic traffic, so we’re running Overture Precision Match ads for now on the site, and we’re gonna have local advertisers, but a majority of it has been word of mouth and organic traffic, so.

Monte: Oh, that’s great, that’s great. And what--you know, the local search market is gonna be huge, I think. I mean, what is your projection in terms of number of users and inquiries into local search inquiries inside the engine, you know, short-term and long-term?

Jake: Well, I think as, you know, more and more people understand what local search is, it’s gonna get bigger. A lot of people don’t understand what local search is right now, they have no clue what that phrase means. You know, I have to explain people not in this space that it’s a really smart phone book, and that’s how people understand it. So, you know, I think it’ll gain more users. As far as numeric projections, to be honest, I have no idea. You know, I know that the demand is there, I know that there--I’ve heard figures from anywhere between 10% and 28% of all searches are local in nature. So, you know, the sky’s the limit with this thing, I think, and as more people actually figure out what local search is, it’ll gain more acceptance.