Foursquare’s Local SEO

If you are a regular reader you’ll know that I’ve been excited about Foursquare and how it has the potential to create a new model for local advertising.

Brief recap is that Foursquare is local-mobile-social network that makes a game out of sharing the local venues that you frequent with your friends. Foursquare users “checkin” on their iPhone, add tips (sort of like tiny reviews), and get alerted when their friends do the same. It’s a local social discovery experience that plays out on your iPhone – for the most part.

What might not be so obvious is the part of Foursquare that plays out on the web. I’m not talking about the twitter notifications but rather the user and venue pages on Foursquare.com.

When a user “checks-in” or adds a tip for a venue, the fact is published to their user page and also indirectly to the page for that venue. This creates a constant stream of new content and an explicit recommendation metrics that can be used to gauge the popularity of the venue.

For example, here’s the venue page for the Peet’s Coffee around the corner from my office (yes, I’m the mayor) and here’s the venue page for Citizen Cake in SF.

Local search and Yellow Page publishers will be quick to notice that every venue visited by Foursquare users has a page. As these pages get more popular, they are starting to get indexed by the major search engines. Here’s a screenshot of a Google search for Grand Sichuan on Second Ave. in NYC. Notice the first listing. If I were the owner of Grand Sichuan I’d be leaning into Foursquare in big way right about now.

Yelp has demonstrated that frequently updated user generated content is a key ingredient to local SEO. Judging by the upward trend that they are seeing, I think we are going to see Foursquare start to steal organic traffic share from Internet Yellow Page players.