U.S. online traffic to
classified ad Web sites increased 84% in February 2009, compared with a year ago, according to a new report from Hitwise, an Experian company. The industry has experienced positive sequential growth
in U.S. visits for all but one month during the past three years. As the state of the U.S. economy worsens, visits to these sites continue to climb, up 28% from December 2008 to February 2009.
To better understand the uptick, Hitwise created two custom categories in the report: "Craigslist Cities," which includes more than 300 local versions of Craigslist, and "All Other
Classifieds." The market share of U.S. Internet visits grew 90% to the "Craigslist Cities" custom category in February 2009, compared with the prior year, while visits to "All Other Classifieds" rose
22%.
Visits to "All Other Classifieds" had declined through most of 2008, but began to increase in January. This trend suggests the boost in visits to classifieds Web sites has been prompted by
the worsening U.S. economy.
An analysis of Craigslist demographics reveals that those earning an annual household income of $150,000 or more were 68% more likely to visit a "Craigslist Cities"
Web site than "All Other Classifieds" Web sites in the four weeks ending Feb. 28. The sites typically attract wealthier households, but most recently growth has come from lower-income groups, too.
While there has been an increase in visits to Craigslist and local classified sites, Hitwise believes these Web sites could benefit much more from search engine optimization and paid search campaigns.
Heather Dougherty, Hitwise research director, said classified represents the long tail of search. New content coming onto the site daily means classified sites must continually optimize listings.
"Sites can help people who post ads by suggesting certain words that could trigger searches," she said. "If you give someone a blank slate they may not know the keywords to drive searches in
rankings."
Classified sites tend to receive a far smaller share of traffic from search than the average category and are also far less active on paid search than average retail stores. Hitwise
analysis reveals that search terms that send visits to classifieds Web sites tend to contain more keywords than average for retail Web sites. This presents opportunities for lower costs and
potentially higher-qualified search traffic.
These sites could take lessons from mainstream social media like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, according to Marty Weintraub, search guru and
aimClear president. "In these community sites, very little content is available 'in front of the login wall' and left to publicly index," he said. "The rest is walled off and restricted to only
users."
Weintraub said by improving internal linking, "juice" is focused on the public portion of the site, causing the listings to rank higher. He suggests that classified sites improve organic
rankings by focusing on smaller sets of optimized public category index pages and walling search engines out from detail pages, which are transient and expire.