Content management company Localeze will unveil a plan today to populate niche search engine GetFave.com with more than 15 million business listings.
The deal is intended to support
consumers looking for relevant information as the turnover of small and medium-sized businesses excels. The niche search engine hopes the deal will enable it to compete with sites like Yelp, Metromix,
and Citysearch, which recently redesigned itself into 75,000 neighborhood guides.
GetFave.com provides local businesses with greater visibility on Google and other search engines. Most content
comes from Vienna, Va.-based Localeze, which verifies the local businesses whose information appears in the database.
Registering on the site gives local businesses the ability to manage and
update online listings in real time and participate in the interactive community with videos, banners, coupons and other information. The business profiles are a one-page Web site describing the
subscribers' services. Software code on the Web pages behind business profiles point Google's index crawlers toward listings.
About 10 million GetFave.com pages have been indexed on Google since
the company publicly launched in March, according to Jeff Seymour, cofounder of Fave Media Inc. "We had used a dataset from another company, but it wasn't formatted for our purposes," Seymour said.
"It was more designed for business leads, not a local search engine trying to support user searches on keywords."
Niche search engines similar to GetFave.com help consumers to find the small
to-mid-size business down the street that make up 96% of U.S. retail companies with one location. The International Council of Shopping Centers estimates 148,000 store closures this year, the largest
number since 2001. The council also forecasts that many more stores will close in the first half of 2009.
Although many businesses are closing or filing for Chapter 11, Seymour--who believes
GetFave.com sells "SEO or Internet visibility products"--said as of last week the site supports about 7,200 visitors. With a run rate of more than 1.5 million unique users, traffic continues to grow
at a compound rate of approximately 30% per month.
Seymour estimates that more than 150 businesses register at the site daily. About 120 are outside of those typically signing up at rivals.
"Keep it simple and appeal to all business segments and markets--that's what it takes to succeed in local search," he said.
About $2 million in private funding supports GetFave.com. The
remainder has been financed by Seymour and his brother, a partner in the business. The funds assist in partnerships similar to the one with Localeze, which earlier this month launched ContentReach, a
database of premium business listings that filters, selects, ranks, builds and returns the most relevant results for on-demand access to as many as 16 million local business listings.