Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Categories - need some input

We have 210 categories so far, organized by: Auto Services, Home Services, Personal Services and Professional Services. This is less than Yahoo and most other sites (http://yp.yahoo.com/). There is also overlap (i.e. car rental could be a personal service and auto service). We will need to figure out how to deal with category overlap.

We want to focus on:
  1. Phone-oriented businesses
  2. Business that will pay for leads
  3. Businesses where the consumer may have a sense of urgency
  4. Categories where the consumer is choosing a service (not insurance paid medical)
  5. Categories where most search produces a long list of choices and relevancy is important
  6. Categories where the speciality can be captured in a few bullet points (divorce lawyer, exterior painter)
If we launch with 210 cats, in 6 area codes and 10 "deep" we will have 12,600 merchants in the database. This does not take into consideration rotation.

On one hand, I want there to be a wide breadth of categories, or the other hand, we want to focus on the highest producing categories. We will only pay for search (keywords) in the most productive cats. Do we try to make our initial cat list more comprehensive, or more focused?

Also - what's the vote on the 1-2 categories that we will buy key words for. This will be the initial test of consumer response.

I like Dentist, Chiropractor. Any other ideas?

1 comment:

amyrabinovitz said...

I'm not crazy about dentists or chiropractors - seem to me to have less immediacy and goes into a medical arena that I think "fast" isn't as important as other factors. Depending on when we launch what about air conditioning - sales and service? Landscapers? Both have spring-time relevancy. Or plumbers, electricians, painters?