It’s not surprising that many businesses focus mainly on ranking well in Google’s local results, but working to rank well in some other search properties often has the benefit of helping to augment one’s rankings in Google, too.

Ranking well in directories can give your listing a better signal in terms of linking weight or citation value on other sites, so performing well in local on subsidiary sites may help to build your rankings back in Google.

There are other good reasons to spend some time improving one’s position on secondary search engines, too. Diversifying your sources of traffic can help to reduce your dependency on the big Google mothership, which is always a good thing.

If a chance algorithm update reduces your rankings for searches related to your business in Google, having some presence in other channels can help to offset the impact for your business.

So, here are a few search engines that you may not have considered. There is some variation in how many local searches are being conducted in each of these, but each have some amount of searches in which your business might benefit from being present.

Considering that Google estimates that around 20% of their searches may have some local intent, whatever amount of local searches happening on the following sites likely have some amount that would be relevant for your business.

Five Search Engines To Target For Local

1.  Twitter Search

Have you even noticed that Twitter has a search feature? Perhaps not. But, if you search for local businesses in it, you can sometimes find the ones which are more engaged with their customers.

To optimize for local searches in Twitter, be sure to set your company profile’s Location in it, using the city name and state. Don’t use geocoordinates for this field! While it might seem clever, it’s not human-friendly, and it likely wouldn’t be relevant for keyword/location search in Twitter.

Also, enable the “Tweet Location” to be added to your Tweets, and describe your business succinctly in the Description. Since a large component of Twitter’s search results page contains freshest Tweets, you should also frequently and consistently be Tweeting about your product/service topics, industry mentions in the news, pics of your products and store, and things of interest happening in your area.

Finally, you also need to develop increasing numbers of followers and interact with them to beef up how often your updates are retweeted to show that you have a level of influence. See also my earlier article, Harness The Power Of Twitter For Local Marketing.

Local search for Seattle Coffee Shops on Twitter

2.  Facebook Search

Facebook has become an extremely sticky portal, with consumers spending considerable time in it every day. So, it’s only natural to assume that they might also be conducting increasing amounts of searches from the ubiquitous search box at the tops of the site’s pages, and Facebook has quietly beefed-up their search results to where they’re becoming more and more useful, including Facebook’s local search results.

If you’re a local business, you may already be appearing in Facebook’s local results and have not even realized it, since Facebook has been displaying business listing locations from data providers for some years now. There are a couple of ways (primarily) for local businesses to integrate with Facebook.

If you’re already there under Facebook Places, you could claim your listing, add/correct your business categories, add your website/phone/email and hours of operation. And/or, you can “Create A Page” about your business, and customize it with all the pertinent information.

As with Twitter, you should also expect to need to consistently update the information consistently, add friends, and interact with your followers to demonstrate influence and engagement (which are vital to improving rankings in Facebook). What’s different is that Facebook Places also has a checkin service for mobile users, and the numbers and frequency of checkins may also be influential on rankings.

Note that having a picture avatar associated with your place may also influence rankings. For more advanced users, see my earlier article on how to leverage Open Graph markup for local SEO.

Local Search on Facebook for Dallas Plumbers

3.  Foursquare Search

Did you know you can search for businesses on Foursquare’s website? While socializing through checkins may be their main feature, the data they’re compiling is also making for a really strong local search engine. Businesses that claim their listing on Foursquare can customize it by adding categories, websites, and Twitter handles.

To further optimize, you need larger numbers of checkins than your competitors, get added to users’ lists, and it may be that paying Foursquare to offer a checkin special could also give your ranking a bump.

Finally, you also ideally want users to submit photos and tips for your place as well. See also my previous article exploring whether local check-ins are a local ranking factor.

Local Search on Foursquare for Los Angeles Restaurants

4.  LinkedIn Company Search

If you feel like your business type doesn’t lend itself to the sorts of searches likely to be conducted in Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, you might consider LinkedIn. LinkedIn is particularly suited for people who are searching for B2B providers, as well as for other professional services companies.

LinkedIn can be tricky to optimize for — you should set up a page for your company, upload a logo, add your website and specialties, your industry type, year founded, and your main address. Another big component involves encouraging all of your employees to set up profile pages on LinkedIn too, and getting them to associate their current job positions with your company’s listing.

The total number of employees with profiles on LinkedIn for a company may be a ranking factor — while that’s hard for you to control, it just reinforces the fact that you should encourage employees to join LinkedIn and associate their job history with your company.

For related tactics, see my article on how to leverage your employees for local search rankings.

Local Search on LinkedIn for Chicago Patent Attorneys

5.  Pinterest Search

This image sharing site is growing its audience phenomenally each day, and it’s reached the point where the overall traffic is potentially quite advantageous for marketers.

As such, I expect Pinterest’s search engine is getting more and more use, including by people who might search for your type of business (see my example of local Wedding Photographer search results, below).

To optimize for Pinterest, your business’s products/services would need to lend themselves to photographs, or your business location should be photo-worthy. But it’s not altogether necessary to meet those qualifications, you could report on local events via your Boards and Pins, and you can post all sorts of photos related to your area and your company. Optimizing Boards and Pins is fairly simple — include your local keywords, link to your business, and describe what you’re posting.

Finally, you should interact with Pinterest’s community, commenting on other’s photos, repinning them, and posting to public Boards. For more details, read my article on how to use Pinterest for Local SEO.

Local Search on Pinterest for Los Angeles Wedding Photographers

One thing you’ll notice in the search engines I selected above is that they all have a very strong social component. As these social sites and services gain a large enough market share, it’s important for businesses to pay attention to the volume of searches which may be conducted within those channels, including localized searches, and look for ways to make your business relevant in those platforms for those who may be seeking your products and services.

Considering how your business’s rankings in the search results in these sites can sometimes also influence your rankings in Google, local search optimization must now include some of the more specialized factors which can affect rankings in these specialized search engines — it’s no longer merely a matter of getting exposure for your website’s links and inputting your local citation “NAP” (Name, Address, and Phone number).

When I wrote that earlier article, I was aware that connecting a major shift in overall consumer behavior to a graphed trendline of searches in Google was a little loose in terms of causality.

There are many reasons why people search for a particular phrase, and many reasons why cumulative searches for the phrase can rise or fall. (Not to mention, there is uncertainty about what the actual volume of searches is in the graphs since Google obscures volume amounts, and there can be error in assuming that Google users reflect the same search patterns of users who may search elsewhere, such as in Bing.)

I had some basis for believing the Google Trends numbers back then, and for associating them with overall consumer behavior connected to “Yellow Pages” as well as for a number of other types of searches for businesses. I had worked for some years for Verizon’s online YP site, Superpages.com, overseeing analytics, among other things, and Superpages had occupied the top search result in Google for searches for “Yellow Pages” for quite a number of years.

The clickthrough rate for “yellow pages” searches was a large enough volume with enough consistency to see a correlation with the graphed line in Google Trends, and with some directory usage indicators. Google Trends also showed expectable seasonal spikes for various industries, and rises and declines in cumulative interest in topics (which is the basis for Google Zeitgeist which is also often cited as a pulse indicator for rises and drops in popularity).

So, when I saw the clearly-declining trend line for YP searches back then, it was concerning to me, and it seemed highly likely that the cause probably was that Google Maps (and other local search engines ) were having an impact on both print and online YP usage.

Users searching for “yellow pages” in Google were typically trying to find one of two things — they were either trying to find the Web address of their local yellow pages in order to conduct business searches online, or they were trying to find contact information for their YP company (either to order a phone book or to advertise in the yellow pages).

The drop in these searches appeared significant enough to reflect some major shift in consumer behavior — if those consumers weren’t trying to find a YP site to use, or a YP company from which to obtain a phone book, then they must be getting business info elsewhere.

What Did This Shift Tell Us About Local Searches?

So, did this demonstrate that yellow pages were being used less, and, did the yellow pages indeed become “toast” four years later?

It’s not possible to know exactly how much people use print yellow pages. There’s obviously no mechanism to independently measure all of the usage, so surveys are conducted along with various other ancillary measures for a sample set of people, and those figures are then projected out across the U.S. population to estimate overall usage.

Even so, it is clear that printed yellow pages book usage has been dropping:

Usage of Printed Yellow Pages Books Graphed Over Time

In the above graph, which was derived from yearly figures provided variously by the Local Search Association (previously named the Yellow Pages Association), one can see that print usage figures have generally been dropping since 2002.

(Note: The accounting methodology was was changed following 2007, so figures before and after are not necessarily quantitatively equivalent units, but I believe this graph is still a reasonable representation of the overall declining trend. Also, I didn’t have figures to include from 2011.)

When plotted out over time, it seems unequivocal that print YP usage has been dropping.

Yellow pages companies enjoyed a tremendous profitability over most of their one-hundred-year-plus history. The industry seemed so virtually indestructable that when I was first hired onto GTE Directories Corporation back in 1997, veteran employees commonly told me that YP company stock was a rock-solid “sure bet” and local businesses would “always need the yellow pages”. For the past generations, this was true.

Nationwide historical data reflects this profitability dramatically:

U.S. Directory Advertising Revenue – Yellow Pages Industry Revenue Plotted Over Time source: Douglas Galbi, Senior Economist, Wireline Competition Bureau of the F.C.C.

While the above graph only goes up to 2007, it can be seen that revenues began softening at around the year 2000. Other estimates I’ve seen of print YP revenue also indicate it flattened out and declined from 2007 to 2011.

In many markets, the decline in revenues can also be seen reflected in the size of local yellow pages books. Here’s a graphic comparison provided by Jeff Kron of a Denver yellow pages book:

Comparison of Denver Yellow Pages Books, 2006 vs. 2010 – Shrinking in Size Photo by Jeff Kron – Used with Permission.

The effect of declining revenues on the top YP companies over the last four years has been massive. Idearc, the company spun off when Verizon divested itself of its yellow pages division, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2009, along with R.H. Donnelley and Ambassador Media Group the same year.

While there were other big factors that impacted each of these companies in addition to reduced print profits, I would argue that factors such as the recession simply accelerated their rates of decline which would have happened anyway due to consumers migrating away from their printed product.

Most recently, AT&T signaled in January that they were looking to offload their directory division, and they are now in talks to sell a stake in the YP unit to the Cerberus Capital Management LP private equity firm. Very tellingly, AT&T’s relative valuation of their YP is sharply lower than Verizon’s YP spinoff valuation back in 2006 (1.5 times EBITDA now versus 8 times EBITDA back then) — and, the lower valuation indicates that financial analysts foresee reduced profitability over time.

As Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett stated about the AT&T selling off of YP:

“The window has already closed for selling Yellow Pages businesses at a meaningful price.”

While Chapter 11 reorganizations are not the same as a complete extinction of these companies, one could have expected them to emerge as much more agile competitors after reducing debt obligations.

However, the decline of print income is still impacting them each year, and there were continued layoffs of employees from both SuperMedia (the post-Chapt 11 name of Verizon’s YP) and Dex One (the post-Chapt 11 name of R.H. Donnelley) after they emerged from Chapter 11. Dex One is planning to continue cost-cutting into 2012 as well.

The more complex piece to analyze of the YP industry involves their online divisions: while their print divisions are experiencing longterm shrinkage, their online arms have grown in usage and revenues in some cases.

The YP industry challenge all along has been that they needed to grow their digital products to replace their legacy print YP books — and profits on the Internet side are considerably lower than the print ads. Imagine that they basically needed to replace each lost print customer with about twenty online customers, and you get an idea of the magnitude of their problem.

Newspapers, another similar traditional media industry, have faced virtually the same challenge and that industry’s revenue shows a similar trend graph over time.

What’s Next For Online Yellow Pages?

So, it appears that each of the big YP companies is still experiencing financial stress. To flourish, they need to develop their digital sides to replace their legacy products, while simultaneously evolving to compete with Google and other technological challengers. Those challengers’ strength in interactive marketshare doesn’t inspire confidence in the longterm chances for yellow pages.

But, there is more going on than meets the eye. Some of these companies have very healthy (and even growing) Internet traffic, and some have successfully leveraged partnership deals which help distribute their business listings out to consumers. They may be able to survive their diminishing print arms and develop sufficient niches to compete as viable longterm companies. I’ve suggested for a long while that they could stand to have one or more mergers which would allow them to reduce expenses more through synergies while combining marketshare.

Looking back over what the big YP companies have gone through, I’d say they definitely were “toast” and the prediction that they faced serious trouble was entirely justified. The industry had a massive reversal which was unprecedented in its century-long history. While there are some positive signs starting to emerge, the industry-wide adjustment still hasn’t completely played out.

Now for the question that many local businesses continue to try to figure out which is tied into this…

In 2012, Is It Still Worthwhile To Advertise In The Yellow Pages?

The answer to this question isn’t purely black-and-white, although industry proponents and opponents frequently characterize it as a simplistic yes-or-no answer.

I’ll try to make this super-easy for you to figure out if you’re a small business owner trying to decide whether to advertise in a printed phone book or not. Here are the facts as I know them:

• There are still people who use printed phone books! Therefore, there is some promotional value in advertising in the books, in general. So, the question really is whether there’s sufficient value for the advertising to make you enough money versus the cost. The ROI is harder to predict in every case, but we can somewhat generalize what the promotional value will be, based upon your particular type of business, the market area you’re located in, and the specific YP book in question.

• People sometimes present the YP advertising to me as an either-or deal: would I be better off dropping my print ad budget and putting it all into online? In some cases, the answer is yes. But in many cases the answer to that probably isn’t clear-cut. I advise putting advertising budget towards as many promotional channels as is feasible, as long as the channel does better than merely pay for itself. If a referral channel is doing that for you, I’m not obsessed about whether it’s print, Internet, or a guy on a streetcorner holding up a sign. Also, using multiple promo channels is healthier for a business than focusing everything in one — multiple lead generators make you less dependent on any one option.

• Yellow Pages books in larger metropolitan areas may be less valuable to advertisers. While there are larger populations in bigger cities, it seems probable that a larger percentage of the population there uses the Internet to find businesses compared to smaller towns. Also, there are typically more businesses listed in big city phone books, so your company could be hidden in a crowd of competitors. Large metro areas typically have a handful of yellow pages books published by competing publishers, too, and you can’t predict which ones will be kept and used by your potential customers (some people throw away all old books in favor of whatever newest book appears on their porch, while others only keep one preferred brand). And, ads in the larger metro books are often priced much higher than in smaller markets. So, I believe that major metro area phonebooks are likely less valuable to advertisers in most cases. There are exceptions, however, so please read on.

• Conversely, usage of yellow pages books in many small towns continues to be healthy. The books there contain fewer overall competitors, there are fewer competing phone books published, and ad prices are often lower. But, the main deal is that smalltown consumers seem to continue using the books at a higher rate than in larger cities. So, if your business is located in a small town, in general you should consider still advertising in the yellow pages.

• Independent directory companies have been profitable, even as some of the larger, better-known YP companies have faltered. An “independent directory” is a non-national company, and is not the “main” book publisher that provides directories branded with the local phone company’s logo. The indie publishers have likely performed better because they had to be more agile, functioning with lower operating expense, and incurring less debt. The indies typically have lower ad prices, too, so it’s possible in some major metro areas that the ad cost is sufficiently low enough to make advertising in them more worthwhile than in the incumbent, “main” phone book. This is iffy, though, and you have to carefully assess the indie book’s distribution numbers compared to the incumbent. In smaller towns I’d be dubious as to the worth of advertising in an independent publisher yellow pages book at all.

• Specialty directories may be a highly valuable advertising option in any size market! Specialty directories are a variety of independent directory which are targeted to particular demographic groups, such as Spanish-speaking consumers, Christian or Jewish customers, Vegetarians and individuals seeking to shop from businesses dedicated to the ethical treatment of animals, and consumers wanting to support ecologically sustainable businesses. Special interest groups of consumers seem to have a higher level of dedication towards businesses supporting their communities, so those types of books appear to be much more viable than the traditional YP books. Here in Dallas where I live, the Desi Yellow Pages and the Korean Yellow Pages appear to be very robust directories with highly engaged consumer groups. So, if your business qualifies for inclusion in a specialty directory, you should seriously consider paying up to be in it.

• Some business categories continue to be sought out more in print than others. If your company provides technological or luxury products/services, it would be expectable for your potential customers to be more inclined to seek you out via Internet, tablets and mobile phones. Businesses catering to lower-income customers should reasonably expect more referrals from offline information sources. So, figure out your average customer demographic when deciding where to place your advertising dollars.

• Old habits die hard. Older consumers continue to use print directories at a much higher rate than younger consumers, so if your business caters to older generations you need to still consider advertising in print.

• Some travel/tourist destination markets may enjoy higher directory usage. Phone books are still commonly included in most hotel rooms, so if your business is located in a city like Las Vegas or Miami you should consider paying to have an ad in the book. This guideline is also closely affected by your business category, too.

• Restaurants, with their coupons and menu lists, can have healthy referrals via print YP. So, even in large metro areas, restaurants might still benefit well from advertising in print.

• Even as print usage shrinks, advertising in the books can still be a profitable enterprise for businesses which sell high-ticket products and services. For instance, an attorney who obtains a single, multimillion-dollar lawsuit from a $40,000 ad could consider it money well-spent. Likewise, a contractor or luxury auto dealer might receive sufficient business from a high-priced YP ad to rationalize advertising in the book a lot longer than other types of businesses.

• Carefully check your local business category in your local phone book — while my generalization is that large metro areas might be a bad ad buy for most, if all of your competitors have bailed out of a book you could scoop up all the remaining referrals left. Some data indicates that the advertisers sticking with print advertising are enjoying pretty good call rates for this reason.

• Larger ads are often a worse value proposition. Try to go with smaller/cheaper print ads which still give you sufficient exposure to communicate a few key facts about your business which would persuade a customer to choose you. Larger ads don’t always equate in consumers’ minds with better businesses, so go with “just enough” exposure if you decide to be in print. Attorney and restaurant ads are some obvious exceptions to this rule — those industries may perform better with larger ads.

• Be sure to measure results!  Since this industry is changing so rapidly, it is really necessary to monitor and assess how good the ROI is if you are advertising in print yellow pages. When you design your ads, try to build in ways to account for each of the business referrals you receive from them. Use a tracking phone number (be careful to try to keep the tracking number off the Internet, though, or it could impair your online search ranking ability). Use a tracked version of your website URL (ex: http://example.com/track) and provide a special discount code which they have to repeat to you in order to receive a good deal. If you advertise in a book and you realize the referrals have declined too much for you to be profitable, then it’s time to pull your ads.

• Even if you’ve decided that the print ads in your book are no longer delivering, advertising in an online YP site could be worthwhile. And, it’s easier to assess the ROI of online advertising in most cases. So, assess if your YP company’s site has enough exposure (find out what partnerships they have, and all the places where your ad could appear if you advertise with them), and if it looks good consider advertising on it. Avoid packages which bundle Internet YP with print YP, since the bundled package may be designed to fluff up the perceived value of a declining print product. (Except, you should consider going with the bundle if you read my previous tips, decided that the print ad may be good in your case, and the bundled price gives you a sufficient discount on the combined print/Internet/mobile ad package.) Discontinue the ad if it isn’t performing, of course — with online ads it should be easier to test whether it’s working sufficiently for your business.

The print yellow pages was toast, but is it still worthwhile to advertise in them? It’s not a pure black-and-white world here in 2012 — there’s also yellow!

There continues to be usage of some of the books by some consumers in some areas, and if you carefully asses you can figure out if it’s still worth advertising in your local directory.

The Location Extensions allow local business advertisers on Bing and Yahoo! search results to display their addresses and phone numbers within the ads, similar to the Location Extensions in Google AdWords.

The interface for adding location extension information is pretty straightforward:

The Location Extensions are clearly part of the adCenter team’s intention to achieve feature parity with Google AdWords soon, as Eric Enge mentioned last month. One feature that differentiates Microsoft’s product a little from Google’s is the “Business icon” which only appears in association with the ads that are displayed on Yahoo!.

I spoke to the adCenter product managers (Shamit Patel, Peter Yang, Erin Zefkeles and Corinne Woodward) this week about the new features and they revealed a number of interesting details. The Location Extensions are unabashedly geared to make it easy for Google AdWords advertisers to copy ad campaigns into adCenter. Businesses such as nationwide department stores can upload up to one thousand locations at a time and associate them with an ad campaign.

I asked the team if they were concerned about whether the inclusion of additional information in the ads might detract from clickthrough interactions and reduce Microsoft’s revenues (since consumers could potentially just call phone numbers displayed and/or visit the store address in-person), and they stated that initial research indicated that would not be the case — display of the local information makes the ads appear more relevant to searchers, increasing clicks and overall engagement.

While the ads can be expected to increase calls and foot traffic to storefronts, they also increase CTR in testing. For anyone familiar with local online marketing, these findings are unsurprising and make it clear that there is likely to be some pent-up demand for location extensions for PPC ads appearing in Bing and Yahoo!.

A few other details:

• Microsoft doesn’t offer their own phone call tracking service, although advertisers are welcome to provision the ads using trackable numbers.
• Unlike Google’s Location Extensions, Microsoft doesn’t require the business listing to be drawn from Bing Business Portal. (From my perspective, this is actually a good thing, since Google’s requirement that location data be drawn from Google Places is less flexible and more restrictive.)
• Bing Business Portal profile pages can be set up as landing pages for these ads, if desired.
• Location Extensions currently will not show up on Bing/Yahoo syndicated search partner sites as of yet, but the adCenter team is evaluating other properties where the feature may appear sometime down the line.

The location extensions are a great addition for local search marketers, and will likely be advantageous for local companies to integrate as soon as possible, since they would likely result in more qualified clicks and store visits.

Shamit Patel reports that Microsoft intends to accelerate the rollout of more features, so I would expect more announcements from the adCenter team in the near future.

Google’s blog post on how local search ranking works stated that they use three primary signals for rank determination: Relevance, Prominence and Distance. Businesses have little control over Distance factors, such as their location in relation to searched placenames or to the geolocation of searchers.

Businesses also may be limited in Relevancy factors as well, since once you’ve incorporated your main keywords in your website and online profiles, and selected appropriate business categories, you may not be able to become any more relevant than you already are for a term. But, there can be a great deal of variability in terms of Prominence.

In attempting to understand what Google is evaluating to determine Prominence, it may be useful to think of it as “relative popularity”. If two businesses were to have essentially identical relevancy and distance factors, what sorts of things would Google algorithmically asses to determine which one should be listed first?

In the regular keyword rankings, the Google PageRank algorithm was initially based upon using the numbers of links pointing to a particular page, and their originating pages’ relative popularity, in order to compute a ranking value for the page in question.

Google likely still uses the PageRanks of businesses’ websites in calculating their rankings, along with other popularity signals such as “citations” — the numbers of times when the business and its address or phone number is mentioned in various places.

Yet, Google is ever on the hunt for other signals which might indicate relative popularity (particularly ones which are less easy to artificially manipulate).

For this reason, experienced SEOs suspect Google could be counting things like Facebook shares or “likes” and Google Pluses. Their “PlaceRank” patent hints at similar types of signals which could be used for local rankings as well.

So, this is where check-in services enter the picture. If you look at the data registered for locations by the most-popular check-in service, foursquare, you’ll see some metrics that would likely be very attractive for Google local search engineers:

The total number of people who’ve checked in at a location, and the total number of check-ins associated with it are great indicators of how popular it may be.

Check-ins could also be relatively difficult to game, so the data could be more trustworthy and indicative of actual human interactions compared to many other signals.

foursquare is not the only check-in service, of course — another with a compellingly huge potential usership is Facebook, and it has similar data associated with places:

(It may be worth noting that another top check-in service, Gowalla, was acquired by Facebook in late 2011. So, we might conclude that Facebook will be serious about the service longterm, despite their slightly muddied progress in handling local businesses and place pages.)

It’s one thing to predict that Google would be interested in check-in data, and quite another to assume that they have access to it. (Google has complained before of being unable to spider some of Facebook’s data.)

The check-in applications are heavily based upon proprietary mobile apps, and Google would either need some sort of SOA data feeds into it, or it would need to be published on webpages that could be spidered.

It doesn’t take much checking in the SERPs to find that Google can indeed access this data — the location pages from foursquare and Facebook are spidered by Googlebot and the numbers of people and check-ins can be interpreted, since they are showing up in the page Previews:

One indication that Google is taking check-ins seriously is that they had earlier rolled-out their own check-in service, Latitude, in 2009, and they’ve continued to develop it in clear imitation of foursquare — on Monday of this past week, they added a points system and Leaderboard for it.

It may not ever be possible to know for certain if Google is using quantitative check-in data for calculating rankings along with all of their other factors. As Danny Sullivan has noted before about this kind of data, “correlation isn’t causation“.

We might reasonably predict that businesses with greater check-in numbers would likely also have higher rankings, because they are more popular and there are also other signals of popularity that Google could be using in their algorithms.

But, check-ins are obviously the very sort of data that Google Local engineers would want to use for ranking determinations. Googlebot can spider webpages containing that data, and it could record and use that data. Google’s ongoing development indicates that they take this sort of service seriously, too.

For me, this is compelling enough information to warrent promotion of location checkins to enhance chances of rankings.

Optimization of business profiles in the Bing Business Portal (or “BBP”) is not difficult nor time-consuming. Microsoft’s newish Beta interfacing for administrating business listing details is actually pretty slick and easy to use.

10 Tips For Optimizing Local Business Listings In Bing

1.  The first key is to claim your business listing

As with other local search engines, having a business owner claim a listing helps to validate the information and establish that the business is active, helping increase “trust ranking” factors.

One of the hardest issues for local search engines and online directories to handle is figuring out which businesses have expired so that they can remove their listings from the databases — so, they have a horror of displaying stale listings to consumers. It’s reasonable to think that businesses which have some signal indicating they’re active will be more likely to be presented more prominently to searchers.

2.  Correct and standardize your basic business contact information

The core contact information needs to be consistently shown in all major places including in Bing Local. The basic contact data is the business Name, Address, and Phone # (a.k.a. “N.A.P.”) — along with the website URL.

3.  Add an image to your listing! 

One striking characteristic of Bing Local searches is how higher-ranking businesses appear to more frequently have images associated with their listings! (See also my earlier articles on optimizing images for local search here and here.) Could be that listings that have images are claimed, and rank higher due to that status, or it could be directly related to the presence of the thumbnails.

Either way, businesses that have pics may have greater chance of ranking well in Bing Local. Example – top two listings for a search for “intellectual property attorneys, chicago, il”:

4.  Set your hours of operation!

Bing Local business profiles actually include a small  sign icon. While I haven’t tested this, I wouldn’t be surprised if businesses might be a little more likely to rank better during times when they list themselves as being open, particularly in mobile search.

Even if it isn’t a direct ranking signal, however, the fact that the profile page gets the bright, attention-getting icon makes it worthwhile as a possibly conversion-increasing element!

5.  Check your categories, and add more where possible!

Business categories like “Plumbers”, “Florists”, and “Attorneys” are core elements involved in local search rankings, yet they can often be wrong or so minimally specified as to detract from the promotion potential that business listings would otherwise possess.

When a local search keyword matches a business’s category — either partially as a “fuzzy match” or as a thesaurus match — the listing is far more likely to rank for it.

6. Go a step beyond categories 

Bing appears to treat “Specialities” similarly to categories or like subcategories, so add relevant specialties.

7. For restaurants, integrate with OpenTable

Integrating with OpenTable to handle reservation scheduling will enable a convenient ”reservations” link to appear on the profile page in Bing.

8.  Add deals to your listing!

Bing appears to have also integrated with Groupon, so if you have a Groupon offer going on, it could appear with your local listing in Bing, too. But, Bing Group Deals may be set up directly within the BBP as well.

9.  Develop citations!

Just as with Google Place Search and Google Maps, Bing Local listings need to have citations and inlinks in order to rank well. Local citation sources which may be influential in Bing include YP.com, Superpages.com, Yahoo! Local, Manta, Judy’s Book, and more. Vertical directories also likely work well here, too, such as Restaurants.com, FindLaw.com, Dentists.com, Contractors.com, etc.

10.  Optimize your local business website

Having a well-optimized local biz website helps all of your external optimizations work hand-in-hand with the on-site optimization. Businesses with good website optimization have a better chance of ranking well and getting found by consumers seeking their products and services.

Bing and other search engines compare listing information against the information found on the website, so keeping the listing data and “N.A.P.” consistent helps reinforce and validate the vital local search criteria.

These basic local optimization tips are pretty obvious to any experienced local marketer, but it’s always amazing how many local businesses fail to check their listings for correctness, consistency and areas where information may be expanded or enhanced.

Sites which follow these simple tips often get an edge over their competition — and, in internet marketing the “early worm” which grabs marketshare first often gets an advantage that extends well into the future. For more details around optimizing local directory profiles, see my earlier article, Anatomy & Optimization Of A Local Business Profile.

For the purpose of this article, I’m using a broader definition for “local search” which includes local services and related marketing technologies through which consumers might discover local businesses and those businesses’ promotional efforts.

Online options for marketing and distribution of local business messages expanded over the past few years and throughout 2011.

Local companies now have a huge number of directory sites, services and technologies they may use in promotions, including local-targeted pay-per-click ads, daily deals platforms like Groupon (as well the Groupon-clones), check-in services like Foursquare, QR codes, etc.

Google’s Not The Only Game In Localtown

While Google’s sheer market share makes it a primary go-to place for finding local businesses (and therefore, a prime place for promoting them, too), other major players such as Facebook and Twitter also have sufficiently compelling audiences, and a myriad of other online directories and services form a second tier of effective marketing channels as well.

So, even though Google is a major place where consumers go to search for local stuff, it is still has not sidelined all competition enough to make it the only place, and the wide variety of promotion options for local businesses may be expected to be available for the foreseeable future.

Twitter Turns To Local?

Twitter’s local places efforts have still seemed very nascent in 2011, yet local business marketing is one of the primary areas where Twitter should be able to see even greater growth.

Expect to see more evolution of Twitter pages for local businesses with an eye towards expansion of paid promotion offerings available for businesses to use in promoting their brands, services, and products.

While some check-in services closed in 2011 (Gowalla and Bizzy, for instance), Foursquare continues to have a strong usership and just enough draw to keep its audience growing and engaged.

Can Facebook Check-ins Compete With Foursquare?

Meanwhile, Facebook’s check-in service still does not seem as robust or compelling as Foursquare’s. Others have opined that Facebook’s efforts to roll location into being available for via status updates could be some sort of acknowledgement that their checkin service simply wasn’t effective.

However, I see indications that users continue to use and like the main check-in service — I predict Facebook may find ways to make checkins even more compelling, perhaps with the enhancement of game dynamics and/or paid business promotions. Their acquisition of Gowalla’s personnel in December could breathe new life into the service, and they’re undoubtedly going to be gunning for Foursquare.

Foursquare itself may be expected to further evolve their service in 2012. Perhaps they will expand their advertiser base by offering greater flexibility and more types of advertising products.

One thing which confounds me is that they have not really tied-in some sort of loyalty program with the service — something that should be a no-brainer mashup. In fact, this makes so much sense that I’ll predict it is going to happen eventually.

Another point regarding Facebook — their overall product mixture for local businesses has simply been incoherent, and I can’t see that continuing. Local business information is muddled among numerous types of pages and quirky limitations: Wikipedia Location Articles / Facebook Pages / Facebook User Accounts / Check-ins / Groups / Business Categories / Etc.

SMBs are frequently confused by how they ought to go about representing themselves in Facebook, or claiming their existing listing profiles there. Is Facebook motivated to fix this incoherence? Would Facebook have enough clarity of vision and focus to do so? Or, is Facebook even aware of how poorly the integration of each local business option affects small business owners?

I predict that Facebook might further revamp their local suite, making it more coherent and much more of a juggernaut in local search. Facebook could easily become #2 in local search against Google if they were to merely focus a bit better.

Yellow Page Companies Continue To Fight For Local Relevancy

Yellow pages companies have been down, but not fully “out”, since some of the larger ones have been caught up in bankruptcy reorganizations over the past few years, multiple rounds of cost-cutting, and the aftermath thereof. These activities have distracted them from competing as aggressively as they might have otherwise.

Now that they’re leaner and meaner, they might be agile enough to compete better, although they would have to make up for lost ground and their knowledgeable personnel have shrunk and moved on to greener pastures in some cases (quite a number of my colleagues from Superpages now work for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!).

The notable exception among the large yellow pages companies is AT&T’s YP.com interactive division which has fine-tuned their branding, bumped up their organic traffic, engaged with mobile, and even experimented some with their own social media concepts.

Will having the insulation of their telco “mother ship” continue to give them enough leeway to experiment and evolve their products to compete effectively? Possibly.

They still need to answer the question posed by Google, Bing and other local services — if consumers find businesses directly through those other means, what is the compelling draw to attract them to YP.com? For now, I must predict that the glow of yellow pages from most IYP companies may continue to dim during 2012, while YP.com may stay in a holding pattern.

I can’t fail to mention the companies which feed into the IYPs — the data aggregators. I’ve believed for a while that data aggregation is poised for some collapse in the numbers of competitors since the shrinking directory market may not be expected to support so many suppliers.

However, the companies involved in these services have found ways to innovate via diversifications and strong partnerships or influxes of investment capital (for example Neustar’s acquisition of TargusInfo, the parent company of Localeze).

The tension involved with data “wanting to be free” versus the demand for local data and the needs of aggregators to monetize their work will continue to create some interesting evolution in this space, I predict. I still see some possible mergers in this niche, and more interesting partnerships developing among them with other interactive local companies.

I foresee further rise of vertical business marketing services and agencies specialized in local search for 2012. These firms seem to effectively bridge the gap between major marketing channels and the SMBs which need help in integrating an online marketing plan.

Companies involved in providing vertical marketing services include those focused on doctors, law firms (i.e. FindLaw), audiologists (i.e. Audiology Online), doctors, restaurants, dentists, and hotels (i.e. TIG Global).

Google Will Go-Ahead With Increased Integrations

One no-brainer for 2012 will be to expect further transformations of the Google Place Search and Maps algorithms. Google continues innovating in their various vertical search products, and particularly in local vis-a-vis Place Search and Maps.

Just before the beginning of 2011, Google moved their heavy-hitter, Marissa Mayer, from overall product development into laser-focus on Local products — and we may expect to see significant work to continue to come out of this high-priority zone within the Googleplex.

Indications are that Google Plus is not going to be just another abortive social media effort on Google’s part, and Google Plus pages for local businesses have not really emerged as of yet — I think we can expect some potential disruption to happen between the new Google Plus business pages and the current Google Place pages.

Even beyond this high-profile project to integrate Plus with Local, Google’s local team can be expected to continue to innovate in small, itterative deployments as they always have — but, perhaps at a more rapid intensity. They have suffered some from lack of coordination among their multi-pronged development efforts in the past, but this is part of what Mayer was brought in to address.

If Google Places/Maps solves some of the difficulties in coordination of multiple, simultaneous dev projects which all have touchpoints and overlap, the velocity of iterative changes may be expected to ramp up. This is one area where the 2012 dragon will roar!

Mobile Will Be Focal Point For Many

More businesses will focus on Mobile friendly websites this year. Mobile arrived and grew to over 100 million people in the US in 2011 (over 40 million access social networks daily via mobile, and eventually there may be more mobile web users than PC users by 2015).

I think we may expect some sort of industry standardizations in terms of consumer opt-in/opt-out permissions for location disclosure on mobile devices and apps. What do I mean by this? Well, there is no real industry standard yet, but consumers have become more aware of how mobile devices know their locations, and how specific applications may be using that information.

Also, 2011 saw some extensive cases where devices and apps snooped on locations as well as other personal data (read info on the Carrier IQ debacle), and European and United States governments began making louder noises about restrictions being placed to address privacy issues.

The industries involved are hyper-aware that their abilities to do business could be rapidly impaired due to oppressive regulation in this regard, so there are incentives for the industry to self-regulate, and for the industry to make personal data controls very clear and understandable to consumers. So, I predict some efforts at standardization and simplification across devices and applications.

Hijacked Listings & Spam Continue To Plague Local

This will also, unfortunately, still be a year for spammers to continue to exploit multitudinous openings in local search services as well. While each of the well-established online local players continue to fight against spam incursions, newer local services (including Facebook and Twitter) appear to be virtually wide open to all sorts of issues including false data, hijacked listings, and more.

Expect to see more of this going on in 2012, and perhaps ramping up in terms of seriousness, the variety of types of spam, and how visible the more widespread issues will become. Nearly all of the online information resources appear to be more intent upon rolling out additions and new services rather than expending energy on spam-fighting. Here’s one prediction about which I want to be wrong!

So, here it is: Year of the Dragon. You can expect more ongoing significant changes in the local search landscape this year. The trends are not slowing down, and the fractured nature of local online marketing shows little sign of getting simpler!

There’s a growing buzz amongst search engine optimization (SEO) circles at the moment that Pinterest is rapidly gaining traffic and traction (see Pinterest Gaining Traction for External SEO and Pinterest: Link Building & SEO Strategies).

You can see its virtually astronomical rise on Google Trends, compared with other popular image-sharing sites:

The cool thing is, the rising popularity of Pinterest is from real users who like the service and not just from marketers or spammers. I’m seeing many everyday users requesting invites (the service is still in beta), perhaps drawn to it by its attractive user interface coupled with social media features.

As a search engine optimization consultant, I’m interested in the ranking benefit that comes from particularly popular sites — but, Pinterest’s audience share is rapidly evolving into something cool, all on its own! So, even if it did not have a potential benefit to search rankings, the channel has a growing audience that makes it worthwhile for promotions.

I’ve previously written about how to optimize using Flickr because of its value according to my comparison of the SEO value of photo sharing services. Flickr has long enjoyed preeminence due to its optimal construction paired with its large audience of users.

But, the Google Trends graph above indicates that Pinterest’s usage may be surpassing that of Flickr — and, there’s one very big reason why its construction could provide more SEO benefit from its links than Flickr’s: the links are not NOFOLLOW-ed! So, Pinterest’s links can convey ranking benefit!

Tips For Local Search Engine Optimization On Pinterest For Local Businesses

• When setting up your profile, obviously you should not select the option to hide your profile from search engines, and you should use good “About” description text with keywords about your business. Also, set the location with your city name (such as “Dallas, TX”), add the URL to your company’s website and connect with your Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• If your website already has fair local rankings, consider using one of your best review pages from a prominent business directory site as your Pinterest profile’s website instead of your company website — doing so could help that positive review page to rank for your name searches.
• Set up Boards using your city name, to collect pics about your area (such as Dallas), and name a Board after your business type, products or services.
• Follow other Pinterest users in your area and Boards related to your areas of interest.
• Try to ”Pin” only good-quality, attractive pictures to your Pinterest Boards. Pinterest is highly visually-oriented, and to get any other users to show interest to your pictures they should be of good visual quality.
• When posting a picture to your locally-named board, describe it with good keyword text.
• Don’t “sing” with only one note — post pictures of other local sights to your board in addition to ones specific to your business. Showing an interest in your overall area will attract local consumers. Photos of local landmarks are particularly good for this. (For example, see this pic of one of the better-known Dallas Landmarks: http://pinterest.com/pin/257690409898241547/ )
• Vote on other good-quality local Pinterest users’ photos by clicking their “♥ Like” buttons.
• Have a good infographic designed which relates to your industry in some way, and use Pinterest to help distribute it.
• If you already optimize via Flickr, you can use those Flickr URLs to post your images on Pinterest — this could help further optimize the Flickr pages to rank well in searches.
• Cross-promote your Pins on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s a bonus tip: declare a Pinterest contest to customers who visit your establishment — offer compelling prizes to those who post pictures of your business and products.

Pinterest doesn’t provide more sophisticated features found on other image sharing services like geotagging of images. However, I think we can reasonably look forward to additional features which may also be useful for local SEO as the service matures.

It’s possible that Pinterest engineers may have purposefully omitted rel=”nofollow” on the links added by users to the service in order to help lure more usage growth.

Whether this was a strategic move on their part or merely an accident, one thing seems certain to me — Pinterest is likely to add NOFOLLOW to their links eventually, so if you’d like to get a little short term benefit, you had better jump on the bandwagon soon!

Related Articles:

• Using Images for Local SEO
• Is Pinterest The Next Great Place To Get Links & Social Mentions?
• Using Infographics in Social Media to Promote Content and Visualize Data
• A Guide To Geocoding Images For Local SEO

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a “what not to do” article (see What NOT To Do On Local Business Websites). But it’s worthwhile to emphasize some of the things I still see local businesses doing wrong in Google Places, since some of the more common stuff results in needless frustration and delays.

Nine Common Ways To Bork Your Local Rankings In Google

Again, do not try these at home!

1.  Use a post office box for your address

I know it doesn’t make sense – this should be alright to do for businesses which do not have physical addresses, and you may even find some competitors doing it, but Google Places doesn’t like it. If you register a new listing with a P.O. box, you can expect it won’t rank for many primary keyword combinations. (For background on this subject, read about Google Places and businesses without addresses.)

So, find a street address to use for your business. Use your home addresss (often not ideal for privacy/security reasons), or partner with another business that will allow you to share their street address, or contract with a company that provides mail service with a local address.

2.  Add directions into your street address

Including directions in the street address field (ex: “on corner with Elm Street”) can result in your map location being messed up and/or can cause Google difficulty in linking information from other business directories for your listing.

Either leave the directions up to Google’s automated map features, or include the helpful directions in the description field, if you absolutely must.

3.  Tell Google not to display your address

This often goes hand-in-hand with businesses that use P.O. box addresses, but not always. What’s confusing about this is that Google Places provides this as an option, but they neglect to tell you that it may royally affect your ability to rank. The reason is that they prefer to show business locations on the map, and their algorithm is instantly dubious of any business that obscures its office location.

So, if you’ve traditionally used a P.O. box and are thinking of switching to your home address in combination with not displaying it, then think again. Okay, theoretically, you might be able to develop enough credibility with Google Places to overcome whatever governors they have on rankings for address-obscured companies.

But in practice, this is such an uphill battle with no information or feedback from Google about your status that you might as well avoid the beating at the begining and simply don’t toggle your address display off.

4.  Use product names and place names in the business category field

It’s confounding that these are free-form, and it’s silly that Google doesn’t merely warn you if they detect a place-name in this data field for your Place page. But what Google wants here is just the business type, such as “Accountant”, “Florist”, “Attorney”, or “Electronics Shop”.

Do not put the names of products here (generally), nor your city names, even when combined with the category name. Google really hates this and it might even get you dinged!

5.  Use a call tracking number as your business’s phone number

There are folks that have a fetish for statistical data who like to argue with me over this one, but there continues to be a pretty good consensus among those of us who are expert consultants for local SEO as to our stance on the matter.

Using an alternate phone number makes it harder for Google to match up your data from multiple sources across the local ecosystem, which can reduce your ability to rank.

For most small, local businesses, rankings and performance in search results ought to trump the desire to have tracking to see where your phone calls originate. Performance is a necessity, and analytics in this case is a comparative nice-to-have!

Google has come out and officially stated not to use tracking numbers, too: “Types of phone numbers that should not be included are: call tracking numbers and phone numbers that are not specific to a business location.”

6.  Post some shill reviews in Google Maps

Getting your employees to help you in posting positive reviews for your business, and/or posting negative reviews about your competition, could result in your listing getting flagged by users and automated algorithms.

People can often sense that a review may be false, and this can result them stating their suspicion outright in their own review under your listing, for all to see, or they may report the listing to Google.

Either way, any juice you got from those reviews might get revoked along with anything else you’ve touched in Google. False reviews are against the law, too, so stay away from this dishonest, bad practice. Instead, harness the power of reviews in acceptable, positive ways.

7.  Make radical changes to your business name, address or phone

Changing your address or business name in Google Places is highly risky to the stability of your rankings. Google canonicalization algorithms may struggle to match up your data from across the Web afterwards, and it could even cause your listing to get flagged as potentially compromised or as an attempt to manipulate.

Expect a few weeks of disruption to your rankings at minimum, assuming you can change all the various citation references out there to match. If you can’t get them to mostly sync up consistently, then expect longterm ranking impact and perhaps also ongoing problems in terms of duplicate listings, too.

If you occupy a really great ranking spot, you might consider leaving it as-is.

8.  Add lots of fictional office listings in each city all over your metro area

Once you’ve poisoned the entire pond, the negative effects will eventually come back to roost with the rankings of your real, original location!

You may think you can add listings all over without Google detecting it, but your competitors will “helpfully” flag each listing and tell Google that you’re not really there. Expect to have your faux listings tank in the rankings and they’ll take your real, original listing with them.

9.  Ignore that your map pinpoint location is completely off

You may be an ADD, multi-tasking, stressed-out small business owner, but this is something you’d better pay attention-to or it can irritate potential customers, reduce your walk-in traffic, and even get your listing erroneously flagged as out-of-business before your realize it.

So, check your map location and use the tools to correct it if you’re significantly off.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be publishing this list. After all, these items result in loads of work for those of us in local search marketing. However, untangling borked business listings is more difficult than setting up a fresh, new business profile completely from scratch.

So, avoid these bad practices so that you can spend more energy on further promotion efforts, rather than trying to correct something that’s been borked!

I’ve written in the past about using press releases for improving PageRank, and as a vehicle to get reporters to promote businesses. Press releases are nearly a throwback to an older time period — they follow a moderately standard format and have been used for over a century to announce new developments to newspapers and other news media.

Perhaps it’s this semiformal nature of the press release that makes many small businesses overlook it when planning ways of promoting themselves. But, press releases are not just for large, national companies.

Press releases are a great source of links (when links are included in them). The websites that host press releases can be worthwhile for link weight, and newspapers or other news sites may sometimes publish the entire release as well. In the past, this near-instant PageRank value conveyed by issuing PR was considered very worthwhile.

But incorporating press releases into your marketing mix includes other compelling reasons that go beyond the value of links you might get. (And, as Google and Bing have become more sophisticated, it could be that press releases are no longer high-quality sources for links, and some sites may be “nofollowing” links in press releases when redisplaying them, negating their link value.)

Press releases are a promotional vehicle that can help you gain more attention for your company. When done effectively, they help you attract attention you might then be able to translate into more customers and sales.

Releases can still function in the classic way, by getting the interest of a local newspaper reporter, who could then choose to do a story about your company for his or her publication. In this day and age, press releases can also get paraphrased or reported on by bloggers, too – I’ve had press releases picked up by specialized industry blogs, bringing attention to my topic from communities interested in the subject matter.

For local businesses, press releases can be an effective source for local citations, particularly since they can get picked up by geo-authority websites such as local news.

Finally, press releases can coordinate well with social media, so using services like Facebook and Twitter to push the PR can help generate more overall buzz about your business.

Tips For Using Press Releases For Local Online Marketing:

• Be sure to cover the basics — specify the who, what, where, why and when.
• Naturally, mention the city and other locality names for the “where” to target your local market, and to help develop relevancy in local search relevancy algorithms. Local businesses should include their full street address and phone number near the end of the press release to get any possible citation value from it.
• Tell a story with each press release! Providing a human interest narrative can help get your publicity distributed. Go beyond a terse listing of the facts; write with a wider audience in mind to better appeal to those who might be inclined to push mentions out via their social media accounts.
• Perform keyword research and include the local phrase combinations that best match what more consumers would be searching for when seeking the topics you’re writing about.
• There are many press release sites/services out there. Some free PR sites can be worthwhile, but some of the paid options have advantages as well. Will the release be permanent? Are links allowed? Will it get distribution through news search or major news sites?
• Include images optimized for local search, for press release distribution services that allow it. Some of them allow embedding a video, which is also helpful.
• Including an optimized PDF version of the press release can also help — it can result in multiple pages linking to your site versus one release, and PDFs sometimes get copied and re-hosted elsewhere, resulting in more link options.
• Include a press releases section on your website, and archive copies of your PR in there. This is yet another valuable keyword content source for your own site.
• Include a few links to your site in your press release. You could also include links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts instead of a couple of the links to your site.
• Promote the press release itself once it’s issued, by linking to it, mentioning it in your own social media accounts and sending it directly to local reporters and hyperlocal bloggers in your area. Just exercise due diligence beforehand to be sure you’re sending it only to people who might be interested in it. A press release about a cool new hamburger is not going to be of interest to reporters who only cover city council politics or bloggers who only focus on the local music scene.
• Here’s a tip borrowed from Matt McGee: Only issue a release when you have something newsworthy to report — don’t waste journalists’ time. Since journalists are not the only consumers of press releases any more, let’s take this a step further and avoid issuing press releases that wouldn’t interest your target audiences of consumers, journalists and bloggers.
• Avoid PR fatigue in the public by not issuing releases too often. Also, use different distribution services over time to diversify where your releases are appearing.

Using these techniques can help you in promoting your local business. However, the best press releases are planned with sophistication, savviness and good writing. It can take experience to do a good job of it. If you haven’t done it before, it can be helpful to hire a professional to do it on your behalf.

Incorporating images as part of your overall content mix is a good idea for search optimization in and of itself. Images can provide additional opportunities for keyword signals on a page, and they represent good opportunities for ranking in search results under Universal Search.

But, if they’re also associated with places properly, they can convey additional location signals, helping a business and/or its website to be considered even more relevant for local searches.

If you’ve explored around Google Maps for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few images associated with local places in the interface. Google uses a few different methods for identifying image locations.

If you geocode your images in some way, it gives Google and other search engines high confidence that the content should be associated with a particular place.

Geocode Images With Photo Sharing Services

One of the easiest ways to geocode an image is through using one of the top image sharing services such as Picasa, Panoramio or Flickr. (FYI, Picasa may be renamed “Google Photos” soon.)

In each of those services, you can upload a photo, then add various elements such as titles, descriptions/captions, tags and associate images with locations by dragging them over a map:

When you map photos via these sharing services, they take the longitude and latitude geocoordinates associated with the map location and store them with the image’s information. Google Maps reads in syndicated feeds of the images from these services and then is able to use the geocordinates to pinpoint them in the images layer in Maps.

But you may be wondering, once you have geocoded the pictures in an image sharing service, how should you then associate those pictures with your company?

You could leverage the hosting through the image sharing service, and display them on the pages of your site. Alternatively, you may also link to your site from the image sharing service’s pages. Both of these methods may augment your local search signal, and may be particularly efficacious when used in combination.

Using GPS Enabled Cameras & EXIF Data

In addition to the above, a slight variation on this technique would involve using a GPS-enabled camera upfront in the process to take your photos, and then uploading them into the photo sharing service.

GPS-enabled cameras will store the geocoordinates in the image file’s EXIF (EXchangeable Image File format) data. EXIF is a format for storing meta data about the image, such as date/time of the photograph, type of camera used, the image’s color profile, geolocation, and other info. Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa will all read out the geolocation from the EXIF info, and translate it into the geocoordinates when mapping the image.

Having the geocoordinates in the EXIF data may have some slight advantages to merely mapping a non-geocoded image, because image sharing services like Flickr will publish the EXIF data onto HTML information pages in conjunction with the image — so, the coordinate pair provides yet another crumb of local signal on the pages associated with your image content.

Using An Image Sitemap

Another method which you can use is to store images directly on your website, and then add an image sitemap file which includes a geolocation element for each image.

However, it’s unclear precisely how Google uses the geolocation info from image sitemaps. The XML schema only requires a string for the location, and uses a city and country like this, for example:

Image sitemaps appear to be mainly geared towards enabling Google’s Image Search to find and rank pictures. So, the geolocation code probably only affects how relevant an image is considered to be for a query, depending upon the geolocation of the searcher or if the query includes local qualifiers such as the city name.

It’s possible that you could enter an entire street address into the image sitemap, or even the geocoordinates for more precise pinpointing. But it does not appear to me that the geolocation data with image sitemaps is communicated over to the Google Maps silo at this time, and perhaps using the lat/long coordinates wouldn’t work at all. (If inclusion of a full street address or lat/long coordinates would work, Google should provide more examples or a better description in their help pages covering the topic.)

In the past, some developers might have geocoded their images by storing each image on a separate webpage, and then geotagging the webpage.

However, I consider this a poor technique at present, because it doesn’t clearly communicate to search engines whether the geolocation is specifically referring to the image, the website, or other subject matter that may be on the same webpage. All the other techniques here make it clear that the geolocation is referring to the image itself.

Manually Embedding Image Location Data

Another technique for geocoding an image would be to use an EXIF editor and manually embed the longitude and latitude coordinates into it. Google suggests this as a method for adding geocoded images into Panoramio, so this is not a risky method, even if it may seem a trifle arcane.

There are a number of programs out there which will allow you to edit an image’s EXIF data. Google’s Panaramio documentation recommends Exifer, although the Exifer site says the software hasn’t been updated since 2002.

Even so, it probably would function just fine, so long as it will run on your system. There are other EXIF editor packages, too. Here’s an example where I input the coordinates of the CN Tower in Toronto, using the free version of the Zoner Photo Studio:

As you can see, the software provides a fairly intuitive interface for inputting the lat/long values, and a map interface to dynamically show where the coordinates are plotted. (In Zoner, this interface can be accessed under the File -> GPS menu.)

The map can also be used to pinpoint the picture location by panning and zooming to locate the place and then clicking where the image was shot. (If you don’t know how to get the precise geocoordinate numbers for a street address, refer to my earlier article on How To Geocode An Address & Optimize Location Pages.)

To view the EXIF data for my example image of the CN Tower, you can use an online EXIF viewing service such as Jeffrey’s Exif viewer — click here to check it out. There are various other browser extensions and software packages that can be used to view and edit the EXIF data as well.

Once it’s geocoded, you can upload it to one of the photo sharing services such as Google Panoramio, Google Picasa, or Flickr (you should first enable settings allowing geocoded photos to be automatically mapped when uploaded). Once uploaded at one of these services, it will eventually be automatically spidered and made available via Google Maps.

Be sure that the image upload service you use is now correctly displaying the image’s location on a map, and does not make any mistakes reading the coordinate pair.

Google’s Panoramio instructions indicate that some EXIF data cannot be interpreted by them, so be sure the data is accessed and that the image is mapped to the correct location in Google Maps afterwards (the Google Maps interface that is integrated into Panoramio).

Likewise, the image’s mapped location may be checked in Flickr and Picasa as well, via the map interfaces and EXIF content pages they generate.

Having the geolocation embedded in the EXIF part of the image file may be the best option from an optimization perspective, because it not only allows you to leverage one of the image sharing services to get your images connected with maps, but also because you may then store the image on your website where the locational data might help to further augment all the other basic local SEO methods you’re using.

Schema.org As A Geocoding Technique

Probably the newest image geocoding technique would involve using the schema.org protocol which the search engines recently announced, and which allows you to tag individual images on your webpages using Micro Data. Under this protocol, you could use the ImageObject type and embed a contentLocation property within it to specify the place.

At present, though, I think that the location content is likely not yet being absorbed by Google’s Image Search or by Google Maps, nor by other search engines. While this technique has a lot of advantages, it is still too early to effectively leverage — but, stay tuned and expect that this method may well become a defacto standard along with embedded geolocation in EXIF data.

Thus far, I believe you get more local search benefit from uploading geocoded images to the image sharing services I highlighted here, since they are well-integrated with Google Maps.

However, as the search engines become more sophisticated, and as more cameras (and camera phones) integrate location data in image files, we might reasonably expect this information to be harvested and used in local search ranking evaluations wherever images may be stored on the internet.