The short answer I give them is that they can likely fix their particular issues by verifying and updating their information at each search engine’s Local Business Center or Local Listing Center individually. It’s (usually) a fairly painless process that yields quick results.

But the long answer to their question usually would require a deep consultation from an experienced local search marketer, and even then might only result in an educated guess as to where that bad or out-of-date information was coming from.

Amazingly, Local search might actually be more complex than traditional search. My “spaghetti” diagram of data provider relationships has intimidated more than a few marketers, let alone the handful of small business owners who have probably seen it.

Things in the Local Search space are out of the control of the typical small business owner; even if they know about the Google Local Business Center, Yahoo Local Listings, or Bing Local Listing Center, they’re only covering half their bases (according to last year’s 15 Miles survey.) And other portals and data companies typically don’t push updates live with the same alacrity as Google and Bing.

At our recent Local University in Spokane, Mike Blumenthal explained to small business owners how Google and Bing assemble a Local listing. Mike explained that the major search engines pull in a number of disparate pieces of information (street address, phone number, hours of operation, etc.) about a business from just about any source they can crawl – obviously weighted more heavily towards sources they trust, including their own Local databases.

He further blew our minds with the notion that this two dimensional chart of location information not only expanded infinitely in two dimensions to cover additional local information sources, but also extended into three dimensions, with time as the additional variable.  Suggesting, in other words, that recent changes to listing information that aren’t corroborated by other sources may be overwhelmed by the weight of a particular listing’s history!

This lack of transparency and understanding of how listing “clusters” are formed understandably leads to frustration on the part of the business owner, particularly when his experience to date has simply been to tell the Yellow Pages rep how he’d like his information represented year after year.

The bottom line: if you don’t claim and verify each and every listing on each and every search engine and data provider, Google and the other search engines are forced to make a “best guess,” by clustering information that seems to match up, and they don’t always guess right.

If there are listings that are showing information you don’t want to appear, or duplicates that you’d like to consolidate, somewhat counterintuitively you’ll want to claim all of them (at least at Google) and attempt to merge them as described here.

No doubt about it, the local search engines and data companies have a tough job to try to show the most current contact information for tens of millions of businesses, consolidate many different taxonomies, and make sure that nefarious parties aren’t trying to hijack that information.

I’d love to see a more open, less time-intensive industry initiative that allows business owners to “push” accurate information to the major players in local search, though. KML and geositemaps may be one way to do it. For instance, the presence of a KML file on a merchant-verified top-level-domain that any local search crawler can grab any time it chooses. This solution, though, would require some central repository for verified domains which would be a massive effort in-and-of itself.

But hey, if the Big Three search engines were able to come together on the sitemaps protocol, there’s still hope that they and the Big Three data providers can come together on something like this.

In the meantime, at the risk of drawing the ire of equine rights advocates for continuing to beat a very dead horse, maintaining ironclad consistency of basic information like Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP), in as many places as possible, online and offline – is critical for search engines to associate the correct information with your business.

Traditional search marketers far and wide – including some of the absolute best in the industry – have recognized that the 10-pack/7-pack has changed the game for them and have voiced their (mostly negative) opinions. Many of their criticisms, such as weak IP targeting in rural areas and lack of relevancy of certain 7-packs have plenty of merit.

Despite the outcry from marketers, however, I think we’re going to see even more local search results popping up in 2010. There’s still a wide gap between the number of searches with local intent (or possible intent) and the number of local results being returned.

Back in 2008, and probably even earlier, Danny Sullivan predicted we might eventually see organic results for certain phrases displaced entirely by local ones, and the trend towards personalization certainly suggests that we’re headed that way.

But these results may not always take the form of a SMB or Local Business Listing set. There are plenty of other location-sensitive result types that may start to get increased visibility, especially at Google, in the coming months.

Local news

For the intelligent newspapers that aren’t actively trying to block the search engines, location-sensitivity is probably going to get them more visibility through search than ever before. Already I’ve noticed on my Yahoo homepage that three or four stories from The Oregonian and other area newspapers are consistently linked from my “Top News” widget by default. Google News shows up for many “Query Deserves Freshness”-type searches already; how long before Google starts to layer in a location-sensitive component to that part of their algorithm?

Blogs

While blog results don’t typically get the same visibility in Universal Search that news results do, the recent discovery that Google is pulling excerpts and extracting sentiment from HyperLocal blogs seems to signify that Google may be moving in this direction. Outside.in already appears to be an attractive acquisition target, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they announce a partnership with at least one of the major search engines in 2010, particularly as HyperLocal blogs continue to gain market share at the expense of traditional local news.

Real-Time social recommendations and reviews

Yellow Pages companies have been hit hard by the 10-pack in terms of their organic search referrals. But integration of real-time or social recommendations into personalized search might be one way Google will placate them. The companies that partner with Google to display review content in Place Pages (Citysearch and CityVoter, for example) have already raised awareness of their brands among a lot of Google users, and the successful ones will turn into destination sites in their own right (which Yelp has already done to a large extent.)

For discovery-oriented searches like “Things to do in,” “Places to eat in,” or “Best bar in” it would not be difficult for the major engines to incorporate Twitter streams (or perhaps Facebook, in Microsoft’s case) for those searches already.

Inventory

Display of accurate local inventory is obviously a huge hurdle for both search engines and businesses to overcome, but the old Research Online, Buy Offline adage suggests the engine that is the first to figure it out will have discovered perhaps the “holy grail” of local search. We’ve already seen product ads tested as a new Adwords type in recent months, and Google’s integration of local inventory with products signals that they’re trying to stay at the front of this curve.

Events and calendars

When creating public calendars, Google has asked for location information for years, as well as offering the ability to map a location  (even for private calendars) directly in the “Add Event” interface. Yahoo, of course, has Upcoming.org which also requires location information as part of its submission process. At some point, I think both search engines will display events from public calendars in universal search results, though probably further downstream than a number of other content types on this list.

Photos and videos

Perhaps the most oft-quoted piece of trivia in the search marketing industry is the fact that YouTube is the Internet’s second-largest search engine. Panoramio and Flickr have long offered users the ability to geotag their works. Many of these photos are already linked from Google’s de facto “city portal”- the authoritative OneBox that shows up for non-specific city searches (like this one.) We may soon start to see thumbnails of local videos or images for businesses showing up in Universal via the same interface as generic images and videos do already.

MyMaps

Chris Silver Smith already highlighted the value of optimizing MyMaps, so I won’t rehash his entire article; these MyMaps are already showing up in the sidebars of Place Pages, as well as “city portals” like this one. Google has consistently demonstrated a wiki-like commitment to the wisdom of the community of Google users…it seems to be only a matter of time before MyMaps start to show up in Universal search results.

Real Estate

The MLS’s days are numbered. I’d bet that Google Base 10-packs will be integrated into Universal results for “homes for sale in ____” searches by the end of 2010. This is going to be a game changer for real estate companies just like the 10-pack has been for local businesses. If you’re a small business in the real estate space, I’d start paying very close attention to the performance and optimization of your Google Base listings.

The bottom line for SMB’s

With the exception of the last one (real estate), if you’re a small business owner, most of these are going to be relevant for a wide variety of industries, and have a pretty low barrier to entry with respect to cost. They’re certainly longer-tail optimization strategies right now.

While I’d certainly start by “blocking and tackling” around my Local Search listings, keeping yourself aware of how Google is integrating local content into Universal Search in the coming year should give you a competitive edge in the long run.

Let’s take a look at some of the most significant developments that have contributed to the evolution of local search in the last year:

1) Local goes universal — big time.

Per Andrew Shotland’s #1 prediction for 2009, Google made several moves to increase its already dominant position in the local search space — none bigger than its release of the generic 10-pack on March 31. While its earlier release of the "K-Pack" and later refinement to the 7-pack were each noteworthy in their own right, the appearance of Local Business Listings across such a wide variety of phrases opened the eyes of Google users, observers, and competitors to the local frontier, and really set the tone for the year.

Yahoo followed suit in December with its own introduction of local results to generic SERPs, while Bing included an "8-pack" from day one of its June launch.

2) Tough times for the Yellow Pages industry.

Even before the introduction of the generic 10-pack, the ever-prescient Chris Silver Smith had some excellent advice for Yellow Pages companies about how to adapt to the changing local search landscape — advice that still holds 11 months later.

But even for those companies whose properties are well-optimized for organic search (per studies by Andrew Shotland and Ash Nallawalla), the 10-pack has slowed referral traffic from Google considerably, and even Google Suggest thinks the end may be near for the industry as we know it.

Google’s accidental indexation of Place Pages during their initial release in October had the potential to choke Internet Yellow Pages traffic even more before Google rectified the glitch.

The annual ComScore/15miles local search study may not portend such a depressed view for the Yellow Pages as a whole, but certainly forecasts a continued decline for the print side.

3) Major upgrades to the Local Business Center(s).

Perhaps Google’s most visible upgrade to its Local Business Center, at least for small business owners, was its release of LBC Analytics in late May, providing basic traffic statistics, information on coupon views, and requests for driving directions. While most SEO’s, including Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee find the data from LBC Analytics borderline useless, two excellent tutorials on segmenting 10-pack traffic via Google’s actual Analytics program were published by Martijn Beijk and Mike Belasco & Mary Bowling.

Later in the year, Google also made public a long-rumored "whitelisted" bulk upload feature for larger companies, and announced a beta ad unit that we are sure to see more of in 2010 — Local Listing Ads — a flat-fee, no-keyword-research-required offering for small business owners based on their Local Business Listings.

Google also put in place clear guidelines in the fall for do’s and don’ts of its LBC, with a few noteworthy changes to combat spam, as well as a guide to the Local Business Center in April.

Bing added phone verification to its Local Business Center soon after it launched, bringing its submission process up to par with Google’s.

4) Continued problems with local data.

All of the local search engines do a "pretty good" job with location data accuracy, but is that job "good enough?" Perhaps not when it comes to police departments, hospitals, or other emergency services, whose Authoritative OneBox results all came under increased scrutiny this year.

OneBoxes featuring merged listing information also raised quite an outcry among SEO’s and SMB’s numerous times throughout the year, although a Search Marketing Now webcast with representatives from the major data providers did an excellent job of clearing up some of the confusion as to why these data problems exist.

Many are caused by NAP ("Name Address Phone") inconsistencies or overlaps, as Gib Olander of Localeze preaches every chance he gets. Despite the measurable promise held by call-tracking numbers, I’ve also advocated for consistency of NAP information on multiple occasions, at least until something akin to a canonical phone tag is adopted by the major players in the local search ecosystem.

And there’s still no solution to the "service area problem" from any of the search engines or data providers for which Miriam Ellis and Chris Silver Smith, among others, have been clamoring for years.

Beyond business data, local search also incorporates a geo-spatial element, of course. Google made a "tectonic shift" on this front in October to eschew data from its former provider, TeleAtlas, in favor of its own. Microsoft continued to update its own VirtualEarth product with more accurate geo-spatial information.

5) Continued problems with Map Spam and Map Jacking.

What 2009 Year-In-Review would be complete without at least a passing mention of locksmiths and their penchant for the darker arts of Local SEO? Muckraker extraordinaire Mike Blumenthal did an excellent job covering the onslaught over the course of the spring.

Things got so bad that Matt McGee asked if it was time to send Google Maps back to the drawing board. Bing was not immune to the scourge of the local search industry, either, and even state attorneys general started to get involved in cracking down on criminal behavior.

To Google’s enormous credit, locksmith-infested SERPs have been pretty clean since late summer are now made up almost entirely of legitimate business owners. Next up in the game of Map Spam Whack-a-mole is likely plastic surgeons.

Less humorous was the frequency of hijacked business listings which even reached as high as the LBC entry for the White House. Google seems to have largely taken care of this issue system-wide as well.

6) Continued problems with small business advertiser "churn."

The Borrell Report in early June highlighted a shocking 50% year-over-year "churn rate" for small business customers who advertise online. Of course, when you consider how many SMBs are being sold a "bill of goods" or are falling victim to other predatory tactics, it’s a little less surprising.

But even companies as large as Google continue to struggle with the customer-facing aspect of serving small business customers. Google began sending email newsletters in August and sent stickers to 100,000 businesses named "Favorite Places" in December as part of a more aggressive outreach campaign than anything we’ve seen to date.

Nonetheless, it has been lambasted for its lack of Local Business Center support almost monthly by the Local SEO community. While Miriam Ellis’ hopeful New Year’s Resolution for Eric Schmidt did not come to fruition in 2009, things are looking up for 2010.

7) The rise of local-social interactions.

Without a doubt, 2009 was the year that Twitter became a major player in local search. Their API added location awareness in August, and just last week Twitter bought TownMe, the owner of GeoAPI. Twitter has truly become a critical component for local online marketing, and released a "101 for Business Owners" including best practices and case studies.

Yahoo added a major local social component to its product suite — Yahoo Neighbors — and Google began displaying customer sentiment via reviews much more prominently on Place Pages, something Bing did several months sooner.

Offerings such as Praized’s Local Buzz which incorporate online word-of-mouth about local businesses are sure to pick up even more steam in 2010.

8) Major partnerships and almost-partnerships.

By far the biggest story of the year was the one that didn’t happen — Google’s reported $500 million offer to buy Yelp that seems to have fallen through. As Mike Blumenthal pointed out, the powerful combination of Google Maps for recovery searches and Yelp for discovery searches would have sent shockwaves through the entire local search industry.

Still, some smaller partnerships hold potential for the future as well. Citysearch has been the most active player, announcing partnerships with Twitter, MySpace, and Mapquest in the last nine months. Yellowpages.com also made a nice deal with Microsoft to power sponsored results on Bing Local.

9) A groundswell of hyperlocal content.

Despite a continued lack of respect from traditional media, the future looks extremely bright for hyperlocal bloggers, thanks to some major distribution deals inked in the second half of the year. Hyperlocal hotbed Seattle is blossoming thanks to its community’s collaboration with the Seattle Times. Nationwide, deals between MSNBC and Everyblock, as well as Bing’s Local Lens project show that Microsoft is clearly moving in a local direction.

Scrappy startup Outside.in, after beefing up its own search capabilities, received a $7 million investment from CNN, meaning hyperlocal content now has the chance to go National. And Yahoo’s homepage has been displaying local news stories inline with national ones for months.

Smaller players like Citysquares and the aforementioned Praized also announced content syndication possibilities this year.

And then there’s Google, which has continued expanding its definition of local content by incorporating real estate listings from Google Base into Maps and tieing in local inventory options to its product search.

What’s coming in 2010?

A few off-the-cuff predictions include:

• more momentum for location-based microformats and KML
• more mergers and content partnerships, especially among the non-Google players
• more mobile-local synergy with initiatives like Favorite Places / QR codes and Microsoft’s slick new "Street Side" experience

While 2009 was certainly a thrilling year for the local search industry, 2010 is sure to be every bit as exciting — and then some. Have a safe and Happy New Year, everyone!

In fact, like so many other business phenomena, local SEO seems to follow the Pareto Principle: 20% of your optimization efforts (taking care of last month’s basics) will get you about 80% of your results, especially when it comes to ranking.

This concept was born out in Mike Blumenthal’s excellent “Cracking the Code” study last year, the most comprehensive quantitative study of ranking in Google Maps to date. We found that “simple” factors like business name and business category predicted ranking for less-competitive verticals (plumbing) but also that in competitive verticals with more signals around the web (restaurants and hotels), additional factors played a significant role.

While Mike’s study wasn’t conclusive as to exactly what those factors were, back to the Pareto Principle, I think it’s safe to call these factors the amorphous “other 20%.”  Here are my speculations as to what they might include:

Authority citations

Most local search observers are no doubt familiar with the concept of citations by now — they are mentions of your business name, address, and phone number in proximity to each other. But just like links in organic SEO, it’s unlikely that a citation is a citation is a citation.

Google’s location prominence patent specifically lists “the highest score of documents referring to the business” as a ranking factor in its local algorithm. While the language is typically vague, I’d argue that “the highest score” refers to something akin to Trust Rank, or at the very least Page Rank.

In local search, a citation from a trusted website like a city or state government or even a commercial site like a Chamber of Commerce or city newspaper can often be the difference between #1 and not appearing in the seven-pack.

Inbound anchor text

The experts in this year’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey put “location keywords in anchor text” and “product/service keywords in anchor text” at #15 and #18, respectively, out of 41 positive factors. While I don’t disagree, this kind of specific keyword context can lead to some very powerful results.

However, its effectiveness may have been diminished by the recent Place Page update; certain searches I track that used to display authoritative OneBoxes now display three- and seven-packs.

MyMaps or other UGC

Chris Silver Smith wrote an excellent piece on MyMaps as a “longer-tail” optimization strategy back in October. His tips were spot-on, especially “use the same name for your placemarks as the business name to facilitate the My Map links to appear in the business’s Place page.”

Like Chris, ever since Place Pages came out, I’ve noticed more and more MyMaps appearing in the sidebar of a local business profile. They’re almost an extension of the idea of citations–more and more people mentioning a business’s information across the web provides Google with a stronger relevancy signal for that business.

Reviews on industry-relevant portals

As with MyMaps, this certainly seems to be a factor that’s dramatically on the rise. I noticed last month that Google started to increase the prominence and frequency of consumer sentiment displayed at the top of Place Pages.  Almost every Place Page I see for businesses here in Portland returns some form of prominent sentiment–from restaurants to insurance agencies to hair salons to plumbers.

These sentiments typically come from reviews on well-known portals that are specific to a particular category, such as gayot.com and zagat.com for restaurants, healthgrades.com for dentists, and servicemagic.com for electricians. Broader portals like CitySearch, AngiesList, DexKnows, and SuperPages also appear regularly. Twitter may not be far behind as we enter the era of “Local-Social” search.

Reviews from power reviewers

Tip of the hat to Tim Coleman of Convert Offline, who posted this concept almost two years ago! While Tim may have been inspired by a temporary glitch at Google, I’m seeing more and more evidence that Google (and other portals like Yahoo and Yelp) may be giving more weight to reviews left by users with multiple reviews across multiple industries. It certainly makes sense as a spam-fighting technique and rewards users for giving Google (or the corresponding portal) direct content.

Time to roll up your sleeves!

Google’s Local algorithm seems to be getting more sophisticated across a number of categories, particularly since the Place Pages rollout. Whether this reflects a vertical-specific intelligence, or just an overall upgrade, what it means is that local SEO’s and small business owners are going to have to work harder than ever, earning that “extra 20%” via 80% of their efforts.

One of my favorite halftime interview clichés from NFL coaches is “we’ve just got to do a better job of blocking and tackling.” While that’s sometimes a euphemism for “the other team is way better than us,” in other cases the coach means his superstar team is getting sloppy and ignoring its fundamentals,  costing them on the scoreboard.

Tying this analogy back to Local Search, is your business (or agency) losing rankings by getting sloppy with its Local SEO “blocking and tackling?”

A quick refresher on 10 Local fundamentals

1. Claim your business listing at the major search engines: Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

This is a total no-brainer. It’s a chance at free exposure and by just by claiming your listing, you’ll give the search engines more trust in your business and improve your chances at ranking (not to mention prevent someone else from hijacking your listing).

2. Submit your business to the major data providers: Localeze, infoUSA, and Acxiom—the latter via UniversalBusinessListing.org.

Most small business owners have heard of Google, Yahoo, and Bing—even with the recent name change. But a tiny percentage of them (and even a tiny percentage of search marketers) know about the “other” Big Three in Local Search—Localeze, infoUSA, and Acxiom. These guys each have their own databases which form the foundation of the search engines’ Local indexes and of a variety of second-tier portals as well. They’re basically the backbone of the entire local search ecosystem.

Acxiom is the only one of the three which doesn’t have an online submission area; the only way in that I’m currently aware of is via Universal Business Listing.

3. Put yourself in the right categories.

One of the main reasons to go through the steps above is to make sure that your business is listed in the right category—which plays a central role in your business’s ability to show up for your target searches.  Sometimes there’s been a mis-entered keystroke or an incorrect mapping from one of the data providers to one of the search engines, and claiming and updating your listing is your chance to correct it.

4. Make sure your business information is consistent.

Google especially likes to see business information match up across the web, because it increases their confidence that their algorithm is returning a relevant, accurate result. This means no keyword stuffing in your business title, either at Google or at the other data providers, and making sure that your phone number and address information matches up everywhere your business is mentioned—the main reason I advised against call-tracking numbers in last month’s column.

5. Get your contact information in hCard microformat or add a QR code on your website.

If you’re a small business owner, starting with this step, this is probably where you’re going to need the help of a developer or a Local SEO company to actually implement these recommendations.

It’s absolutely essential that the search engines are able to see your business’s Name, Address, and Phone number (a.k.a. “NAP”—a great acronym from Localeze’s Gib Olander) when they crawl your website. If that information is contained a fancy font or in a header image, they’re not going to be able to find it.  So make sure it’s in basic HTML, at the very least, and if you want a few brownie points, use the hCard microformat.

6. Create a KML file and upload it to Google Webmaster Central.

Most SEO companies are familiar with XML sitemaps.  Well, think of a KML file as a “location map.”  It’s a specialized file format that includes the latitude and longitude coordinates of the physical business locations listed on a particular website and gives them one more confidence boost in the location of a particular business. Dutch SEO Martijn Beijk has written an excellent KML tutorial to help those for whom this is a fresh concept.

7. Use your official business name in the title tag of your contact or location page.

This recommendation is kind of a new “blocking and tackling” technique that I’ve advised after reading some of Mike Blumenthal’s discussion of the Google Maps patent and hearing him present on it at SMX East last month.  Bill Slawski mentioned this as a Local Search strategy (way back in 2006!) but it took Mike’s presentation to hammer it home for me.

Essentially by doing this you make sure Google assigns your website as an “authority document” for Location Prominence.

8. Use geographic keywords in your title tags.

This is more of a generalized recommendation: make sure that you include your city and state in the title tag of your contact or location page, and if you’re in widget sales, use words like “CityName Widgets” or “Widgets in CityName” on assorted other title tags on your website.

9. Make sure you have Analytics installed on your website.

Think of analytics as equivalent to watching game film in football. If you want to know how your team is performing, you need to revisit how you’ve done in previous games. Analytics can give you great insight into which keywords are bringing traffic to your website, and what pages are engaging your users and leading to new business.

If you’re partial to Google Analytics, check out this excellent post series from SEOverflow on how to track clickthroughs from the 7-pack (i.e. the Maps results shown as part of Universal search).

10. Scout the opposition to see what your high-ranking competitors are up to.

Take a look at both the Organic AND the Local search results for some of your target phrases. What competitors are showing up? Use tools like Linkscape or Yahoo Site Explorer to see if there are particular websites linking to them and not you. Google is now displaying categories publicly as part of Place Pages.  See how they’re listing themselves and ask yourself if there’s anything you can learn from that. While you’re there, check out their “Web Pages” area, too, to see if there are any obvious citations you’re missing.  Are they accumulating user reviews on certain portals where your company isn’t as active?

While these fundamentals might not be as sexy as Twitter or as inspirational as linkbait, they’re tried-and-true methods that are sure to help your business rank better in the search engines and ultimately bring in more business.

All right, team, bring it in. Let’s go get ‘em—”Local Search” on three!

The kind of at-a-glance analytics these numbers offer make it easy for businesses and search agencies to calculate Return On Investment, a desirable metric for both parties to gauge the success or failure of their engagement.

Agencies and service providers are eager to demonstrate the value of their SEM acumen to small businesses and large corporations alike, and because it’s such an easy concept for business owners and traditional marketing VP’s to understand, it’s often sold as a value-add for a particular product suite.

Because the local search space is so fragmented, it seems like call tracking numbers would be even more useful.  After all, wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which customers were coming to you from Superpages vs. Yelp vs. Citysearch vs. your own website? Some companies that offer call-tracking may also offer call recording, so that you can gauge not just the quantity of the phone calls but their quality.

Conceptually, both of these possibilities sound wonderful, but in reality, the negative effects on your Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local rankings could be significant. Let’s take a look at why.

The importance of citations for local business listings

Given the vast number of small businesses without a website (~50-55%), or weakly-optimized one (probably an additional 40%), Google Maps and the other local search engines need indicators of relevance and authority that are not based primarily on links. User reviews on major portals like Yelp or Citysearch are obviously key indicators, as is the information that businesses tell the engines directly at the respective Local Business Centers.

But citations are also a critical component of any Local SEO strategy—recall that Local Search Ranking Factors contributors placed them as the #2 most important factor for ranking this year.

What’s a citation? Essentially, just a mention of your business information (your name + address, your name + phone number, or both) somewhere out there on the web—even if it doesn’t contain a link—remember that most businesses don’t have anything to link to!  The bottom line is that search engines’ ability to tie a particular phone number to a particular business gives them increased confidence in that business’s information, especially if that information matches what the business owner has entered into the Local Business Center—so they’re more likely to rank it.

Phone numbers may even be seen as a stronger confidence indicator than addresses, as Chris Silver Smith stated eloquently in his interview with Eric Enge last month:

“The phone number has in the past typically been considered something that doesn’t vary as much as some of the other information from all the different business sources.”

Citations and call-tracking numbers don’t mix

To maximize your rankings on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local, your business’s Name, Address and Phone number (“NAP,” to borrow a Localeze-inspired acronym) should broadcast the same rock-solid signal on every platform.  Think of them as your business’s thumbprint.  As Gib Olander of Localeze  says, they are “not the place for advertising.”

Remember, as Brownbook’s Marc Lyne pointed out, that “you don’t own your business information.” For instance, what happens if you give your business a unique tracking phone number at a directory that Acxiom happens to spider for its own index? That number is now considered authoritative by Acxiom, and gets pushed out to every partner that’s leasing Acxiom’s data. Meanwhile, infoUSA and Localeze probably still have your main line. You now have two different thumbprints.

In a perfect world, Google, Yahoo, and Bing would be smart enough to see that the business name and address information matches, even though the phone numbers differ. They’d “count” all of them as citations for the same business, but continue to display the Local number you’ve given them in the Local Business Center. But given some of the issues with Google’s merging algorithm, do you really want to take that chance?

Other possible scenarios include duplication, which will split your “citation equity” across multiple listings and confuse customers about how they should actually contact you. This is especially possible if Google sees the same tracking numbers on multiple portals, as in the Acxiom scenario I described above.

And what happens if you want to cancel your contract with the provider through whom you’re running the tracking number? It’ll take months to get a new phone number flowing through the Local search ecosystem, even starting right at the top with the major data providers.

Maintaining absolute consistency with your business information is the key to a successful long-term Local SEO strategy.

Not all call-tracking is bad for Local SEO

The safest form of call-tracking is the old fashioned way: train your receptionists or salespeople to ask “Do you mind telling me how you heard about our business?” at the end of every initial phone call. Just keep a running chart in excel (if they’re at a computer) or even on a hardcopy piece of paper. I also quite like the way Matt van Wagner’s favorite bakery, Patisserie Bleu in Nashua, NH, handles call-tracking: by putting up different colored Post-It notes on their refrigerator when orders for new cakes come in.

You’ll obviously want to get a baseline level of call volume before you start your campaign so you know where you’re starting from. Make sure you’re not picking an unusually active (like the holidays) or unusually dead (like summer vacation) sample time in your business cycle.

If you decide that the benefits to call-tracking outweigh the possible risks to your rankings, at the very least ask if the marketing company or search portal with whom you’re engaging can hide these numbers when they display them to search engines.

In some cases, this might be done with Javascript or even something as simple as a non-alt-texted image tag.  This way there’s at least a chance of picking up an address-only citation from that page; No-indexing the page isn’t really a good solution because then you’re just cutting off any chance for potential ranking benefit.

But I doubt that many companies that are providing call-tracking numbers in local search have considered their implications for ranking, so most are probably hard-coding them at present.

Chris Silver Smith posited an interesting solution by calling for an industry-standard “canonical phone” microformat but the Local search engines may have more pressing issues to deal with than trying to adopt a brand-new standard.

Conclusion

Call-tracking numbers are not always bad for your local search presence, but hopefully this column has made small business owners aware of some of their implications. Extreme care should be taken during implementation of a call-tracking campaign to ensure a healthy long-term local presence. It may not be worth the risk of polluting your business’s signal or confusing the primary search engines.

Fellow Small Is Beautiful columnist Hanan Lifshitz offered a glimpse into how most IYP portals categorize the average small business in his own column last month. He found that over 60% of SMB’s in Alexandria, VA are placed into two or fewer categories by Internet Yellow Pages portals. This should be more than a little disturbing, both for SMB’s and end users.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, allow me to reiterate my view that Local search is focused around businesses and locations not necessarily websites. After all, barely 50% of small businesses even have websites, and among the 50% that do, only a handful are even moderately optimized for search. So even for advanced Local search engines that are able to take website information into account, such as Google Maps (presumably), there’s just not a lot of HTML content about the vast majority of small businesses.**

So in my mind, proper (and exhaustive) categorization remains one of the keys to both Local Search Engine Optimization and a good user experience for the local searcher. Other than trying to fix incorrect NAP information (Name, Address, Phone-thanks Gib J ), categories probably cause the most headaches in Local search. Let’s take a quick look at why.

Data mis-entry or mis-translation

Back in the Dark Ages (OK, so it wasn’t that long ago, just before the Internet), NAICS or SIC codes were the primary way that business information was organized. Business data aggregators like infoUSA and Acxiom assigned each business to a particular code to keep track of them in their computer system. Use of these codes, or at least of the data previously organized by these codes, is still widespread today.

Obviously, when you’re talking about a numerical entry corresponding to a verbal translation, one slightly mis-entered keystroke could place a business in a completely different area of the taxonomy.

A similar situation occurs when aggregators try to map other portals’ taxonomies to their own. Even with a proper entry, some categories become lost in translation.

As this data spreads throughout the Local Search ecosystem, the error just compounds itself, and a florist is all of a sudden listed as an auto mechanic. Or a museum is listed as an advertising agency.

And frankly, I was shocked to hear from Pankaj Mathur on last month’s aforementioned SMN webinar that infoUSA sometimes edits the categories that business owners tell them. It certainly goes against the industry grain (and against common sense) not to trust the business owner above other sources.

Incomplete taxonomies

Problems often arise when data providers’ category taxonomies simply don’t describe their business adequately.

One of my favorite Local search portals, CityVoter, is a good example. CityVoter is one of the most powerful citation sources for Google Maps, showing up an amazing number of times on Web Pages tabs in all kinds of industries and locations.

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine who runs an environmental consulting company asked me to help him with his Local Search presence. Naturally, CityVoter was one of the first places we submitted him. My friend’s CityVoter profile currently shows up as the #2 citation on his Local Business Listing in Google Maps.

But, it turns out that CityVoter doesn’t even have a category for Environmental Services. So we put his business in the closest matching category: Home Services > Contractors. It seemed to me to be far better that he be listed in a marginally-related category than to ignore CityVoter altogether and lose the ranking power that its citation brings with it to Google Maps.

Explicit restrictions

CityVoter may not have as complete a category taxonomy as infoUSA, Superpages, or some of the other major data providers.  But even more complete taxonomies that unrealistically restrict the number categories into which a business can place itself are detrimental to Local Search.

Not to continue to harp on infoUSA, but in last month’s webinar, Pankaj explicitly discouraged businesses from using categories to more fully describe their products and services (beginning at the 9:55 mark in the webinar). Given everything that we know about the long tail of search (greater volume in aggregate, less competition, higher conversion rates) this advice simply makes no sense to me as an SEO. And if I were running Local Search portal, why would I want a less-rather-than-more complete picture of what a business does?

In her recent comment on Mike’s categorization post, Miriam Ellis wondered whether Google wants Local Business Center categories to be used to add long-tail information, as well. Their current tooltip in the LBC simply reads: “Which categories (up to 5) best describe your business? Ex: Dentist, Wedding Photographer, Thai Restaurant.” It’s a line which Chris Silver Smith rightly points out confuses the long-tail issue, and may inadvertently encourage unwitting small business owners to enter multiple categories in the same field, a definite No-No.

But at least the United States version of the Local Business Center is still allowing business owners to submit custom categories. Darren Shaw, an SEO from Edmonton, Alberta, reported to me last week that custom categories were no longer available in the Canadian LBC.  One hopes this is a temporary glitch rather than a permanent decision on Google’s part.

To Google’s credit, Maps Director Carter Maslan stopped by the thread on Mike’s blog on multiple occasions and we may see some interface improvements rolled out shortly.

Categories and the future of Local search

Restrictions and incomplete taxonomies aren’t just bad for small businesses; they’re bad for searchers. Studies everywhere highlight that keyword search strings are getting longer. Borrowing two of Gib Olander’s favorite examples, and adding a third of my own: “Pet-friendly hotel downtown San Francisco,” “café with wi-fi in Pearl District Portland,” “old-fashioned diner in western suburbs.”  Without allowing businesses to input that kind of rich information as a category (i.e. “pet-friendly hotel” or “old-fashioned diner”), the results that Local Search portals return for those phrases are simply not going to be as relevant.

Google’s response has been that that information belongs in custom attributes or on business’ websites. But Google, quite frankly, is better at crawling the web than a traditional Internet Yellow Pages portal, which won’t be able to take that kind of information into account. And rather than placing limits on the completeness and accuracy of categories, why not use better-defined, longer-tail versions of them to help solve Local search’s service area problem?

Bringing things full-circle back to Hanan’s column, it might be helpful for data providers and portals to consider categories more like tags-one-size does not fit all. Localeze already seems to have adopted this mindset; UniversalBusinessListing, too, advises clients right on its submission page that “Adding more items to your business listing improves how search engines see your business.”

From the business owner’s perspective (at least the ones that I work with on a daily basis), successful Local SEO is not about spamming the search engines with marginal categories. But I hope I’ve laid out in this article why I always encourage SMB’s and agencies who represent them to “max out” their available categories in Google Maps and Internet Yellow Pages, and to use custom categories where appropriate.

(**Incidentally , this lack of HTML content–i.e. lack of links–is one of the reasons citations are a major ranking factor for Google Maps.)

It’s clearly a lot to digest in one sitting, so in this month’s SEL column, I thought I would take a little deeper look at a few of the responses that I found most interesting.  While these responses represent the collective wisdom of the panelists, in general, they’re pretty closely aligned with my personal opinions as well.

Does SEO make a difference?

Traditional on-page SEO ranked last among general signals, behind a verified Local Business Listing, off-page and off-listing criteria, and reviews.

Think about some of the leading businesses you see ranking in local search results, even in some of the more competitive industries.  In many cases, restaurants ranking at the top of the list have poorly-optimized or even all-Flash websites.  Large chain hotels frequently rank with location-page URLs that are buried within parent site architecture.

In both of these cases, and countless others, different factors seem to outweigh the strength of an individual website or webpage.  For instance, restaurants may have powerful profiles on places like Yelp or UrbanSpoon; hotels may have really great reviews on TripAdvisor.  Both are likely presenting a very strong signal among the traditional data providers (more on them below).

It remains critical to think about Local as its own entity within a broader SEO framework (or even like pay-per-click, as I suggested a couple of months ago).

Location, Location, Location

Having a location in the city being searched for was identified as the single most important ranking factor this year. For moms-and-pops who have been around for years, there’s not a lot to do in “optimizing” a location. New businesses, however, may want to consider this as part of their decision on where to lease or buy space.  In a larger metro area, it’s likely that being inside the city limits of a major city will bring you more online traffic.

While distance from city centroid seems to be on the decline as a factor, the dominance of location in the algorithm presents a major problem for service-based businesses such as carpet cleaners, roofers, or even insurance agents who frequently visit their clients, rather than the other way around.

To date, the most popular way around this problem is a gray-hat tactic of reserving a PO Box or UPS Store address in the cities in which you want to rank, but the effectiveness of this technique seems to be on the decline.  All of the map spam we’ve seen in the Locksmith industry is closely tied to this facet of the algorithm, though spammers are taking it one step further by claiming listings of legitimate businesses and changing them to suit their needs.

Going forward, it would seem that Google would need to adjust its algorithm to account for businesses in certain service verticals if it truly wants to address some of these problems.  It’s less clear (to me, anyway), what Bing/Yahoo have up their sleeves in this area.

Clean data counts

Citations from major data providers shot up the 2009 list to the second most important ranking factor.  If you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s essential to send the local search engines a strong signal about your business’ name, location, and contact information. This means a proactive effort to make sure that this information is consistent and prominent across as many of these portals as possible.

To that end, the Internet Yellow Pages need to figure out how to monetize the value they provide in concert with Google, rather than trying to sell exclusively their own products.  To serve their customers, the Yellow Pages also need to place much more of an emphasis on consolidating minor business name variations among their print customers, and introduce more stringent standards as to who can create a listing in their online versions.

For more about data providers and Local Search, tune into the Search Marketing Now webcast coming up next week with Gib Olander of Localeze, Jonathan Cohn of Acxiom, and Pankaj Mathur of infoUSA.

Know who you are

Proper categorization remained one of this year’s most important factors, as Hanan Lifshitz identified in his recent column.  The interaction of category with search phrase remains a bit of a black box to Local Search marketers…we just know that it seems to be important!

Hanan may be right that as we move more and more towards keyword-based directories, categories may matter less. However, I still contend that this remains one of the key qualitative distinctions between Local search and traditional search.  Local is about businesses and locations whereas search is about websites.  Categories are still going to have relevance as a meta-indicator of the relevance of a business for quite awhile, in my opinion.  Custom categories may start to play more of a role, for those businesses that don’t fit neatly into traditional verticals.

It’s a solidly white hat tactic to place yourself in as many relevant categories as possible.  Google explicitly discourages irrelevant categories, however, perhaps because they recognize the contribution of marginal categories to their Locksmith map-jacking problem.  These nefarious companies often show up for hotels, restaurants, or other popular searches.

Nonetheless, marginal categorization was this year’s “most improved” factor, signifying that it’s working for many marketers in the trenches.

Word-of-mouth

Reviews gained in importance this year, at least as a general signal.  I’m somewhat amazed that Positive Customer Ratings were only ranked #35 out of 41 helpful factors, although I don’t disagree with my fellow panelists.  I’m just amazed that they don’t seem to matter more in the Google Maps algorithm.

Google has a long way to go here, and may be one of the reasons they are/were so interested in the technology behind Twitter as a measure of sentiment.  Bing Local has incorporated some of this technology in their recent rollout, but only in certain verticals with tons of UGC information, like restaurants. Going forward, we may see trusted sources like BBB and Judy’s Book start to protect their content to remain vital independent players in the Local search space.

The importance of a deep LBC profile seems to be on the rise.  Google wants a rich user experience to try to compete with the Yelps, UrbanSpoons, Judys Books, and other vertical portals which could take market share away from them in the future.

To that end, they’ve introduced an explicit percentage complete score within their recent LBC Analytics rollout.  I encourage people to click that link and see just what a dominant role photos and videos play in Google’s LBC score (greater than 25%!).  Local Search marketers were all over this one, even before the Analytics rollout-videos and photos were both two of the “more helpful than in 2008″ ranking factors.

I’ll be presenting more Local Search nuggets in tandem with Mike Blumenthal at SMX East in October, so if you haven’t registered yet, now’s the time.

There’s tremendous value for small businesses in optimizing for Google’s Universal results, as Hanan Lifshitz pointed out last week. It’s hard not to imagine that small business owner grabbing the lion’s share of chiropractic searchers in his region, thanks to the efforts of Will Scott’s Search Influence firm.

But no matter your industry, when it comes to Local, it’s absolutely critical to think beyond Google, even if all you’re trying to do is optimize for the 10-pack.

The importance of citations for Google Maps

One of the pathways to “Local Organic Domination,” as Hanan termed it, is through the acquisition of citations. Citations are just mentions of your business name in close proximity to your address or phone number, with or without a link to your website. Think of them like votes of confidence for a particular business’slocation…the more confidence Google has in your listing, the higher they’re likely to display it in search results. So it’s important to list yourself fully and accurately in as many places across the web as possible, including blogs about your city or industry.

Bottom line, it’s hard to rank in Google Maps (and consequently Universal Search) without paying significant attention to how your business is listed across the web, not just on Google.

“Other” local search

One of Gib Olander’s favorite lines is: ” ‘other’ is the third-largest local search engine.” What he means is that local search is far more fragmented than traditional organic search. Unlike traditional search, if you’re only paying attention to getting your business on Google and Yahoo, you’re missing out on a huge chunk of local market share.

While the demise of the Print Yellow Pages seems imminent, Internet Yellow Pages sites are far healthier, and some are even thriving. YellowPages.com’s ad partnership with Bing is just one example…at least if Bing can continue to capitalize on its current hype. Superpages.com has long been a trusted source of data with its own steady traffic stream, and more recent entrants like InsiderPages and Yellowbot are starting to develop passionate user bases.

Then there’s the online classified market. Craigslist is the default place to look for local ‘stuff” here on the West Coast, not to mention other major players like Oodle and Kijiji.

Vertical local search

Success in local also means promoting your presence on sites with strong market shares of their own in particular industries. This doesn’t mean only ranking well, but paying attention to what people are saying about you, responding to their feedback, and improving their perceptions.

For example, sites like TripAdvisor and Kayak are huge in the travel industry. Restauranteurs might even think about places like Yelp, BooRah, or Urban Spoon before thinking about Google. For chiropractors like Will’s client, these might include Planet Chiropractic and No More Clipboard. For searches near and dear to my heart, [golf courses] – it’s portals like Golf Digest and GolfNow.

(Incidentally, almost all of these sites make excellent citations for your Google Maps listing…)

Social local search

Many of the sites mentioned above, and even Google and Yahoo, straddle the line between social media and search due to the prominence of reviews in their users’ experience.  But local “searchers” are often turning to purely social sites like Twitter, Praized, and RetailMeNot as well for recommendations and sale information about Local businesses. And as we all learned from Dave Carroll’s brilliant lampoon of United Airlines last week, word-of-mouth can sometimes be more powerful than any search marketing campaign could be.

Conclusion

Local search traffic is only going to grow in importance.  So don’t “put your blinkers on” as Nick Faldo loves to say (indulge me…this is Open Championship week, after all) and focus all of your energies on Google. Your long-term chances for a successful online presence will suffer if you do.

It’s an especially timely question, given the recent Borrell report about the number of small businesses who cancel their contracts with online advertising providers within a year. The short version of my reaction to the study is that there are simple explanations for this churn:

• a sales mentality rather than a service mentality on the part of the providers, and
• an exclusive focus on scalable Pay-Per-Click offerings as opposed to organic SEO, which requires a more individualized approach.

Many SMBs, however, simply have a “Do-It-Yourself’ mindset. It’s that mindset that encouraged many owners to go into business for themselves, and there are plenty of examples of business owners who simply have a knack for marketing themselves online.

With that in mind (and this might amount to heresy in the SEO industry) – I’m going to disagree with Hanan that a middleman is “a critical component” of the online ecosystem. Caveat: hiring a top-notch search consultant will almost always bring a positive ROI.

Depending on the size of your business (for instance, if you’re a mom-and-pop with one location), your level of commitment to online marketing, and your company lifestage, there are plenty of low-cost baby steps you can take for yourself, without any help from a third-party provider.

I. Take a few hours to learn the basics of search marketing

I’ll admit, one of the problems with a DIY mentality in SEO is that it’s hard to know whom to trust.  There are a lot of shysters out there. So let me simplify things for you by pointing you to a couple of fantastic free resources (besides Search Engine Land of course!) where you can learn the ropes.

SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO and companion Beginner’s Checklist are excellent places to start. So are Matt McGee’s “How to Promote a New Small Business Website” and Lisa Barone’s “How to Launch that SMB Website.”

At the very least, reading these resources will raise your knowledge to a level where you can make an informed decision about what third-party companies are trying to sell you.

II. Learn what your customers are searching for

Most small business owners and prospective clients come to me with a “money” keyphrase they want to rank for. This is a good starting point, but sometimes owners describe their business, or what they sell, differently than consumers do.

Luckily Google has an external keyword research tool that is simple to use. Just punch in a few (or a lot of) phrases you think customers would use to describe your business, and Google will return related phrases and show you how many times people search for them. In general, you want to think about using terms on your website where Google shows a lot of volume, but not a lot of advertiser competition.

If you already have a Twitter account, Twitter can be a great research tool also. Depending on your business, you might be able to see hot trends on search.twitter.com that are worth pursuing. You could also ask your followers “what keywords would you use to search for my business?” and get a few responses.

And don’t forget about offline possibilities. Asking your walk-in customers what keywords they would use in searching for a business like yours via a comment card or business card raffle could reveal some interesting findings.

III. Create a web presence

Notice I said “web presence” and not “website“. Don’t even want to deal with setting up or revising your website right now? No problem? You can rank in plenty of Local search results without one.  Think about using your profile on a powerful website like Yelp or Yahoo as your initial web presence-for more on this strategy, see Will Scott‘s article on “Barnacle SEO.”  Use some of the keywords from Step II in describing your business.

But if you are ready to take the plunge on an actual site, or revise your current one, I highly recommend building it on WordPress. Buy a domain name and a sign up for a hosting account (approximately $10 and $50-$100 per year, respectively) and install this free publishing platform.  There are literally thousands of high-quality free or cheap themes for WordPress on places like Smashing Magazine, Premium Themes, ThemeForest, DIY Themes, Design Disease, and Brian Gardner.

IV. Submit your business to the local search engines

While you can’t really submit a website to a search engine anymore, did you know that you can submit your business information to them? Tell Google’s Local Business Center, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local about your business at a minimum (shameless plug: you can submit to all of them from one place at GetListed.org). Use some of the keywords from Step II in describing your business, and make sure you place yourself in the proper categories.

The “Big Three” are not as dominant in Local Search as you might think, though, so don’t stop there. Sign up for listing syndication services Localeze and Universal Business Listing as well.  Be consistent with your information and sign up on as many additional directories as you have time to do.

V. Track and analyze your results

Even without a website, Google’s Local Business Center can show you how many people view your business profile on Google, and the top keywords they are using to find you. I suspect Yahoo and Bing will be following suit shortly, let alone portals like Yelp, Superpages, and Yellowpages.com.  Keep track of this data & see which keywords you’re not showing up for but should be.

If you decide to start or revise website, install Google Analytics‘ free tracking code. You’ll find out what pages people are landing on & the ones that are catching their attention the most (hint: look at the time on page statistic).

Yes, this might all be confusing and require the help of a professional SEO eventually, but you may learn one or two things about your customers that you didn’t know before.

VI. Get social

At this stage, if you haven’t joined Twitter yet, now is the time. Make friends in your community (you can use search.twitter.com to find them) and let your customers know your Twitter handle in your offline and online marketing materials.

If you’ve done a good job with Step IV and submitted to the major Local Search engines, suggesting that your customers review you periodically on their favorite one will help round out your web presence.

VI. Stay informed about best practices in small business and local SEO

Read bloggers like Mike Blumenthal, Matt McGee, Miriam Ellis, Andrew Shotland, Local Search News, and this column on a regular basis! And if you’re into the whole Twitter thing, follow the experts there, too.

Total financial cost of all of this: $30 – $200 per year

As you can see, it’s easy to get started on a pretty reasonable budget, if you’ve got the time and interest in doing your internet marketing “in-house.” Here’s just one example of the success that an actual small business owner had by following these steps. Note that Local SEO Don Campbell advised the SMB on this process, but did not require a long-term consulting contract up-front.

And if you’re an Internet Yellow Pages company, or other service provider reading this column, I’d recommend–as I’ve said for the last two years or so–that you develop some basic expertise in search engine marketing (beyond just Pay-Per-Click) among your salespeople. Transition your primary business model from selling a product to selling a service.

Your reps don’t need to be SEOs or SEMs per se; rather, they should help SMB’s find the right mix of search and internet advertising products to fit their budget and time comfort zones. Help them get their feet wet with some of the strategies above, and they’ll turn to you for more advanced (read: expensive) expertise later on. Demonstrate the power of the Internet to transform their business, rather than simply overselling them on empty click packages.