We’ve reached the midpoint of fantasy football season, and in our SEMpdx league, my team is hanging on to a playoff slot by a thread.  (Yes, I am “that guy” who roots for the Patriots to get into the red zone and then stall out, just so my fantasy kicker Stephen Gostkowski gets a chance at a few more field goals.)

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!

Call-tracking phone numbers are often hailed as a best practice strategy in paid search campaigns thanks to their ability to demonstrate a specific number of conversions or inquiries generated by the campaign.

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.

Properly categorizing your business at Google Maps is one of the most important Local Search Ranking Factors, as I mentioned in last month’s column. There’s been a lot of chatter about business categories since then, most notably at the Local Search Summit in San Jose, during August’s Search Marketing Now webinar on Local Search, and on Mike Blumenthal’s Understanding Google Maps blog.

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.)

I am continually amazed by, and thankful for, the efforts of the Local Search Ranking Factors panelists. The survey remains one of the most visited pages on my website (right up there with my blog’s homepage) despite being static for 364 days a year. I receive weekly or even semi-weekly emails or comments thanking me for putting the study together; credit really should go to the participants!

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.

From marketers to Wall Street analysts to the Department of Justice, everyone (even the general public) recognizes that Google is the 800-pound gorilla in the world of search. And particularly with the introduction of the generic 10-pack to Universal results, this fact largely holds true in Local Search as well. Google Maps has pulled even with Mapquest thanks largely to this decision by the higher-ups in Mountain View.

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.

In last week’s Small Is Beautiful column, Hanan Lifshitz posed the question “Do SMBs Still Need the Middleman to Advertise?”

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.

Twitter has reached critical mass.  Oprah’s recent announcement that she’d joined Twitter, and her near-instantaneous recruitment of over 1,000,000 followers, has signaled a tipping point—tweeting is no longer a pastime exclusively for the technorati and uber-geeks.  In fact, it seems like elitist spinsters are the only demographic not to embrace it yet at some level (anticipating protests from Maureen Dowd devotees—no, this is not her actual Twitter account).

Unsurprisingly, the Brits are way ahead of us in terms of Twitter adoption, having been much faster to incorporate mobile phones and SMS into everyday life in the 90’s and early 00’s as well.  But the numbers cited by The Telegraph (6,000 new businesses a day on Twitter!) are impressive indeed.  Back Stateside, you can be sure that if companies like the online yellow pages are starting to catch Twitter fever, now is the time to catch it yourself.  

If you’re a small business owner, more and more of your peers, competitors and (most importantly) customers will create Twitter accounts in the coming weeks and months.  In the major cities on the West Coast, there’s a good chance they already have.

Twitiquette. You’ll absolutely want to claim your username, if only to prevent someone else from squatting or even maliciously taking it from you.  But just joining doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have success with Twitter. 

The Yellow Pages’ recent Twitter article (same as linked above) implies that they do understand how to engage their audience properly on Twitter, as a conversation, requiring dialogue: “people taking turns talking and listening.”  To wit, the preposition used in that piece’s title would be more useful as “talk with” rather than “talk to your customers.”

I’ve been on for almost 400 days now.  And the single-most important tip I could give for success on Twitter is to listen and converse more than you simply “tweet.” You don’t have to follow or engage in conversation with everyone who follows you, but dialogue, not monologue, is going to be the strategy that pays long-term dividends.

Applying Twitter to your business

There are literally hundreds of small businesses (and large ones, for that matter) already doing amazing, creative things with this new platform.  Follow them, listen to them, perhaps even engage them in a little conversation.  And then, when you’re comfortable, start promoting your Twitter account in your place of business and dive into a deeper relationship with your customers!  Below are just a few ideas to get you started thinking about how your business can use Twitter.

Networking. Twitter is a simply a fabulous way to meet people in your industry, and in your community.  Some of my long-time Twitter friends are people whom I have never met, or only just met recently.  Aaron, Michael and Kristy, respectively, have been generous with their feedback or recommendations when I have asked them about specific business projects.  I already know that in Aaron’s & Michael’s cases we’ll get along famously whenever we actually do meet in person.  I don’t doubt that I’ll refer business to all three of them, or receive some in return, somewhere down the road.

And it’s so easy to network on Twitter.  Just use their search function to find topics you’re interested in, or people in your general geographic area, and start following them.  If you’re actively engaged, you’ll read re-tweets that you find interesting, and you can spread your network even further by following the original tweeter.

Market research & lead generation. You can use search.twitter.com’s advanced features and subscribe to an RSS feed of keywords and locations where you want to eavesdrop.  Or take a more direct route. Social Media Marketer Kyle Lacy suggests: “ask your clients and prospective clients what they would like to see, hear, taste, and experience” at your business. 

John Jantsch of the excellent blog Duct Tape Marketing even theorizes that if you hone your searches and subscriptions finely enough, or monitor them closely enough, you could pick up actual leads just from listening to others’ conversations. 

Improving your local search rankings. Steve Espinosa reported at SMX West that he’d seen Twitter profiles showing up as Local business listing citations. 

But Twitter can lead to citations and links for your business indirectly as well.  Consider the following real-life example: Blue Lemon Bistro in American Fork, UT has a very active Twitter strategy.  One customer who found them via Twitter was so impressed with their restaurant, he blogged about them, linked to their website, included their business name and city in his title tag, and even embedded a Google Map in his blog post!  If that’s not a clear indication to Google and Yahoo of a quality experience with a business in American Fork, Utah, I’m not sure what would qualify on that score.

Just as more and more people are getting on Twitter, they’re also starting their own blogs, creating accounts on local/social platforms like Yelp and leaving reviews, and just generally spreading goodwill (or perhaps badwill-it’s a double-edged sword) about your business around the Internet.

Customer service & reputation management. Speaking of badwill, if that’s even a word, Comcast is a company that’s got a lot of that going around.  But they’re also one of the great examples of a company using Twitter to improve their customer service offerings.  @Comcastcares lets customers (or anyone) get in touch with Comcast on their own schedule, without having to wait on hold or deal with someone who has trouble speaking English.  They respond promptly and can usually solve your problem or direct you right to the specific FAQ page on the Comcast website that will answer it.

And don’t be afraid to stroke the egos of your followers.  Give props to your favorite customers.  Blue Lemon, whom I mentioned earlier, noticed their blogging customer’s review and tweeted it to their 2,000+ followers.  Not only does this reinforce the positive experience that the blogger had with Blue Lemon, but it encourages more followers to do the same.  You could even take things one step further and encourage followers to leave reviews (with direct, shortened URLs) on their favorite search platforms.

Take orders via twitter. It’s not so far-fetched.  Here’s a terrific anecdote from Mr. Tweet about a coffee shop owner who responded in real-time to one of his followers for a to-go order, leading to tons of buzz and a selection as the venue for a Houston area Tweet-up.  Wow!  Very cool.

Even if you don’t have the resources or desire to tweet in real-time, you can tweet your followers whenever a fresh product arrives in your store or use Twitter for special insider sales or pre-releases.

Fill last-minute inventory. Taking sales one step further, Twitter represents a phenomenal opportunity to fill unused inventory and track sales at the same time.  Here’s one example of a San Francisco restaurant who “gets it” via Matt McGee; I saw a similar feature on a San Francisco massage parlor (yes, a real one) in the New York Times as well.  In the case of True Massage, they tweet openings in their schedule just a few hours in advance, along with a special tracking code that allows followers to book and save, all at the same time.

Eric Ward and I tweeted back and forth last week about the fantastic opportunity for golf courses to do the same thing with open tee times.  Hotels, ski resorts, hair salons, restaurants… any business that relies on walk-in traffic to fill empty slots would do fantastically well with this strategy.

Engage in community activism. Just within the last three months, fellow Portlander (and my friend) Kerry Finsand has gotten over 3,350 people to sign a petition protesting the proposed Oregon beer tax largely using Twitter, and the Northern California Golf Association used Twitter to help raise awareness and defeat a proposed golf tax in their state.

Here are two fantastic round-up posts on possible Twitter strategies: Five Technology’s 100 Reasons to Be on Twitter, and Buzz Marketing Daily’s 25 Innovative Ways Companies Are Using Twitter.

Twitter as an extension of local search

Gib Olander likes to say that “other” is the third-largest local search engine. Right now, Twitter is part of that “other”… but by the end of 2010, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Twitter jump up to #3 or even #2.  The ability to search by zip code and radius, the open nature of its API, and its intrinsic social component make it the ideal local recommendation engine, as Sebastian Provencher and Mike Boland pointed out last week.  Sebastian is already incorporating Twitter feeds and the like over at Praized Questions.

Even if search.twitter.com isn’t all that popular among the masses as a destination, its results are going to get pulled in more and more places.  Yet one more reason you’ll want to be talking about your business and your products or services in the Twittersphere ASAP.  Or ideally, develop such a bond with your followers that other people talk about them and recommend them for you.

Remember, as with most forms of social media, you get back only what you put into it.  If all you’re doing is tweeting about your own promotions, instead of listening to what your followers are talking about and helping them spread their own messages, you’re probably not going to get very far.  You want to converse with people to get them to converse about you in a positive light.

It doesn’t really matter which of these strategies you employ for your own business—if any; blazing your own trail might be the best strategy for your company.

Just do me one favor: ignore Maureen, and follow Oprah instead.  At the very least, it’ll be way more fun.

Last month, I moderated a fantastic session at Searchfest ‘09 subtitled “Little Is the New Big.” But had our conference taken place on April 10 rather than March 10, even that ambitious tagline wouldn’t have done the panel justice.

That’s because two weeks ago, Google decided to start showing 10-packs and other local results (including an authoritative onebox!) for non-geo-targeted keywords.

Whoa.  Talk about a game-changer.  This change has impacted (or will soon impact, for those that haven’t figured out local search yet) businesses of all sizes.

Just in law search results alone, Mike Blumenthal speculates that these new local results are going to give about 61 times more exposure for local lawyers that appear for generic searches in their geographic areas-something a solo outfit never had a chance to do for “national” or “generic” terms before. 

Aaron Wall suggested in a timely post last week that few SEO strategies, especially for small businesses, are directed at hitting the “home run,” i.e. ranking for the kind of generic, short-tail phrases that Mike highlights in his quick analysis.

Up until two weeks ago, I certainly followed Aaron’s line of thinking for my clients and can attest to the success of essentially ignoring the short-tail basket and putting my clients’ eggs (i.e. title tags and internal link juice) into the long tail instead.

That thinking may begin to change, however.  Ranking in Google Maps for phrases like “Chicago lawyers” or “Omaha dentists” (presumably the phrases from which 10-packs are pulling for “lawyers” and “dentists”) is not going to be nearly as difficult as ranking organically for “lawyers” and “dentists.”  The opportunity for traffic from high-volume phrases just became a lot more realistic.

But what’s the trade-off? The 10-pack typically shows up in position #4, and there are nine other businesses within the 10-pack list, even if Google does decide to show it for your short-tail keywords.  It’s going to make efforts to track 10-pack clickthroughs in your analytics a very important component of local keyword research going forward as you decide where to focus your SEM energies.

The new Generic 10-pack is a bit of a double-edged sword, too, as small businesses who had successfully figured how to drive fantastic revenues via long-tail organic traffic may now find their rankings subsumed by the incredible visual barrier that the 10-pack represents.  It’s hard to imagine too many people scrolling past the top three results anymore, once a map is shown.

Obviously, Google is going to continue to experiment with and refine its SERPs.  But this most recent iteration seems to signal the kind of shift Danny Sullivan mentioned in his keynote at the SEOmoz Seminar last year.  Danny feels (or at least felt—I don’t want to put words in his mouth) that Google may eventually move towards a page of entirely local results for keywords that demonstrate local intent—a kind of change that Dr. Pete Meyers has postulated might be imminent as well. 

To the Google Maps team’s credit, concurrent with this massive increase in the visibility for local results, they’ve fleshed out their local business help center with a new user guide and an official review policy just within the last month.

One thing is certain: Local search is going to continue to become more important for businesses of all sizes to understand and consider as part of their overall SEM strategy.

Some of you may know that around this time every year, I come down with a serious case of NCAA Tournament fever.  During the month of March, when people ask for my phone number, I respond “65-32-16-8-4-2-1.”  Assuming clients are able to get a hold of me somehow, all of my doodles during phone calls somehow turn into brackets. I find myself buying lottery tickets with the numbers 8-9, 7-10, 6-11.  An unseen force compels me to blurt out “5-12 upset!” every so often on the street, drawing stares from my fellow Portlanders. 

So please indulge me this month as I feebly try to draw a comparison between small businesses and the so-called “mid-majors” like Cleveland State, Western Kentucky, and Siena that so often play the role of Cinderella in March.

Successful mid-majors share a number of common characteristics and strategies to “upset” their larger, better-funded opponents in the search engine ranking.

Characteristic: Superior scouting. Cinderellas often play in obscurity, with only one or two televised games a year.  Major-conference teams are on TV a dozen or more times.  There’s plenty of information about them.  Even casual fans know their strengths and weaknesses.  It’s comparatively much harder for a power-conference team to understand and prepare for the little guy.

Strategy: Do your research. Mine your analytics. Use competitive intelligence. Start with the basics: there are plenty of free tools to perform keyword research, including Google’s External Adwords Tool.  Learn what your customers are searching for and create content that will not only rank well, but will satisfy those search desires.  Close monitoring of your analytics will often reveal opportunities in long tail and geo-targeted search phrases that your larger-scale competition will rarely be able to discover.  And in regards to Local search: check out the ‘Web Pages’ tabs of your competitors.  Add your business to the same kinds of directory sites that they’re on-most of them will be free, and will help put your business on a more or less equal footing with the big boys.

Characteristic: Experience. Although less talented, the guys from mid-major schools tend to stick around for four years.  The result is frequently a team of juniors and seniors playing against a team of freshmen and sophomores.  The mid-majors have seen and lived NCAA pressure; the bigger teams haven’t always done so. 

Strategy: Answer the questions your customers are asking in person online. As a small business owner, you’ve probably got more experience relevant to your actual business than do many corporate types.  You’re “on the ground” and know the kinds of questions your customers have asked over the years.  Answer them on your blog, Yahoo Answers, or even Craigslist.  Show your customers you can solve their problems (or problems like theirs) and you’ll be rewarded with their business.

Characteristic: Superior communication. Because they’ve been together for four years, players on mid-major teams often know one another well.  They call out screens, halfcourt sets, and defensive switches.  Some mid-major coaches like Stew Morrill of Utah State even hold up clipboards with play numbers and names that their players can read even on the opposite end of the court.

Strategy: Overwhelm your competition with superior Twitter, email, and customer service communications. As a small business owner, you don’t have all the corporate red tape to cut through in order to break news about your industry, announce discounts, or respond to crises.  Use this to your advantage-get the word out there first, update your customers frequently on Twitter, and do a better job of responding to their questions and concerns than your opponents.

Characteristic: Three-point assault. Perhaps the most common characteristic of mid-major upsets is a three-point shooting barrage.  Smaller, quicker backcourts like Vermont and Davidson, and Western Kentucky and Siena in this year’s tournament, find ways to get open and are not shy about shooting right over the top of stronger, taller defenses.

Strategy: Be daring and dramatic with social media plays. Again, because you don’t have the red tape of a larger company, you can take more risks than your competitors.  It’s rare that a company like Kenmore or Cuisinart will make the front page of Digg.  But content from a smaller player like BlendTec can (and did) become a social media craze.  The result?  Blendtec now ranks #3 organically for “blenders”, right behind Amazon.com, and ahead of Target and Wal-mart.

Characteristic: Get the most out of your lineup. Cinderellas often play the games of their lives to upset powerhouse teams, squeezing every ounce of skill out of the players on the floor.  Bigger schools are more talented, but even in the first rounds of the NCAA tournament, rarely do their players play with the urgency that this could be their last tournament game.

Strategy: Mine your existing links for better anchor text. Your competition may have more incoming links, but you can still outrank them with better keyword targeting.  SEOmoz’s Linkscape tool has a phenomenal filtering feature to let you see the anchor text  of your links at a glance, but even if you don’t have the budget for that, you can still go through the results from Yahoo Site Explorer manually.  It never hurts to email a blogger or other small business that has already linked to you and ask them to include a keyword or two in the link.  And don’t forget about the INTERNAL anchor text on your own website, which can be surprisingly powerful.

Characteristic: Get the crowd behind you. The funny thing about mid-majors is that even when they screw up your bracket, you still can’t help pulling for them.  People LOVE to root for the underdog.  Especially at the first- and second-round regional sites, an underdog from across the country can turn it into an ‘away’ game for the team playing closer to home.

Strategy: Ask your customers for reviews. The “underdog” role holds true for small businesses going up against the Walmarts and Home Depots of the world.  Most small businesses have suggestion cards & boxes.  Be sure to include a line for “email address” on there.  When someone turns in a positive review, send them an email thanking them for the feedback, give them a little coupon for their next visit and ask if they wouldn’t mind leaving a similar review on their favorite search engine and list all of your local business profiles right in the email.  If their email address is “@gmail.com” or “@yahoo.com” send them a direct link to your Google Maps or Yahoo Local listing.

Your reward: Mindshare and market dominance

A number of small schools have become legendary through their performances in March.  Names like “Coppin State” and “Valpo” still reverberate across the college basketball landscape thanks to singular upsets they pulled YEARS ago.  Though more recent, George Mason’s Final Four run will never be forgotten.

Perhaps the most extreme example: the only people outside of Spokane who had heard of Gonzaga prior to 1999 were fans of John Stockton (the school’s most famous alumnus).  Now, Gonzaga is a household name and considered a national power thanks to their consistent performance in the NCAA’s since 1999.  

Your small business can succeed in much the same way.  Nationally, all it takes is the right social media sensation to get picked up in the New York Times, CNN, or another major media outlet as the jumpstart you need for your business to explode.  But even if you don’t  make that big social media splash like BlendTec did, the other strategies in this article should give you a stronger foothold, and a fighting chance against the big boys, in longer-tail or geo-targeted search engine results.

In last month’s column, I highlighted the need for search marketers, search engines, and data providers to reach out to small business owners to increase their awareness of the free opportunities to claim their businesses online.  Well, the two excellent Local Search panels at SMX West, put together by Search Engine Land’s own Greg Sterling, did just that. It’s just a shame there weren’t more small business owners in attendance!

So for SMB’s reading this column, I thought I’d highlight a few key takeaways related to maximizing your presence via local business listings.

In the first panel, “Up Close with Google Maps & Local,” I re-iterated the importance of claiming your listing directly at the Google Local Business Center, as well as data providers like Localeze, Universal Business Listing, and infoUSA.  Verifying with these data providers is key-both because of their direct feeds to Google, as well as their use in directories and other local search portals, which serve as citations via Google’s web crawl.

Chris Silver Smith followed up with a few tips for the case in which your physically-based business actually serves multiple neighborhoods or towns where you don’t have a location.  He recommends:

• Creating plenty of city- or neighborhood-specific content on your own website to let the search engine spiders know you serve these additional areas.
• Registering a PO Box and obtaining a local phone number in the additional towns or neighborhoods you serve.
• Claiming your profile on local portals or data providers who only require a business name and phone number, or who will accept a PO Box as an address.

These steps should ensure that Google Maps picks up your additional “locations” in its web crawl, which you can then claim as local business listings.

Jumping ahead a little bit, you could follow up the content on your own website by starting a series of HyperLocal blogs focused on news and events specific to these communities. In the next panel, “Local Search Marketing Tactics,” Matt McGee demonstrated that these kinds of blogs build buzz for your company in areas which you serve, and accrue more town- or neighborhood-specific web crawl citations.

Back to the original panel-my co-presenter Steve Espinosa also presented some excellent tips to optimize your local business listings, and increase your citation totals:

• Include yourself in as many relevant categories as possible at Yahoo-this can often lead to multiple URLs, and thus multiple citations.
• Pay the $9.95/mo. for Yahoo’s Enhanced Product.  His company has found that the little “Merchant Verified” checkmark increases phone calls by 180%.
• Don’t forget about video, both as a citation source and a direct traffic driver. Getting a video thumbnail AND a local listing on the same search result page has led to a 340% increase in phone calls.
• Properly constructed social media profiles, like Twitter, can be picked up as citations if they include your business name, address, and phone number.
• Be sure to link out to your various profiles and citations directly from the landing page you list in the Google Local Business Center. This will ensure that Google is crawling your citations and correlating them with your local business listing.

And finally, Will Scott of Search Influence took Steve’s last nugget one step further with his concept of “Barnacle SEO.”  Essentially, the idea involves linking to your various local profiles from your own content, as well as building links to these profiles through external content.

By doing so, you can leverage the domain authority that a site like Yahoo.com or Yelp.com has in the search engines, and make sure that your own profile is the most relevant result on that domain.  Targeting the right sites with a large enough volume of links means not only will these profiles be seen as powerful citations for your Google local business listing, but will rank organically on their own for geo-targeted searches as well.

The other local search marketers (Olivier Amar, Dennis Yu, and Scott Dunlap) all gave excellent presentations as well, they just focused on topics other than profile optimization. All in all, SMX West was a conference filled with actionable advice that I recommend more SMB’s attend next year.