If you’re a dentist in Boston looking for local sites, you could look at the listings of other Boston businesses, such as Boston Standard Plumbing:

However, Google does have quite a few Facebook pages in its index – a quick search suggests as many as 2.6 billion:

When you check out Google Place Pages for small businesses, you do find many references to Facebook. Here’s an example of a plumber in Boston with a Facebook citation on his Place Page:

The fact that there is a Facebook citation here does not necessarily mean that Google crawled Facebook. However, since this Place Page is not ‘owner verified’ we can assume it was not manually entered by the business owner.

We thought it would be interesting to see how many NY businesses have links to Facebook from their Google Place Page. Out of the 500,000+ businesses we looked at, the average we found was slightly over 2% – and virtually all of the business categories were in the single-digit percentages.

What’s surprising is the discrepancy between the figures we found and the figures quoted by other surveys. For example, BIA Kelsey’s study found that 32% of SMBs use social sites like Facebook, USA Today quoted more than 1 million SMBs have Facebook profiles, and Fox Small Business Center published a survey that found 63% of SMBs rely on Facebook.

This raises a few questions: how many small businesses really are on Facebook?

If, for example, Kelsey got it right and 32% is a fair number, then why does Google show such a small percentage? This could be for a number of reasons, given the tense relations between these two Internet giants. Thoughts?

For example, if you’re a plumber in Boston looking for local sites to post your business listing on, you could look at the listings of other Boston businesses, by running a query for “Boston Plumbing” to find other local sites:

If you want to find vertical sites, you could look at the listings of other dentists, such as Tribeca Dental Associates in New York:

Even better, you would want to look at businesses that are in both your locale and your vertical, such as Charles River Dental Associates in Boston:

Finding local and vertical sites this way is a tedious process because you have to go through many businesses one by one. An alternative is to use an online tool that automatically aggregates all the sites where your competitors are listed.

But with all of these approaches, you end up seeing the large, plain vanilla sites like Yelp, CitySearch and SuperPages. Whether you’re a dentist, florist or plumber, and whether you’re in Boston, Chicago or Chico, these generic sites aren’t necessarily the right ones for you to be listed on.

Not Just Hyperlocal, Hyper-Relevant

It could be that in order to rank high on Google Maps, you need to be on a hyperlocal site or the hyper vertical site that is ‘hyper relevant’ for your type of business! Otherwise you may be lost under the big nationwide, multi-category sites that just list all 15M US businesses.

To get a better understanding, we ran an analysis of 3 million SMB’s in multiple verticals and locations, and used that data to look at just the vertical sites and just the local sites – and found some interesting things. Here is an example of what we found for Faneuil Hall Dental Associates, a Boston dentist.

These are the nationwide sites for their business category, which include both the big sites like Google and more relevant sites such as healthgrades.com and wellness.com (vertical sites are marked by and multi-category sites are marked by ):

Below are the local sites where they should be listed. Some of these smaller local sites one might never think of (such as nomoreclipboard.com or clinicwalk.com) but Google thinks they are important:

It’s clear that the plain vanilla sites are not the only ones you need to be listed on – equally as important are the smaller, simple sites that Google finds to be important for your business category. What’s important for SMB’s to understand is that not every dentist needs to be listed on clinicwalk.com, but that they would do well to consider all the sites that are most relevant to their vertical and their locale.

What one wouldn’t expect to see is a simple storefront business in a single location, such as a salon, getting listed across a large geographical area. If you’re one salon among hundreds, one would think you’d focus on getting optimized well for your city, rather than appearing in a city two hours away.

Yet we came across a tanning salon in Newton, MA that appears for different keywords in seven cities across two states. They appear for “spray tans” in Fall River, MA (one hour away):

And for “spray tanning” in Woonsocket, RI (also over an hour away):

They show up on page 1 for most of their relevant keywords, even though nearly every keyword brings them up in a different city:

There is over a 2-hour driving distance between some of the cities that Incredible Tan shows up in:

Incredible Tan appears to be quite the savvy salon (they also advertise and offer online coupons.) But is their strategy a good one? How likely is it that someone in West Warwick, RI will drive an hour-plus to Newton, MA for a 15-minute tanning session, especially when there are plenty of other tanning salons much closer?

While it may not seem to make much sense from the internet marketing point of view, from the business owner’s perspective they don’t really have anything to lose. Maybe 1 in 100 potential customers from these farther-away areas will visit the website, think it’s nice, and remember it the next time they’re passing through on their way to Boston.

So many business owners have been asking how to do this that Google recently addressed the issue.

What do others think – is this a good thing?

When he searched on Google for “dollar store” in Albuquerque, the business did not show up on the first results page. The business also did not appear for the following relevant keywords that their competitors did:

To better understand why this franchise had a low visibility, we compared them to another franchise – in the same city – that did appear on the first page of Google.

This second Family Dollar Store ranked much higher, receiving a customer reach score of 58%. They came up for many of the same keywords as their competitors:

And they appear on many relevant sites:

Given that these are two out of 23 Family Dollar Store franchises in Albuquerque (not to mention the dozens of other local dollar stores), what was making one more visible than another?

So we started looking for the usual suspects.

• Does the higher-ranking business have a more relevant name? No, all the franchises have the exact same name.
• Does the business have a better optimized website? No, they all share the exact same website.
• Does the business have better products or services? No, they all sell the same products for a dollar.
• Does the business have more online citations? No – in fact the low-ranking business has more online citations than the higher-ranking business.

Faced with this puzzle, I couldn’t help but think that there’s always a way to differentiate seemingly identical entities:

This is a problem many franchises face. When you’re selling the same product, with the same name, same website, in the same city, and with dozens of competitors, how can you stand out from the rest?

As we were trying to understand this discrepancy, sitting in front of a Google maps of New Mexico, it dawned on us -

Location, location, location. The business that scored 58% is 1.5 miles from what Google considers the city center and the business that scored 8% is 7 miles away. As Matt McGee reported, proximity of address to city centroid is the twelfth most important factor in one’s online visibility ranking.

What do you think – is that the whole story, or is there more to this picture?

A good way to determine which citations one needs is by researching the competition and using their citations as a guide – much as one would do with link building for site ranking improvements. The process seems relatively straightforward.

However, there is a considerable discrepancy between the Place Page results one sees for a business versus the results of a standard Google search. This information can lead business owners astray when they are looking to increase their citations.

Let’s take an example. If I’m an orthopedic surgeon in San Jose, I may consider Dr. Leo Semkiw a competitor that I’d like to emulate. Because I want to match his citations, I look to his Place Page:

His Place Page shows 30 results, but if you check the links, many of them have nothing to do with Dr. Leo Semkiw – including the last three of the results on the first page. For example, the fifth link brings us to an injury report of some man named Vinny, with no mention of Dr. Semkiw.

Now if I do a Google search for him, I find many more relevant results:

The first thing that strikes me is that his Merchant Circle and Yahoo listings (among others) come up first on the Google search results, and don’t appear at all on his Place Page results.

Given that Google is usually very good at analyzing the content of web pages, why didn’t Google include these relevant results in the Place Page? Google lists Yahoo Local and Merchant Circle in other Place Pages, so what could be the reason for this? You could argue that Google strives to put only the most high quality results on the Place Page, but that doesn’t account for the low quality results on Dr. Leo Semkiw’s Place Page.

So how should business owners go about determining which citations they need? Clearly Yahoo Local and Merchant Circle are sites worth getting listed on, but if you do, will Google give you credit for those citations? Some citation tools use Google search results while other local analytic services use the citations from the Place Page. Curious to hear your thoughts…

Upon taking these steps, SMB owners will wait to see their results on search engines, make the necessary tweaks, and eventually reach a higher position in online search results.

If you do your homework, the process seems fairly straightforward. Here’s an example of a plumber in Chico, CA who comes up #1 on Google:

We found Earl’s Performance Plumbing on page one for 15 relevant keywords:

It looks like Earl is doing a fantastic job. But one has to remember that it’s important not only to rank #1 but to rank #1 for the right keywords. As Stoney G. deGeyter said, “All search terms are not created equal.”

One great way to check if you’re missing critical keywords is, as Mike Moran suggests, by comparing against your successful competitors’ keywords.

To help facilitate this effort, we released a new data version for a couple million businesses in the southwest on AmIVisible, showing which keywords their competitors come up for but they do not.

We looked at all of Earl’s competitors in Chico (about 100, across 8 categories) and found the following keywords that Earl’s competitors came up for but he did not:

This is quite an eye opener. While some of these missing keywords may not be relevant for Earl, others certainly are. For example, he comes up for “sewer” and “plumber”, but he does not come up for “sewers” or “plumbing services.”

Even a business like Earl’s Performance Plumbing, which comes up #1 on Google for several keywords, should not be complacent about their online presence. Whether you resort to using a monitoring service or tool, or do it yourself manually, you should always remember to check results against your competitors to be sure that you’ve got all your bases covered.

This is a story about a small business practitioner who made it to the Google pack – without a website – in a competitive category in Manhattan. As a starting out cardiologist working in a New York City clinic, she depends greatly upon her Internet listings to get her name publicized and bring in new patients.

I met with her husband a couple weeks ago in New York, and while showing him our new SEO reach score for businesses in Florida, he told me about how he improved his wife’s SEO on his own. He helped her claim her listings on search engines, update her listings on directory sites, incorporate her category (cardiologist) in her business listing titles, and added her to Zocdoc, an online appointment site like OpenTable but for doctors. All of the steps he took are common recommendations for obtaining a better online ranking.

So,  to recap – they didn’t spend a dollar on SEO, an advertising campaign or even a website. Yet lo and behold, she made it to the top of the Google pack (see below). This is quite an accomplishment, especially for a category such as ‘cardiologist’ and a location as New York City.

Now it’s true that if you’re not going to hire an SEO company or other professional to assist you, you have to know what to do. This cardiologist happened to have a knowledgeable husband who could help her, but this information is available on the Internet for every business owner to take advantage of.

A good place to start is David Mihm’s  2010 Local Search Ranking Factors report. The report found that the number one most important factor in one’s online visibility is “Claiming Place Page/Local Listing”. It’s so simple, costs nothing, and yet so many business owners fail to do it.

The report found over 50 variables that influence your ranking. This New York City cardiologist only covered a few of the top 10 factors, yet that seemed to be enough to get her to the Google pack.

So to return to my original question, the answer is probably yes. But as this anecdote shows us, if you do your homework and take some initiative, you can get quite far on the Internet – even without a website.

We received a complaint from an Oregon art supply store that they were being incorrectly compared to an irrelevant business. The so-called competitor, called Hair’s Where It’s At, was also categorized as an art supply store on AmIVisible.

Our initial assumption was that we had somehow erred, but we decided to take a look to be sure. It turned out that Hair’s Where It’s At is listed on major directories and search engines under the following categories:

For example, Google Maps had categorized them as ‘beauty salon’ with a specialty in ‘galleries’:

Such an odd mix of categories didn’t clarify what type of business this was, so we searched for Hair’s website to get a clearer picture. Well, there was no website to be found. Next we decided to take a look at which keywords the business shows up for.  With a name like Hair’s Where It’s At, we expected to find keywords along the lines of hair or salon. Instead, we found:

So now we were totally confused – was this a hair salon, or an art supply store?

At this point we decided to pick up the phone and end the mystery.

The business owner, Sandra, had no idea she was listed under these categories. Her response was, “I didn’t even know I was on the Internet. It must have been my grandson who did all that.”

Well it turned out she is a hair salon (and has been since 1976) but she’s also an artist, and hangs her paintings on the wall to sell to her hair customers. “I used to display hair-dos on wigs, but nobody was interested in buying those,” she laughed.

While it’s all good and fun to sell art while cutting hair, it doesn’t bode well for your online presence the way it currently stands, we tried explaining to her. The name implies that you’re a hairdresser while your listings, categories, and keywords make you sound like an art supplies store. By editing a few search engine listings and optimizing your keywords, this could all be corrected, and could drive significantly more traffic to your business.

She didn’t seem bothered a bit by her online inconsistencies. When asked if she had considered creating a website, she said: “I’m a mini-senior citizen, I don’t need the Internet. I already have two customers coming in today.”

Being in business since 1976 is certainly a proud accomplishment, and two customers a day is better than none. But if someone would correct her categories and optimize her keywords, there’s little doubt that more potential customers would be driven to her. Not everyone will pick up the phone to call and ask whether she’s a barber or an art shop the way we did.

Who really stands to lose in this situation?

It bothered the business who was incorrectly compared to them on our presence management system, but that’s a minor issue. It should bother search engines that potential customers searching for an art store will find a hair salon (which is an all too common problem.) It’s the people who are searching for a haircut in her area who stand to lose, because they won’t find her easily. And most of all Sandra stands to lose – considering her hair salon, and not her art, is her primary business.

But as Clickable CEO David Kidder pointed out, nearly 45% of SMB’s don’t want new customers. Maybe Sandra is one of them.

To answer this question, we took a look at businesses in San Diego and calculated their visibility on search engines, directories and yellow pages sites. We discovered an interesting distribution between those with low, medium, and high online visibility.

The graph below depicts the online visibility of 194K San Diego small busineses:

As we see on the left side of the chart, the majority of businesses have low visibility. They may be listed on a few search engines and local directories, but otherwise make no investment in their online presence. To the right of the spike but still in the ‘low visibility’ group we see businesses that are making some amount of effort, such as claiming their listings or setting up a website.

The middle of the chart illustrates those businesses with decent visibility – they are listed in most places, and have taken additional steps such as optimizing their website and advertising online.

Only the minority, as shown on the right side of the chart, has excellent visibility – these businesses are at the top of the top. They invest serious dollars in effective PPC advertising, social media tools, video marketing, and are listed in the Google 7-pack for relevant keywords.

So what does ‘excellent online visibility’ mean in concrete terms? Take a look at Bill Howe Plumbing Inc.* who received a high visibility score on AmIVisible. This business owner has invested in nearly every possible avenue for his visibility.

He is listed on search engines and yellow pages sites, and has claimed these listings:

He advertises on Superpages, Yellowbook, and other sites:

He posted numerous videos on YouTube:

He created pages on Facebook and Twitter:

And on and on. This is about as good as it gets in the world of online visibility.

What this means for the average small business owner with low visibility is that there are easy, low-cost steps you can take to get ahead. A minor investment such as listing yourself better, optimizing your website, or spending a little in advertising can have a big impact. It’s the SMB’s with the lowest visibility that have the greatest opportunity for improvement.

By no means should all SMB’s try to be ‘the best’ –100% perfect visibility is a neither necessary nor attainable goal. The focus should be on breaking away from the low-end majority, keeping in mind that visibility is a relative and not an objective measurement.

It’s the businesses in the middle who are already investing something that face a bigger challenge. In order to be like Bill, it will require significantly more money and effort.

*Disclaimer: Bill Howe Plumbing Inc. is not a client of or in any way associated with AmIVisible. The business was randomly selected as an example of high online visibility for the purposes of this post.