This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

But today, plenty of research tells us that online consumers are now using the Internet to make local decisions more than most other applications, except maybe email. So it’s now pretty clear that the time for local is finally and really upon us.

Specific estimates vary widely, but there is a broadening consensus that the local opportunity is one that will be measured in the many billions of dollars—and that even more fundamentally, local will be an important driver associated with the growth of online advertising. Comparing today with a decade ago, when the market and advertiser readiness was nascent, a consistent realization is setting in that this local thing is for real and will arrive faster than people expect!

As more people and companies get involved, it is fun to see many familiar names and faces in the local space today, such as Search Engine Land’s own Chris Sherman: Chris and I crossed paths years ago, as he was the original About.com Guide for Web Search, a position he was obviously well qualified for. Now, years later, I find myself contributing to Chris’s new venture!

Nonetheless, I was very pleased to learn that Search Engine Land decided to dedicate a full week to examining the area of local, on top of its regular Locals Only column. Whether a sheer timing coincidence or not, Marchex just released its own 12-page report, Unlocking the Potential of the Local Internet that’s been long in development and deals exclusively with the local opportunity.

I wanted now to share some findings from the survey to whet your appetite and then I’ll let you jump into the rest of the details on your own time. Specifically we detail that:

1) The consensus is that local online advertising revenue is expected to grow five times to more than $25 billion per year within ten years.

2) No one has really yet created a truly comprehensive local information portal. This frankly is surprising as the opportunity is so large.

3) Plenty of companies are scrambling to harness different segments of this still emerging market, whether industry giants like Google and Yahoo!, directories like YellowPages.com, or more niche focused players, such as Judy’s Book. Despite everything that’s been under development in the local online space, I am convinced that the best days for local search and online advertising are clearly yet to come.

4) We conclude that companies who want to have large-scale success in local search will need to have three basic characteristics:

• They will own a critical mass of locally focused traffic and a critical mass of local advertisers, either directly or through partnerships.
• They will need to provide comprehensive local content and information across all locales, meaning that it would be just as easy for consumers to find a licensed locksmith in Lincoln, Nebraska as it is to find a great restaurant in New York City.
• It will be important to offer a flexible variety of products and services for local small- to medium-sized business (SMB) advertisers, as they are becoming more sophisticated about local search and will need the same sorts of products and services that larger national advertisers can leverage, such as analytics services and pay-per-phone call and call tracking capabilities.

There are many other area of the report, including some concise and easy-to-reference charts detailing many of the major players in local search and local online advertising. Feel free to dig in further on your own.

This time for local is finally upon us. I am sure you will agree with me that it will be worth the long wait.

Bill Day is chief media officer for Marchex.

This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

In this article I’ll outline a few reasons why optimized store locators are beneficial, and I’ll provide a few tips on how to optimize the content for local searches and better user-experience overall.

Let’s look at an example of a typical major corporate store locator.

Starbucks, the company that elevated coffee to a religion and enjoys daily visits from devoted worshipers at thousands of locations, has a web site store locator on the link labeled “find a store.” The search form on that page allows one to enter a street address to find all Starbucks outlets within a certain radius of the address. If you don’t enter a street address, and only enter a zip code or only a city + state, the utility will find all outlets within radius of the centroid of the zip code or city area.

Notice that the Starbucks store locator doesn’t have alternate navigation for users (or bots) to find their outlets’ info pages—everything must go through the search form. So, their store locations pages are not getting spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Does this cause Starbucks problems? Probably not any major problems, but this situation results in other sites being able to achieve placement in the search results for their own brand name terms. For instance, performing a search in Google for “Denver Starbucks” returns a number of directories or other sites first in the search results prior to the Google Maps links:

(click to enlarge)

The first link is for the StarbucksEveryWhere.net site—a site operated by a fan of Starbucks which displays photos of lots of Starbucks locations found in a number of major cities. It’s probably unsatisfactory for users seeking coffee shops in their area, though, because it doesn’t show the street addresses or contact info of each of the locations.

The next two pages in the Google SERP are for online directories—ZipHip.com, and Citysearch. These are great since they have addresses, maps and phone numbers for the locations. But these sites are likely not getting their data from Starbucks—ZipHip is getting its data from Local.com which is getting data from Acxiom and other sources, and Citysearch is getting data from infoUSA. While the data aggregators like Acxiom and infoUSA are great, it’s quite possible that the data isn’t up to date, so some of the Starbucks they list could be closed, and they might not have the listings for the newest stores.

While the Google Maps listings do show mapped locations, phone numbers, and links over to Starbucks.com, the very links themselves are not all that ideal because they just dump the users who might click through onto the Starbucks homepage.

Under the Google Maps listings, a page from Metblogs shows up titled “Starbucks, WTF?”—a page that touts a competitor and give passing criticism to Starbucks.

Starbucks might wish to reduce the chances that users go through the “middleman” sites for a few reasons. The info could be stale, users could be leaving negative reviews for locations, and Starbucks could be paying for referrals from some of those sites. Starbucks may want to advertise other stuff to those users who come onto their sites looking for locations. It’s a better user experience for searchers to be able to easily find the official info from Starbucks, and Starbucks can better manage its online reputation by enabling people to find stores directly.

Not to mention, if Starbucks had optimized a page for Denver, they’d likely rank higher than the other sites showing up, and this could help push that negative page on Metroblog down further, reducing the chances that users would pay attention to it.

The Starbucks nonoptimal store locator situation isn’t unique. Try “Houston Pizza Hut”, or “Chicago Zales Jewelry“, or “Nashville Meineke.” For that matter, find “Wal-Mart in Seattle.”

The search engines, particularly Google, will show preferential rankings to famous name-brand sites for specific searches like this, if they can find relevant content. If these sites were to perform just a little basic SEO with these sections, they could improve their local search rankings and improve their site traffic and user-experience.

Unsurprisingly, one vertical industry which does do locator pages well is the hotels industry, perhaps because their locations are their primary product, and they’re highly conscious about how much research happens online when consumers select accommodations. For instance, take a look at Marriott.com’s “Find & Reserve” page which includes regular links to their hotel’s individual profile pages. They link through to individual hotel pages by cities, states, amenities, airports, local activities and more. So, if a user performs a search like “Minneapolis Marriott” or “Marriott in Los Angeles“, one of Marriott’s own site pages is coming up as highest for the search.

Marriott’s search-engine-friendly design should really be sort of thing that all chain stores aim to achieve. Here are some tips on the best practices for optimizing store locator web content.

Tips to optimize store locators for local search:

• There must be links which search engines can follow into all the store location pages. You’ll need to provide a web page for every city with your stores, and you may have to generate a small hierarchy of pages to link out to pages for all locations, depending upon how many total locations you have. The search engines recommend that you have fewer than a hundred links on a single page, and you may need to display even fewer than that for the sake of good usability. If you have many locations, you might link first to all the states or provinces in your country on your store locator search page. On each state’s or province’s page, provide a list of all the cities where you have locations. Within each city’s page, list all the locations where you have stores. Some companies even provide a helpful image map of the country, allowing users to click on the map to get a list of locations for each area or city—best to provide a separate plain text linked navigation system in addition to an image map, though.

• Ideally, the links down through your navigation structure should be spider-friendly. Shorter is better—only use a few query string parameters if you can, or even better—avoid query strings and use a static-appearing format like “directory/subdirectory/filename.html.”
• It’s preferable to create a stand alone page for each and every location, so that each of those pages will be made to be very specifically relevant to the city, zip code and local area. Consider designing each location’s page as a sort of profile of information about that particular store.
• Make each store’s profile page as unique as possible. List the street address, including the city, state and postal code. List store hours, contact phone numbers, and provide a map for the location. I’ve previously mentioned using the hCard microformat for the address and other information, but that’s just a nice-to-have. Listing the information in html text on the page is the basic, necessary step.
• Look at how users search for your business, since this can help you form the ideal TITLE for the pages. I suggest that you include the brand name, the city name, and the business type in the title. For example, “Widgets-R-Us Hardware Store in Springfield, Missouri.” You may need to adjust for the location to use a neighborhood or regional name as well or instead of the city name. For instance, New Yorkers might be using the abbreviation “NYC” as much as they use “New York city” when they search.
• Mentioning nearby items of related interest on your store profile pages can bring valuable incremental traffic. If a restaurant location is near a major event center or landmark, for instance, list those things on the page.
• Form good META Description tags which are individual to each location. Keep these short, and specific. For instance, “Visit the Widgets-R-Us store in Springfield for all your widget and hardware component needs.” It’s best to include a direct call to action and realize that the description should be engineered to assure the enduser that the page has what they want, and it should help draw them into clicking into the page.
• Include photos of the location, if you’re able. You might ask the managers of all your locations to email in a digital picture of the storefront as one way to easily build the content. Displaying the photo of the location can help make the store more recognizable when consumers are driving to it for the first time.
• If your individual stores have promotional budgets or support the local community through charitable donations, they could request that references to them on other local online sites be linked to the store’s individual profile page. Getting other local sites to link directly to the store profile pages can help build PageRank, and make these official site pages appear more important/relevant than other sites displaying your listing information.
• Use Google’s Business Location Bulk Upload to deliver your store location information directly to Google Maps, and make sure that each of your locations also has its own unique URL in the data. This will improve user-experience by making Google’s local listings for your company link over to the exact page for that listing on your site. Optimizing your store location pages might allow Google Maps to link more directly to the associated pages in your site, but uploading the location information will give you a better guarantee of this working well.
• Depending on your size, many other business directory sites, internet yellow pages, and local search sites may also accept feeds directly from you. Chains with hundreds and thousands of locations may benefit from directly feeding their listings into these sites in order to directly manage their online presence. Contact these sites after you’ve optimized your store locator and see if you can send them periodic updates to insure your data is correct, and to improve chances that consumers can find new stores that you open.

Most large corporate chains have both the data and the development resources necessary to optimize their store location pages, but they lack the focus to see that they could benefit from doing this. The search engine’s continual improvements have also contributed to giving these companies a lack of urgency in optimizing their locators. Yet, optimizing these sections is worthwhile. Having the official location pages exposed through the search engines will bring in more traffic, allowing these companies to market new products to their customers. It’ll also reduce the instances where they’re paying third parties for referral traffic that could be going to them directly, and it will help them control their online reputations better.

Chris “Silver” Smith is Lead Strategist at Netconcepts.

This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

The Superpages compare feature is like that found on product comparison search engines and allows for side-by-side comparisons of up to eight merchants.

Here’s an example of the functionality for the search “Florists, San Francisco”:

The new upgrade on Superpages is part of an ongoing expansion of features and capabilities on the site, which has recently introduced video advertising, personalization, a Facebook application and more mobile options. The company has also been aggressively syndicating its listings to third parties online and in mobile.

Superpages executives will be speaking at SMX Local & Mobile.

After exploring Yahoo’s Mapspam, I started investigating Yahoo’s end user local reporting features more fully. I may have underestimated Yahoo’s features to deal with spam (and to abet it). The new Yahoo Local is making a strong attempt at encouraging user input and content about local businesses with reviews, soliciting and actually reading end user suggestions for improvements and even allowing users to add business level details to specific records.

This article is part of Local Search Week here at Search Engine Land, a special look at local search marketing issues in the run-up to our SMX Local & Mobile conference next month.

This last feature, while buried deep within the local record, has much more “clout” than I originally imagined. While in New York City over the weekend, I took the time in Yahoo Local to “update this business” for the “New York Florist” that had fabricated their address and I indicated to Yahoo Local that they were closed.

Immediately a warning tag appeared on their record in the local listing although their ranking in the organic results was not immediately affected.

On different computers, I made two additional “closed” notations on each of the subsequent days. When I returned home on Tuesday, I logged into Yahoo Local as a Yahoo user and once again proceeded to the “update this business” option. This time I was advised that 3 previous users had indicated that the business was closed and was asked if I agreed. I indicated that I did and that the business was in fact not at the address listed.

By Thursday, the “New York Florist” record was completely removed from both the Yahoo Local results and the local content embedded in the main search results page for the search “Florist + NY, NY”. Langdon’s Florist, the real florist near that address, was now ranked #1. (see an image of last week search results) . I was awed by my new found god like “powers” and that the record was removed with such rapidity. I felt like I had found a solution for all of the real florists in the world in their “battle” against fake local businesses. Had I discovered the path to florist nirhvana or had I uncovered a pandora’s box?

My experience certainly raised a number of questions:

• Was 4 notations all it took to remove a business?
• Did Yahoo give more importance to members than non members?
• Was geo-location of the user input a consideration? (how would I know the NY business was closed if I was in LA?)
• Can I so notate any business in the country and thus tag them?
• Was there additional verification before the business was removed?
• Would typical viewers ever really take the time to tag businesses as closed?
• Would this become a tool for black hat endeavors?

The realization came to me that Yahoo had not just assigned the “god” role to me but to all users. Alas had my Yahoo Local world quickly morphed from the concept of a single benign despot (me) to one more resembling the mob madness in Lord of the Flies? Had we moved from the world of “user generated content” (UGC) to that of “user denigrated content” (UDC)?

After a few emails describing this discovery to Cathy of realflorist.flowerchat.com, she pointed out in detail something I had glanced over earlier in the day:

Don’t know if you noticed this post on the Yahoo Suggestion Board, but it hasn’t taken competitor(s) long to figure out how to abuse categories with multiple listings (5 for the same company on pg 1) and smack “this business is closed’ labels on their neighbors – see this discussion.

Look at the SERPs – “carpet cleaning atlanta ga – OY! (BTW, seems even “Merchant Verified’ listings respond the same way as the unverified ones.)

To me, it looks like just three companies trying to crowd out everyone else. They all appear to be “national’ sites or their affiliates but none list local addresses. There’s more dirt here than just carpets. (OK, I couldn’t resist.)

Sheesh. I just knew there was more than rotten flowers in those pages.

Cathy

And I would have been such a good god, I know I would have. However it appears that instead I might be dodging local search bullets in this new world order of user denigrated content along with the rest of humanity. Nothing like the internet to accerlate a fall from grace.

Mike Blumenthal is a student of life, political economy and local search. He writes the blog Understanding Google Maps and Yahoo Local Search and is a partner in a small web design company in upstate NY.

It’s also clear that as searchers get more sophisticated, they’re getting more comfortable seeking out nearby merchants and service providers using the web, rather than turning to the increasingly outdated, non-interactive yellow pages.

Despite these promising signs, the market is fragmented, and getting more so with new local search services launching almost weekly. And the established players, the general purpose search engines and internet yellow pages providers have all put major resources into creating robust local search and mapping offerings.

So it’s still a confusing landscape for many search marketers. In the posts this week by Search Engine Land columnists and writers, we hope to dispel some of that confusion and clarify some of the opportunities that you may not have considered.

And, of course, our SMX Local & Mobile conference is just around the corner. In highlighting local search this week, and mobile search next week, we aim to whet your appetite for what’s shaping up to be a fantastic conference, with tons of new and original content from speakers who have developed significant knowledge and expertise in these emerging areas of search marketing.

Want to know more about SMX Local & Mobile? Here you go:

Attend SMX Local & Mobile – October 1-2, Denver

Learn the latest tips and techniques for local search at SMX Local & Mobile! Join the Search Engine Land editorial team for the only event 100% focused on this significant opportunity for search marketers.

See the Agenda. Check out the Networking page. Register today!