Google’s new social search experiment is kind of a big deal for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is it will open up lots of opportunity for smart local search marketers.

Over the past couple of years we’ve seen social-local search plays like Yelp gather steam while at the same time Google Maps results have slowly started encroaching on more and more Web results. Recently Google added place pages and Google local listing ads which should both start to grab more and more local search attention. In short, as Google improves its local search experience, it will get harder for sites to get the valuable local search traffic they have been feasting on for years.

But along comes Google social search and it looks like the all-you-can-eat local search buffet has been restocked.

At the moment Google social search does not work very well for local search. The algorithm appears to rely heavily on Gmail connections. Combine this with the fact that its hard to find enough relevant social interactions for a large amount of search queries, so Google doesn’t have much to work with for a lot of users.

But you can be sure that with the announcement of a Twitter integration deal and Facebook turning on location-based services, Google social search is going to come out like a monster and the local part of it is going to be huge.

So how can you benefit from this?

First let’s talk about some of the main types of social connections one has on the web:

• Friends
• Friends of friends
• People who are interested in the same niche
• People who are located in the same geographic area
• People who you have no connection with (let’s call them “the unfortunates”)

As I mentioned in my Twitter Chamber of Commerce post there is a large opportunity for businesses to increase awareness in their community by simply networking with other businesses via social media like Twitter. But now with the advent of Google social search, the simple act of following or being followed has a ripple effect that could yield dramatic benefits.

Here’s a pseudo-real-world example:

Joe’s Pizza in Pleasanton follows me on Twitter. Someone else in Pleasanton whom I have a Facebook connection with searches Google for “pizza” or “pizza in pleasanton.” Because my Facebook and Twitter accounts are connected in a variety of places (my blog, on Brizzly, etc.), Google can find my relationship to Joe’s Pizza and surface it in the “social” results section of a search result page, which is a good thing for Joe because he was having a hard time cracking the local search “seven pack” (local search results placed next to a map on Google’s Web results pages).

But since it’s highly unlikely that I will have even a one-way social connection with local businesses or Tweets about a local business in many categories (think upholsterers, foot fungus specialists and pet psychics), Google will have to look somewhere else to find socially relevant results. This is where people interested in the same niche and people located in the same area come in. My guess is that these social profiles will make up the “backfill” of social local results when no one whom you have a direct or even indirect connection with for a specific local query has shared any relevant content. And given the tangled web nature of social media connections, my guess that inevitably Google will be able to find a connection that is somehow relevant for any query.

So basically for a lot of queries in the early days of Google social local search it’s going to come down to how aggressive and targeted you can be with your social media profiles. The more relevant you can be regarding the query, the location and the network, the more likely you are to appear in the local search results. The good news is that if you follow basic social networking logic you should be able to do pretty well. Some tips for all of you locksmiths and other local businesses out there:

• Create a social media profile on the major social networking sites—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.
• If your niche has social media sites, create profiles on those sites (e.g. Sphinn, PetPsychicNetwork, etc).
• Make sure you include both your location and your niche keywords in all of your social profiles.
• Connect with people who are talking about your niche and/or talking about your location.
• For good measure you might want to connect with people who have a large number of social connections. This will increase the likelihood that you have at least a distant connection with someone who is searching for a query relevant to your profile.

It pains me to say it, but local search is a solved consumer problem. I’m in pain admitting this, because I’ve been trying to create better local search mousetraps since 2003.

Put simply, major search engines do a good enough job of surfacing local listings and phone numbers to consumers who need a specific product or service at a moment in time. The rest of the local search “opportunity,” beyond the one or two review aggregator sites lucky enough to also pop up—is all a matter of either SEO (indefensible) or arbitrage (sinking margins). In other words, consumers have accepted the solution the web search engines provide to them, not because it solves the problem in the best possible way, but because they have built intractable habit. Better local search, grounded in innovative product or technology, has little or no opportunity to break the habits the engines reinforce day in, day out, across billions of searches. The battle has been won.

Worse, for the local business, participation in the local result set is not only far beyond their control (show me a plumber effectively competing with YellowBot or Yelp on Google), but a consumer’s very decision-making process is mediated by the sites that control the most content about that business (the review aggregators). This state of affairs is an artifact of the SEO game, in which the plumber can’t hope to compete against the aggregators, often even for specific name and location searches.

So where can a die-hard local search junkie turn to scratch the itch of their burning faith in the local space? To the local business, for whom, I’d argue, local search represents more problems than solutions. The real problem that’s now worth solving is to turn the data set, technology and techniques of consumer-oriented local search to the benefit of the local business.

Last month, my colleague Eric Souder wrote about the value of rich, relevant content on a business’s web site, and the importance of marketing that content appropriately. I’d take this one step further to say that it’s imperative local businesses be just as vigilant and knowledgeable about all of the other places that information is listed across the web, if not more so. Often, a business’ digital footprint is growing without them even knowing it, not just through the propagation of often semi-accurate business details (data), but through reviews and other user generated content (opinion).

I used to claim that the future of local search was data mining, but I think I had it only half right. The future of local search is to leverage data mining to aggregate, summarize, and expose the full digital footprint of a local business, for two explicit purposes:

1. To improve marketing. Learning how a business is talked about by the specific terms it is known for, or where spikes in online activity such as sales or consumer reviews occur, can determine which marketing efforts are working well versus those that are not.
2. To improve operations. Monitoring customer feedback can raise awareness of customer service issues or other unknown problems within the business that perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise been flagged.

At Marchex, we’re calling this problem set reputation management, and we’re looking forward to turning local search back on its head, putting information advantage back in the hands of the local business.

Congress’ debate on healthcare has sparked many different opinions about the right path for the future of healthcare insurance. Regardless of where that debate is headed, all Americans share the same challenge at one point or another: finding good healthcare.

And that’s where local search comes in—to help connect medical professionals with patients.

Recently, Dennis Fromholzer at CRM Associates analyzed some data points from Knowledge Networks that show healthcare accounts for 14 percent of all Yellow Pages usage—or roughly one out of every seven uses. In 2008, there were 2.4 billion references to healthcare headings in the Yellow Pages, both print and online. Five headings—Physicians, Dentists, Chiropractors, Hospitals, and Pharmacies—account for over 75 percent of healthcare references.

Over the last few years, we’ve also seen a proliferation of vertical web sites that offer local search tools and user reviews to help consumers find local medical professionals. They range from the all encompassing Angie’s List and CitySearch to the more specific like webMD Physician Finder, Find A Doctor and New York City-based Zoc Doc.

Online local search options are even spreading beyond simply finding a doctor to finding health insurance as well—an inherently very local task given the nature of the insurance industry and a wide array of state laws. Healthcare.com made a presentation at the recent Kelsey Group Directional Media Strategies conference about the growing opportunities for insurance providers to use online local search tools to market themselves.

So what does all this mean for the local healthcare professional or practice wanting to build a clientele of patients? For starters, it means taking stock of all the tools available to you, from print yellow pages, internet yellow pages, city listings sites and local search verticals to determine which will reach your intended audience. Depending on the community and demographic desired, this may be a mix of tools, or possibly all of them.

I think in this evaluation, it’s very important to consider which mediums people trust most. A yellow pages ad can offer legitimacy, while a featured listing on an internet yellow pages site can attract high viewership via a Google search.

Once the medium has been selected, it’s critical to spend some time on the message. Look at what other healthcare professional are sayings in their listings and ads, and determine what message and ad format will differentiate against others in the profession.

Finally, word of mouth is critical. And by word of mouth, it’s not only the referrals you hear from family or friends in every day discussion, but also what others are saying online. A simple tweet about a great doc can drum up new clients for a practice. Likewise, a user-generated review on local sites that allow them can be critical in attracting, or scaring away, potential patients.

I think it’s safe to say that whatever happens in Congress, patients will continue to turn to local search tools to find accessible healthcare. Our role as local search agents will not change, and in fact, may only get greater as changes to the system will only prompt additional questions. Our job will be to continue to provide the most relevant information for the millions and millions of Americans who rely upon local search to make some of the most important decisions for themselves and their families.

This past week at SMX East, I presented a longer-tail marketing tactic for Google Maps—creation and uploading of place marks data into the customizable “My Maps” section. For companies and individuals who have some rich local data to share, or local place expertise, My Maps may be for you!

If you’ve ever wished that you could engineer the Google Maps interface to highlight and display your local content, My Maps could be something of a dream-come-true. For content publishers, imagine if your content was pinpointed and presented throughout Google Maps, making it easy for people who are exploring local areas virtually to discover you? For small mom-and-pop businesses, imagine if consumers were able to find you via hundreds or thousands of listings in Google Maps instead of just one?

People frequently search for local places via maps—indeed, Hitwise counts four map sites in the top ten of its travel category. While inside the maps, there are a few ways by which searchers may be exposed to user-generated maps. First, in the left sidebar of Google Maps are displayed image thumbnail icons related to the query and below that are links to some of the top user-submitted maps:

Second, within the new Place Pages generated for each location, and on individual Place Pages for businesses, there are also links to various user-submitted links.

On these pages, the user-submitted maps which rank highest are typically those which are more popular and have the most views. Subject matter of things plotted in maps may be constrained by your content, but keywords in map names, map descriptions and appropriateness of map names to the area pinpointed by the maps Placemarks also affect how often searchers will see and click to view the custom maps.

Some of the custom maps have received significant numbers of click-throughs! I’ve seen some with over 60,000 views—an indication that these can sometimes be very worthwhile sources for referral traffic, if engineered well.

There are all sorts of useful custom maps that one could provide about local areas. Companies which develop value-add information maps about local areas could easily reap the benefit of having more content within Google Maps which can convert to more traffic to their websites. Some examples I’ve seen include a blog about coffee which pinpointed independent coffee shops of Denver, a map of local tourist destinations at Catalina Island, and maps for Silicon Valley cafes provided by Mapplr.

Those who create custom maps are provided with an unprecedented degree of control over content presented. As an example, I created a custom map for a non-profit group’s local area connection points, Operation Christmas Child’s New York drop-off locations. As you can see, I was able to customize the display of the information bubbles for each location by adding a description that included name, street address, phone number and a small pic from their website:

Within each, I also added a link back to Operation Christmas Child’s website.

This resulted in increased exposure for the charitable organization. Those dropoff locations now appear in Google Maps search results when one searches for “operation christmas child, new york,” and the link to the custom map now appears in those dropoff organizations’ Google Place pages.

The promotional value of such custom maps is clear for organizations and many businesses. By uploading useful locational info into Google Maps, you can increase your exposure and it can open up another long-tail channel for referral traffic.

Google’s My Maps can be generated in a few ways. One may click to create a map by hand. One may develop a KML file that pinpoints placemarks to be manually uploaded into Google’s My Maps. And, one can create a KML file and submit it for crawling via Sitemaps protocol (Here’s a link to the example KML file I created for the Operation Christmas Child NYC Map).

Tips for creating Google “My Maps:”

• Build out your Google Profile page. You can leverage brand name value with a well-chosen profile name. The Profile page ought to have a good custom avatar icon and should include links back to your website pages.
• Create maps that are useful.
• Link to the custom maps you build from your website.
• Customize the information bubble content for your placemarks.
• Include links in the info bubble content back to related pages on your site that provide additional information.
• Design custom placemark icons.
• If you’re providing more info about businesses already within Google Maps’ directory, use the same name for your placemarks as the business name to facilitate the My Map links to appear in the business’s Place page.
• Remember to include vitally-useful details such as addresses and phone numbers for placemarks where it makes sense to do so—leaving out those details harms usability.

Creating elegant and effective custom maps within Google Maps is easy to do and is one long-tail tactic that relatively few companies have exploited. If you use My Maps to promote a business or a site as I’ve described, be sure to leave comments below this article linking-to and describing the maps you’ve created!

Co-opitition is a fairly common occurrence in the local search biz.  A lot of the big yellow pages publishers have access to a lot of advertisers but they don’t always have the right mix of traffic.  While it’s no small feat to sign up a dentist in Pleasanton, CA, it’s just as hard to get traffic to your site from the relatively few people each month in Pleasanton who are searching for a dentist, even if you have 20 million monthly visitors to your site.  So if you’re sitting on a few million in ad spend you have to go out and buy the traffic, usually from your competitors.

And your competitors often have the opposite problem—they get lot of traffic to “dentists in Pleasanton” pages but no advertisers.  So they will gladly take your ads if the price is right, and sometimes even if it isn’t, because $0.10 is better than $0.00.

But with the increasing competition in local search it is not so easy to figure out who has the traffic you need any more.  There are now thousands of 2nd & 3rd tier local search directories that each get a little bit of traffic that when aggregated adds up to a huge amount of inventory.

This is type of environment in which Google AdSense has flourished.  Because of it’s ease of use and it’s broad inventory coverage, it is the monetization mechanism of choice for many small (and big) sites.   And while the big agencies and yellow pages publishers can do deals with each other to get access to the inventory each controls, ultimately most of them have to at some point go to Google to get access to the AdWords & AdSense inventory.

Google has created a great thing with AdSense.  I work with several sites that generate thousands of dollars a month from of it and I have built an entire business that does nothing but help local search sites optimize their AdSense revenue.  I love it and so do my clients.  That said, it seems like the world is screaming out for a credible AdSense competitor that is not Microhoo and I think the local search world is the right place to start.

Because yellow pages-type search queries typically signal an intent to purchase locally, they have an extremely high value, particularly in relation to a lot of other types of ad inventory on the web.  Local search directories that generate a decent amount of traffic can make anywhere from $15 to $100 eCPMs just by participating in the AdSense program.  Perhaps this is why there are so many sites jumping into the local search game.

On the other side you have the big yellow pages publishers and SEM agencies who are shelling out serious cash to Google to act as the middleman to get them distribution.  It would seem to me that these guys have a serious incentive to go direct and take the middleman out of the equation.

It wouldn’t be easy, but I imagine a Hulu-like consortium of big yellow page publishers and big Certified Marketing Representatives (CMRs are agencies that typically focus on buying yellow pages ads) could aggregate enough media spend/coverage to make the effort viable from the outset.  According to The BIA Kelsey Group locally targeted digital media in the U.S. is about a $3B/year business and growing rapidly.  If this Newco could aggregate a significant portion of that spend (and overcome all of the significant technical and political execution obstacles inherent in a consortium like this), they could be a viable alternative to AdSense.

I don’t think this could start out as a self-serve business like AdSense, as early on you would want to maintain high quality control over the network. But I don’t think it would be very hard to find a huge number of qualified distribution partners.  And since these companies already have spent years refining how to trade and optimize purchased traffic this would be a natural progression for their business models.

The yellow pages industry’s strongest assets are huge salesforces and large advertiser base.  These strengths are being whittled away by new business models and new consumer/advertiser behavior.  While creating a new Local AdSense wouldn’t be a cure-all for a challenged industry, I do believe it could be a high-growth path forward for the industry to focus on what it does best.

While it may sound basic, you’d be surprised by how many advertisers underestimate the power of including rich, relevant content on their business web sites. Or for that matter, keeping consistent with their search advertising to ensure that the content they are promoting—be it a product or a service—is where the consumer’s click actually takes them versus a generic home page. Let’s face it: if a consumer has to go digging on your web site for the item or information they’re looking for, chances are they won’t stick around long enough to make the conversion you want.

What I’m sharing here isn’t new information but may serve as an important reminder to not overlook even the most basic marketing tool—your web site content—and how you can be most effective when using it in conjunction with advertising efforts, particularly with online advertising.

On a large business scale, one obvious company that does a great job with fully utilizing rich content on its web site is Amazon.com. Each year, I buy a book from Oprah’s book club list for my wife’s birthday. If I conduct a search for ”Oprah monthly book club” on Google, a text advertisement for Amazon.com with the headline “Oprah Books Club” appears. Clicking on this link takes me immediately to a list of books from Oprah’s book club, complete with a huge selection of great content, such as images of the book covers, user reviews with ratings, excerpts from the books, pricing and free shipping information. All of the important information a consumer would need to make a purchasing decision is marketed in one place and reachable with a single click.

Applying this at the local business level, it is important for advertisers to understand the value of their content and the importance of marketing that content in the most efficient way for the consumer to convert, regardless of whether the conversion event is to buy something, make a call, send an email, print a coupon, find your address—whatever it is that you want someone to do.

A good way to examine how your business is doing with this is to think about the various methods you are using to get in front of consumers (search, offline, word of mouth, etc.). Consider what expectations the consumer may have from a visit to your web site based on how they found your business and the type of information they might be seeking. Let’s look at a few examples:

Search advertising. A consumer that clicks on an ad that is specific to a product will expect to go directly to the relevant product page with the best content to make a decision. Being directed to a page with poor content on the products may be confusing. Even worse, directed to a generic home page with little content may result in more work and time to find the product than the consumer is willing to invest. In addition, a page that doesn’t include the relevant information the consumer needs (price, shipping costs, availability, or address and/or hours for a brick and mortar location) can result in frustration and ultimately a negative experience with your business for the consumer.

Direct mail or offline advertising. When using coupons or offline campaigns to direct consumers to your web site, it’s a good idea to use a landing page or specific link that replicates the look and feel of the “promo” you referenced in the advertisement. Not only does it offer the opportunity to track and measure campaign effectiveness but provides consumers with easily identifiable content, which reassures them that they are in the right place and are seeing exactly the right information.

Word of mouth. On a very basic level, a consumer who hears of a business or service from a friend may first try to look up the business name by its URL (i.e. while looking for Joe’s Shoe Store, I might type in www.joesshoestore.com). If your business name doesn’t align with your business’s web address (i.e. your business URL is actually www.josephsshoes.com), there’s a good chance you may be missing out on new business. Sure, the consumer may next try to find you on a search engine but why take that risk?

When it comes to content, everything from how an advertiser describes his or her business or services, to the metadata (such as images, video, contact information, a blog, etc.) that’s included on that web site needs to be carefully thought out and made meaningful to the consumer reading it. It is an opportunity for a local business to build trust with consumers by providing the best content to inspire the consumer to make a purchase or a service appointment with confidence, which can have a direct and very positive effect on your sales.

Earlier, this spring, a number of local search marketers noticed that Google began displaying a 10-pack of local business listings based on searchers’ geolocation even when search queries didn’t include a local search term (such as a city name). Matt McGee suggested that this would likely alter user behavior and reduce referral traffic to online directories. Stats show it may have happened.

As you may recall, Google has increasingly mixed specialized, “vertical” search content into keyword search results for the past few years. Google refers to this as “Universal Search though other search engines have forms of this as well, referred to more generically as “blended search.”

Nowhere has blended search been quite so prominent as in the area of local searches. Sure, the little icons one can see for image and video results for some queries are attention-getting, but the local 10-pack of business directory listings coupled with a pinpoint map takes up more Google search results page real estate than any other piece of inserted vertical search content.

Previously, the 10-pack (and 3-pack and 1-box) business listing results primarily appeared when users included a qualifier to queries indicating that they were seeking local-specific information. Queries such as “dallas accountants” or “pizza in chicago” would invoke a local 10-pack, while broader queries without local qualifiers would not. But, that paradigm shifted late last year and more dramatically in Spring of 2009 (some experts such as Steve Espinosa suggest that the shift may’ve begun in late 2008, and I believe that’s the case—I believe Google tested this, perhaps on some limited number of broad keywords, and then expanded to a fuller set of commonly-sought local business-type keywords). Google has now been displaying a local 10-pack of results for these common local business keywords for a number of months.

The effect of this change appears to be a sharp reduction in the number of referrals from Google to internet yellow pages sites and other types of business directories. Compare in Google Trends—Google’s view of visitors to some top yellow page sites and business directories (Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, Citysearch.com, Whitepages.com):

Here are some more IYPs and business directories (DexKnows.com, YellowBook.com, Insiderpages.com, Local.com, Business.com):

I also checked trends for some foreign yellow pages such as ones in Canada, Australia and the U.K., and I’m seeing similar drops in referral visitors begining in spring as well.

Compare these trends with other directory and industry-specific verticals (Hotels.com, Cars.com, Monster.com, Expedia.com, Travelocity.com):

More industry-specific verticals (Lawyers.com, Martindale-Hubbell, Restaurants.com):

A number of notable local info sites appear to be bucking the trend or holding steady—most notably Yelp which is still holding steady, but also MerchantCircle, Zillow, ServiceMagic, and Realtor.com:

Also, Craigslist and BBB.org are also bucking the trend.

Now, I’m fully aware that there are literally thousands of variables involved which can affect daily unique visit metrics for these sites, and how Google Trends chooses to account visits can also affect these graphs. The only other recent data I’ve seen on this subject was some comScore graphs from a few days ago with an article on Techcrunch which noted that Yelp has doubled its audience in the last year while Citysearch has remained flat. In Google’s eyes according to the Google Trends graphs I provided above, Citysearch has actually lost visitors while Yelp is gaining.

Discrepancies in the graphs can be explained to some degree by different accounting methods and data sources—comScore is based on one sample set which would include usage going through Yahoo! and Bing, while Google is only seeing Google-centric traffic. I think Google Trends may be excluding some paid traffic as well, while comScore would be more of a catchall.

It’ll be interesting to see if the trends shown in Google’s graphs are reflected when the next comparative internet yellow pages ranking report emerges from comScore or Hitwise.

Still, it’s striking and likely significant to see that in Google’s eyes, quite a few of the major business directory sites have dropped in terms of organic referral visits. Since Google is leader in search marketshare, this represents a meaningful impact. This could definitely be impacted by the economy, yet, I’d expect the impact to have started earlier if the trends were merely due to economic issues. Adjusting for seasonal spiking from the late 2008 holiday season, it appears that the sites I mentioned lost significant amounts of referrals, and this happened during the timeframe when Google began displaying the 10-pack for a greater number of searches.

I interpret the main cause to be a change in users’ behavior. As more local listings were pushed directly to searchers from Google Maps in the 10-pack, fewer people found it necessary to click through to browse for businesses in local directory sites and internet yellow pages.

Now, this is not good news for the embattled yellow pages industry, who did not need to be losing marketshare to Google, particularly at this time. However, it’s vital that this trend be understood and aggressively fought, and it should be noted that Google has not completely closed the doors on directory sites. Not at all.

To turn this trend around, it’s necessary for sites which lost ground to step up their SEO efforts and to adapt to the changing conditions. Rapidly.

For now, Google’s still only displaying the local 10-pack for a limited, albeit substantial, number of business search terms. I see the 10-pack is not being automatically invoked in a great many cases where product names, alternative category names, and longer-tail keywords are being used in combo with local search terms. For instance, I just now searched for “asphalt roofing shingles, shreveport, la“, and there was no 10-pack invoked! There are a great many potential long-tail local business queries like this which can turn into valuable referrals for IYPs and business directories.

I see quite a lot of lost opportunities in SEO terms when I look over most business directory sites. Displaying the same, bare-bones content for a business’s listing which is also being displayed on hundreds of other sites is going to be less and less sufficient to maintaining organic referral traffic from search.

It may be necessary to expand out your taxonomy development efforts or partner with a company like ShopLocal, NearByNow or Where2GetIt to find out what is being sold at many of the stores listed in your directory. Finding ways to expand out keyword-rich description data about companies could be the deciding point in whether or not sites can continue to obtain natural, non-paid referral traffic.

Probably the biggest barrier for most online directories is in terms of slowness to evolve—either in recognizing the issues keeping them from obtaining and increasing search engine traffic or in streamlining IT development cycles in order to be sufficiently responsive to the changing landscape. I believe that some level of natural search traffic is vital on the internet for these directories for them to remain viable—both in terms of being able to monetize visitor traffic, as well as a vehicle for self-promotion in encouraging businesses to advertise. Yet, if a bureaucratic process is keeping you from being effective, it must be reengineered.

Two key aspects are likely playing into Yelp’s ability to continue to grow traffic, even while Google is pushing their own Maps listings to consumers for more local queries. One aspect is Yelp’s oft-cited ability to create and grow a strong community following as an effective blending of social media with business directory. Quite a few of these directories which have recently lost referral traffic according to Google Trends are also offering some user reviews and rating features in hopes of gaining Yelp’s level of success. Yet, they’ve failed to make such rating features easily usable, robust, and their user interfaces are cold and uncompelling in terms of giving a friendly “feel.” Are the tools flexible enough for users? Is the interface both intuitive and friendly? Do you allow users to customize their profile pages?

Another aspect helping Yelp during this period is that they’re essentially a poster-child for semantic markup. This spring, Google’s introduction of rich snippets has allowed Yelp’s listings in the SERPs to stand out more, attracting consumers to click more due to the “bling” decorating the listings in the form of the star ratings (though, Insiderpages listings also have the same treatment in Google SERPs, but perhaps their pages may not rank as well as Yelp’s for various other reasons). There are now some very good reasons why sites with ratings and reviews should be adopting microformats, and it’s not that hard to do! For a more detailed explanation, read my recap on the subject, Why Use Microformats?

The unfortunate side effect of Google’s improving usability in local search results may be that this could result in some sort of industry-wide chilling effect. If IYPs and directory sites are feeling closed-out of Google search referral traffic, they may react by reviewing their engagement strategies and setting up restrictions on partnership deals with the search engine. Quite a number of these sites are already in some level of “coopetition” with Google, partnering on one hand by selling ads into the search engine’s network and delivering data into Google Maps while also attempting to continue to remain local info destination sites.

A few weeks ago, I got followed on Twitter by the Hilton Hotel in my hometown of Pleasanton, CA. My guess was that they were following anyone who looked like a business in the area with the intent of promoting their networking events.I wondered if the connection came with bar privileges but soon forgot about it. A few minutes later though, I got a follow notice from a local Italian restaurant. And that was quickly followed by two local wineries and a car dealer. I started to get curious.

I poked around on the profiles of these new followers and saw that each was connected to several local businesses and organizations. I kept an eye on their status updates over the next few weeks and noticed a pattern: some were tweeting regularly, typically about a promotion like this:

There were very few replies to these tweets. This made sense, as these businesses were mostly other businesses broadcasting. Few ever asked for any input from their followers.

But out of Tweakness I sensed opportunity… Followers of the more popular Pleasanton business Twitter profiles broke down more or less like this:

• 1/3 – Local businesses or people associated with the business
• 1/3 – People or businesses in the area but not in Pleasanton
• 1/3 – Your typical “I’ll follow anything with a pulse” profiles

If I wanted to get more customers in the Pleasanton area the local followers would be a great list to target, but how to best get their attention?

Get yourself known locally on Twitter

Your first reaction might be to follow every Twitter profile in Pleasanton, but I don’t think that would be the way to go. It would take too much time and you would end up with a cluttered tweetstream. Sometimes the less direct route is the best path to your goal.

Twitter is all about conversations right? And in most social media, be it online or off, the conversations are dominated by the vocal few and observed by the silent majority. So the trick to getting noticed on Twitter is to become one of the local loudmouths, without making a nuisance of yourself of course.

Start conversations with the local business Twitter profiles that have the most followers. Since almost no one is interacting with them, there’s a good chance they will respond to any tweet addressed to them. In fact they will probably be excited by your messages because they have been tweeting for months and may not have much to show for it other than a couple of retweets for the “Scottish Gathering and Games“.

It’s important that your interactions adhere to standard acceptable social media behavior—you know the routine: actually have a conversation, don’t blatantly self-promote, be nice, helpful, interesting, etc. Remember, you are not spamming here; you are just trying to increase your visibility as an interesting, helpful, and most of all, local, business person. If you can’t think of much to say, then a simple retweet is always an easy way to get started. I find asking questions about whatever it is they are tweeting works well too.

(It’s true: There really is a lot of kilt action going on here in Pleasanton.)

By participating in regular conversations and getting the other person to respond to you, your profile will start to show up in the tweetstreams of the other local followers and they will start to get to know you. If your Twitter name is branded to describe your business or service (like “Local SEO Guide” or better yet “Pleasanton SEO Guide,”) these followers might even start to wonder about your business and investigate your profile/website. And if you show up in their tweetstream as they are thinking about using a service like yours you might find yourself on the receiving end of a potential customer inquiry, as has happened to me already several times.

The Pleasanton Chamber of Commerce touts membership in the organization as a way members can “leverage their Chamber membership to raise their company profiles, grow revenue and develop business relationships.” Social media platforms like Twitter offer you the same opportunity. While it will take a long while before a majority of local businesses are using these services on a regular basis, at the moment Twitter appears to be the place to find some of the most entrepreneurial and well-connected people in your area.

A couple of hours spent rubbing elbows in the Twitter Chamber of Commerce might be just as beneficial as heading to your local chamber’s monthly mixer—plus the cocktails will probably be stronger and the dues a bit more reasonable.

In my last article, “Matching Local Advertising to Consumer Intent,” I encouraged local advertisers to consider the intent of the consumers that they wanted to reach with their advertising distribution sources. The same idea can be applied to mobile, including the types of advertising that best fits your desired action (i.e. an enticement for an in-store visit, such as a coupon; or establishing your business as a brand, associated with other similar content; or a phone call to set-up an appointment). Here are some mobile search options, with observations on when they are most effective at having a meaningful impact on consumers.

SMS advertising

SMS (Short Message Service), otherwise known as text messaging, was one of the earliest forms of mobile advertising and is still used today. In fact, Greg Sterling recently posted an article on Local Mobile Search which highlights SMS campaign response rates as “often 2X to 10X higher than online advertising.” I would agree that the opportunity within SMS is huge. However, it’s important to note that it’s a valuable tool for existing customers but in our experience, may not be the best way to reach new customers. This is largely due to the confusions consumers may experience from having an SMS offer sent to them without having any context of the business or advertisement. If the consumer is not familiar with you, they may either respond thinking they will get something other than what you offer thus wasting both parties’ time, or else ignore your ad completely.

SMS Advertising is a valuable way for local businesses to connect with existing customers through loyalty programs. For example, the owner of a coffee shop could send a text message with a coupon code for 10 percent off the daily drink special to her list of customers who have opted-in to receive information on their phones. Similarly, the local book store owner could send a text message to his list of book club members to announce that the latest vampire romance novel is arriving next week with a free book bag offer for the first 25 readers that arrive that day.

Generally, this form of advertising is best used to encourage an in-store visit and not an actual purchase over the mobile device.

Mobile banner advertising

Mobile banner or display advertising is typically used by businesses that strive to establish a brand or identity as the way to create demand from customers. For example, a well-known brand such as Best Buy may place a banner ad on a mobile screen as a way of reminding consumers of its stores for future consideration for electronic purchases.

While display can be effectively used for online branding campaigns for national advertisers, typically, local advertisers tend to gravitate toward campaigns with faster sales conversions. Although display advertising can have a high-rate of click through, the conversion rates are often much lower than other forms of advertising due to lack of an opportunity for transactions.

We believe that local advertisers will have a higher likelihood for success using other mobile advertising methods, such as SMS or search advertising.

Mobile search advertising

Search advertising can be another effective way to reach consumers who intend to take action right now, such as making an appointment with a service provider over the phone or looking for directions to the business.

Typically, when consumers get to the point of searching for a specific key word or topic on a mobile device, they are beyond the research phase and are ready to engage with the advertiser. We’ve found that some of the best results occur when, after seeing the ad, the next step is a click to a landing page or mobile business profile page that enables a direct connection via a phone call to the business. Getting to the business phone number needs to be as simple as possible with the least amount of steps on the way, as the mobile user is often on the go and can’t afford to spend time clicking through multiple screens. Local advertisers that understand this need for simplicity have the greatest potential for effectively reaching new customers.

Again, to select the best type of advertising for your local business, it is most important to consider the action you want your advertisements to result in, who your customers are and which of these—SMS, display or search—will work best to reach them. If you are looking to strengthen existing relationships with your customers, implementing a loyalty program using SMS ads may be your best option. If you want to strengthen your brand among a certain audience, a display advertising campaign may actually work for your business. And finally, if you want to attract new customers that are ready to visit your store or make an appointment right now, a search advertising campaign can help you reach that audience.

While SMS, display and search are the three most basic types of mobile advertising, there are additional tools a local advertiser can consider, such as creating a mobile application for your business or managing your online business listings to ensure they are mobile optimized. However, for the sake of keeping it simple, I’ll ask that you stay tuned for future articles for an even deeper dive on mobile advertising.

Finally, after a lengthy gestation period, Microhoo is official! In late July, Microsoft and Yahoo inked a 10-year deal that — if approved — combines the companies’ forces in an internet search alliance to make a concentrated run at Google, recognized by many as the key player in local search.

The deal, which seems to mark the end for Yahoo as an independent search engine, propels Microsoft and its recently unleashed Bing search engine into the No. 2 position behind Google in search technology. Still, Google maintains approximately 65 percent of the U.S. search market, Microsoft and Yahoo 28 percent, according to stats from Hitwise and other measurement agencies.

Now everyone’s asking what this means. For those of us in the local search space, it will have important implications.

Local businesses will need to consider how they can optimize their content for both engines. Many have focused on optimizing their web sites and internet yellow pages listings to ensure they rank as high as possible on Google. If Bing is successful in its efforts to gain market share through this partnership with Yahoo, it will be more important than ever for businesses to ensure they rank high on Bing, too.

Making decisions about where to place internet advertisements and sponsored keywords will become more complicated. Internet advertising tends to be an area where small business owners are most uncomfortable making decisions without expert help. Understanding Google AdWords and other search marketing tools can be difficult for those who don’t have the time or relevant experience. Add Bing into the mix and small businesses will need more support than ever on this front.

Consumers may decide to visit multiple engines before buying. Many articles have noted that Google’s dominance in the search space is due in large part to the fact that it works well. But as searchers give Bing a try, they may find it has features or results that complement or are even preferable to what Google offers. Add into the mix internet yellow pages sites, which are often linked to the search engines or serve as a starting point for local search, and businesses will find it’s more important than ever to be everywhere a consumer is looking.

The bottom line is that the local search space continues to evolve, and competition will mean new opportunities and new challenges. Both Microsoft and Yahoo bring assets to the combined Microhoo. Microsoft has Bing Maps and Bing Local, which defaults to a YellowPages.com-powered directory. Yahoo has Yahoo Maps and Yahoo Local, and there’s also a Yahoo Yellow Pages. Yahoo and Microsoft also operate independent databases for small and local business listings: the Bing Local Listings Center and the Yahoo Local Listings Center. And both companies offer local search.

Now, Bing has the opportunity to evolve much more quickly. Bing’s search market share will grow exponentially with the addition of Yahoo search—certainly much faster than it would from organic growth.

Of course, Microhoo has a long, long, long way to go. And Microhoo certainly is in for heated competition as Google now sets its sights on the new No. 2 search player. All of us in the yellow pages industry are working hard to stay on top of these changes as well to help our small businesses customers.