The courtship of social networking and local search will result in a marriage that diversifies the mix of sales tools and empowers circles of families, friends, co-workers and organizations to share experiences and opinions in the local search space.

For a number of years, consumers have had a collective, powerful online voice through ratings and reviews. That voice continues to grow and has never been more powerful thanks to social media. Now, small businesses must learn how to harness “local-social search” or risk missing important growth opportunities.

Social networking has taken ratings and reviews to the next level by giving them a real influence on a local scale. Early local-social search products like Yelp raised the bar. Now Twitter, Facebook and Google’s new local-social search efforts are fortifying the movement. Google recently launched Place Pages, which will aggregate reviews, photos, details and maps. Also, Google Maps recently integrated a user review feature, and Yahoo! Local modified its relevance engine to include review content in its index.

And so it goes. Mobile search has mutated into mobile-local-social search. Some local search destinations have recently launched user-generated content. YellowBot, for example, offers local search results based on networking and tagging. Unique users? One million since March.

While Yelp catered to foodies, and vice versa, should we expect to see such social network forums for florists, dog groomers, hair salons, doctors, etc.? I’d say, most certainly.

Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) are adding a social aspect to ride the wave and continue to provide up-to-date local content. Idearc has even announced a Twitter feature for SuperPages. Social networking companies are providing local-social search platforms targeted to their unique audience demographics. For advertising and product marketing, local-social search enhances the ability to promote products and identify micro-target markets. And for business listings, local-social search provides a fundamental change in how listing information is collected.

User-generated content not only enhances the local-social search experience, it changes the game. And local search companies not embracing social search are ignoring an important avenue in how local information will be found today and tomorrow.

As local business information becomes less static through the partnership of social networking and local search, businesses must take advantage of the growing and ever-changing environment to help consumers and businesses connect in meaningful ways, whether it’s Facebook or Twitter, or new platforms that have yet to be launched.

It’s no secret that newspapers have been struggling with the disruptive innovations introduced by the internet, and this has resulted in some level of accusation towards Google and a circling-of-the-wagons mentality by the industry. But, what if they were to go in the opposite direction, with fuller engagement? Here’s one tactic for how to go about it via SEO.

In the last few years, I’ve visited a lot of newspaper websites for various projects. These sites are most frequently the online arms of what were once strictly printed local newspapers. When visiting these sites, I’ve been struck by the technical clunkiness of most—they’re typified by poor usability, layouts still closely influenced by traditional print newspaper layouts, dysfunctional on-site search engines, and content management systems hamstrung with badly-formed page templates.

Naturally, these sites are not optimized for search engines nor to make their content readily findable via search. It’s unsurprising that the sites are search-unfriendly. The newspapers probably feel highly conflicted in regards to search—the nostalgic desire for successes experienced in the past have made them grow unhappy with the internet paradigm, and they’ve worked each other up into a frenzy to hold Google responsible for their troubles. It’s hard to expressly invite a perceived enemy into your house on one hand while issuing invective against him on the other.

(I have also encountered newspaper sites which have optimized by some degree. But, these seem fairly few, and even some of them have only taken faltering steps in that direction. The exceptions are some of the biggest players such as the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and other juggernaut newspapers—which are doing professional jobs at optimization.)

I’m very sympathetic to the dilemma newspapers are experiencing. I recall a time not long back when newspapers felt that internet yellow pages companies (”IYPs”) were as much of a threat as Google (see Local Media Face Growing Threat from Local Search Competitors Like Google, Overture and Yellow Pages, New AIM Group Study Reports and Search Engines Make Local Landgrabs, Leave Newspapers Out In the Cold), back when yellow pages companies had a considerable head-start over newspapers in online engagement and ad sales.

Since I used to work at an IYP, I also experienced firsthand what it was like to see a veteran print industry work to evolve to fit in the changing landscape while still being influenced strongly by legacy technologies. Technology wasn’t the only issue: organizational resistance toward seeing where things were headed, or even relatively insightful observations that there might be a risk in not engaging more aggressively also held the IYPs back. Since newspapers perceived the threat beginning such a long time ago, it’s disheartening to see that as a whole they have struggled to develop an effective adaptation for online—particularly the smaller, local market papers.

So, what’s to be done?

While there are a great many areas where online newspaper sites might improve and increase revenue prospects, one of the greatest untapped potentials on newspaper sites in my opinion is the news archive section. Even among poorly optimized newspaper sites, some articles may vanish into a walled-garden archive section at some point, going dark for search engines. Combined with very poor on-site search utilities, it’s as though these articles don’t exist at all for consumers.

I can’t count how many different newspaper sites I’ve visited where I’ve searched for articles which I knew existed, yet the on-site search engines could not locate them. In some cases, the “live” sites had search engines separate from archive search, yet offered no explanation to users as to which should be used and in what cases. Do articles pass into archive after one year? Two? Three? Why can’t the on-site search show them, regardless? In many other cases I’ve found articles by searching in Google, but the article is no longer available when I click through to the newspaper site, and searching within the site fails to reveal it. Did the article “expire” and pass into the archive graveyard or something? No messaging on the resulting error pages reveals this, nor suggests viable means for locating the article.

Newspaper folks: this is your main product! It’s all well and good to try to keep Google from making everything free and putting you out of business, but at this point there’s an even greater danger in locking away your content to the point where online consumers cannot even find—if a searcher doesn’t even know it exists, it’s certain they won’t be engaging with your site to try to obtain it, regardless of whether it’s provided “free” in return for ad impressions, in exchange for “free registration” or provided in return for some subscription fee.

How many articles are locked away in these old archives?!? It surely varies from newspaper to newspaper, but the potential numbers are staggering. While clicks on pay-per-click ads on newspaper sites may add up slowly, there’s no doubt in my mind that if newspapers dramatically expanded the content they have available to search engines, the clicks and associated revenue would increase. These newspapers must not realize the potential they’re sitting upon!

I acknowledge that current news is going to be the more popular content on newspaper sites, but there’s likely at least half as much traffic potential in the legacy content under the theory of the long tail. According to that theory when applied to newspaper website traffic, yes, there’s far more visits per contemporary news story than past ones, but the cumulative traffic from thousands and thousands of past news stories can equal or dwarf the traffic from the more popular stuff.

So, how should news archives be optimized for search?

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Optimize titles & headlines. This is one area where newspapers should utterly dominate! Reporters and editors often write beautiful article headlines which succinctly describe the topic and grab readers’ attention. But, the headline prose is squandered on some newspaper sites which either repeat the newspaper’s name for the TITLE text of all pages, or cram it up with the date, newspaper name and other “branding” messaging before the article title.

This amounts to almost criminal misuse of the title tag. The title is often the link text that’s displayed in search engine results when pages on your site are found to match the search term, and it’s displayed at the top of the browser window when a user visits the page. Also, in HTML there is a particular tag called the “heading” which is intended for just what it sounds like—used as way of identifying the heading and subheadings on a page, and it should be used when displaying article headlines. There are six different heading tags available (each uses different font attributes to add or decrease emphasis), but the main one you need to know is the <h1>, which is perfect for use in displaying an article’s headline on the page. The article headline should also appear at the beginning, not end, of title tags, and be displayed in H1 tags on the page for best usability and search engine friendliness.

Link to all of your content. To this day, search engines still rely heavily on links to pages to discover and index content. For good usability and crawability, I recommend designing a hierarchy of pages on your site so that users may click from the homepage to a page which provides a short list of top level links (such as links by dates or category of type of news story). Those top level links can link down to subcategory pages which link down further to each article ever published by your newspaper. Such a hierarchy of links is mainly for human site users to navigate down into all of your content, but it also helps the search engines understand the site structure, apply relative priority weighting of pages, and also to semantically categorize content.

Create and actively maintain sitemaps. Although the category pages I mentioned above are often loosely referred to as sitemaps, “official” sitemaps files (those created using a formal standard acknowledged by all of the major search engines) are lists of links to your pages that search engines use find all of your content. These should be used in conjunction with the hierarchy of links provided for human users. The sitemaps help insure that the search engines can find all of your pages.

Focus on creating evergreen URLs. Search engines tend to respect pages that have been around for a long while, and frequently changing the physical location of pages confuses both users and search engines alike. So, try to design article URLs which remain stable when an article is pubbed all the way through to when it’s archived for the long term. People also tend to link to articles, which helps search engines to decide how popular a page is. If you change the URL, then the link “votes” for popularity will no longer point to your article.

If you must change URLs, use 301 redirects. If your system is full of legacy processes which require you to change article page URLs once a current news article is moved off into the archive, then at least redirect the original URL to the final location instead of just delivering up an error page. Most users who click through won’t stop to poke around to try to find where something was shifted-to—they’ll just abandon your site to try to find info elsewhere. And, that redirection command should be a 301 “permanent” redirection in order to insure the search engines apply the original URL’s popularity weighting to the new URL.

Offer a “first click free” option. For those newspapers which require registration or subscription prior to showing archive content, read up on Google’s “First Click Free” program. This process allows Google to crawl your site content and index it, and a person who clicks through from Google can view and read the first page for free, but you can then require payment or registration for subsequent pages.

Create a subscription designation with Google. If you set it up with them, Google will allow you to have content crawled, but when users click through they must pay or register to see any of the article. This is less-preferred by Google since it’s a less satisfactory user-experience. If going this route, I’d recommend displaying a good-sized chunk of the article to users that click through, as a preview. In that way, they’ll feel a little less disappointed, and may be drawn in further to pay a subscription to see more.

Improve on-site search Just as a usability matter, consider using Google’s site search if your internal site search doesn’t work well. Once the pages have been optimized as I’ve outlined above, you could implement Google site search and perhaps improve your site’s overall usability.

There are certainly many other areas for optimization for newspapers, and this is not an exhaustive list of SEO improvements which could be done for articles. Simply exposing hidden and non-indexed archives would be a good start.

Google is trying to find additional ways in which to help the newspaper industry, such as its plan to roll out a micropayment system within a year. Micropayment is FAR better, in my opinion, than attempting to require someone to purchase a month-long or yearly subscription when they might want to access only a single article. I’d also suggest improving classified sections or partnering with many news sites for a multi-site subscription.

The local newspapers have lost a lot of marketshare to online news sites and aggregators, but evolving to improve their popularity and traffic in the internet economy could help them to take back marketshare and increase revenue. SEO helps with promotion and expansion of audience. If you’re a local newspaper in need of increased business, seriously consider beefing up your search engine optimization game.

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.