Let’s take a look at some of the most significant developments that have contributed to the evolution of local search in the last year:

1) Local goes universal — big time.

Per Andrew Shotland’s #1 prediction for 2009, Google made several moves to increase its already dominant position in the local search space — none bigger than its release of the generic 10-pack on March 31. While its earlier release of the "K-Pack" and later refinement to the 7-pack were each noteworthy in their own right, the appearance of Local Business Listings across such a wide variety of phrases opened the eyes of Google users, observers, and competitors to the local frontier, and really set the tone for the year.

Yahoo followed suit in December with its own introduction of local results to generic SERPs, while Bing included an "8-pack" from day one of its June launch.

2) Tough times for the Yellow Pages industry.

Even before the introduction of the generic 10-pack, the ever-prescient Chris Silver Smith had some excellent advice for Yellow Pages companies about how to adapt to the changing local search landscape — advice that still holds 11 months later.

But even for those companies whose properties are well-optimized for organic search (per studies by Andrew Shotland and Ash Nallawalla), the 10-pack has slowed referral traffic from Google considerably, and even Google Suggest thinks the end may be near for the industry as we know it.

Google’s accidental indexation of Place Pages during their initial release in October had the potential to choke Internet Yellow Pages traffic even more before Google rectified the glitch.

The annual ComScore/15miles local search study may not portend such a depressed view for the Yellow Pages as a whole, but certainly forecasts a continued decline for the print side.

3) Major upgrades to the Local Business Center(s).

Perhaps Google’s most visible upgrade to its Local Business Center, at least for small business owners, was its release of LBC Analytics in late May, providing basic traffic statistics, information on coupon views, and requests for driving directions. While most SEO’s, including Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee find the data from LBC Analytics borderline useless, two excellent tutorials on segmenting 10-pack traffic via Google’s actual Analytics program were published by Martijn Beijk and Mike Belasco & Mary Bowling.

Later in the year, Google also made public a long-rumored "whitelisted" bulk upload feature for larger companies, and announced a beta ad unit that we are sure to see more of in 2010 — Local Listing Ads — a flat-fee, no-keyword-research-required offering for small business owners based on their Local Business Listings.

Google also put in place clear guidelines in the fall for do’s and don’ts of its LBC, with a few noteworthy changes to combat spam, as well as a guide to the Local Business Center in April.

Bing added phone verification to its Local Business Center soon after it launched, bringing its submission process up to par with Google’s.

4) Continued problems with local data.

All of the local search engines do a "pretty good" job with location data accuracy, but is that job "good enough?" Perhaps not when it comes to police departments, hospitals, or other emergency services, whose Authoritative OneBox results all came under increased scrutiny this year.

OneBoxes featuring merged listing information also raised quite an outcry among SEO’s and SMB’s numerous times throughout the year, although a Search Marketing Now webcast with representatives from the major data providers did an excellent job of clearing up some of the confusion as to why these data problems exist.

Many are caused by NAP ("Name Address Phone") inconsistencies or overlaps, as Gib Olander of Localeze preaches every chance he gets. Despite the measurable promise held by call-tracking numbers, I’ve also advocated for consistency of NAP information on multiple occasions, at least until something akin to a canonical phone tag is adopted by the major players in the local search ecosystem.

And there’s still no solution to the "service area problem" from any of the search engines or data providers for which Miriam Ellis and Chris Silver Smith, among others, have been clamoring for years.

Beyond business data, local search also incorporates a geo-spatial element, of course. Google made a "tectonic shift" on this front in October to eschew data from its former provider, TeleAtlas, in favor of its own. Microsoft continued to update its own VirtualEarth product with more accurate geo-spatial information.

5) Continued problems with Map Spam and Map Jacking.

What 2009 Year-In-Review would be complete without at least a passing mention of locksmiths and their penchant for the darker arts of Local SEO? Muckraker extraordinaire Mike Blumenthal did an excellent job covering the onslaught over the course of the spring.

Things got so bad that Matt McGee asked if it was time to send Google Maps back to the drawing board. Bing was not immune to the scourge of the local search industry, either, and even state attorneys general started to get involved in cracking down on criminal behavior.

To Google’s enormous credit, locksmith-infested SERPs have been pretty clean since late summer are now made up almost entirely of legitimate business owners. Next up in the game of Map Spam Whack-a-mole is likely plastic surgeons.

Less humorous was the frequency of hijacked business listings which even reached as high as the LBC entry for the White House. Google seems to have largely taken care of this issue system-wide as well.

6) Continued problems with small business advertiser "churn."

The Borrell Report in early June highlighted a shocking 50% year-over-year "churn rate" for small business customers who advertise online. Of course, when you consider how many SMBs are being sold a "bill of goods" or are falling victim to other predatory tactics, it’s a little less surprising.

But even companies as large as Google continue to struggle with the customer-facing aspect of serving small business customers. Google began sending email newsletters in August and sent stickers to 100,000 businesses named "Favorite Places" in December as part of a more aggressive outreach campaign than anything we’ve seen to date.

Nonetheless, it has been lambasted for its lack of Local Business Center support almost monthly by the Local SEO community. While Miriam Ellis’ hopeful New Year’s Resolution for Eric Schmidt did not come to fruition in 2009, things are looking up for 2010.

7) The rise of local-social interactions.

Without a doubt, 2009 was the year that Twitter became a major player in local search. Their API added location awareness in August, and just last week Twitter bought TownMe, the owner of GeoAPI. Twitter has truly become a critical component for local online marketing, and released a "101 for Business Owners" including best practices and case studies.

Yahoo added a major local social component to its product suite — Yahoo Neighbors — and Google began displaying customer sentiment via reviews much more prominently on Place Pages, something Bing did several months sooner.

Offerings such as Praized’s Local Buzz which incorporate online word-of-mouth about local businesses are sure to pick up even more steam in 2010.

8) Major partnerships and almost-partnerships.

By far the biggest story of the year was the one that didn’t happen — Google’s reported $500 million offer to buy Yelp that seems to have fallen through. As Mike Blumenthal pointed out, the powerful combination of Google Maps for recovery searches and Yelp for discovery searches would have sent shockwaves through the entire local search industry.

Still, some smaller partnerships hold potential for the future as well. Citysearch has been the most active player, announcing partnerships with Twitter, MySpace, and Mapquest in the last nine months. Yellowpages.com also made a nice deal with Microsoft to power sponsored results on Bing Local.

9) A groundswell of hyperlocal content.

Despite a continued lack of respect from traditional media, the future looks extremely bright for hyperlocal bloggers, thanks to some major distribution deals inked in the second half of the year. Hyperlocal hotbed Seattle is blossoming thanks to its community’s collaboration with the Seattle Times. Nationwide, deals between MSNBC and Everyblock, as well as Bing’s Local Lens project show that Microsoft is clearly moving in a local direction.

Scrappy startup Outside.in, after beefing up its own search capabilities, received a $7 million investment from CNN, meaning hyperlocal content now has the chance to go National. And Yahoo’s homepage has been displaying local news stories inline with national ones for months.

Smaller players like Citysquares and the aforementioned Praized also announced content syndication possibilities this year.

And then there’s Google, which has continued expanding its definition of local content by incorporating real estate listings from Google Base into Maps and tieing in local inventory options to its product search.

What’s coming in 2010?

A few off-the-cuff predictions include:

• more momentum for location-based microformats and KML
• more mergers and content partnerships, especially among the non-Google players
• more mobile-local synergy with initiatives like Favorite Places / QR codes and Microsoft’s slick new "Street Side" experience

While 2009 was certainly a thrilling year for the local search industry, 2010 is sure to be every bit as exciting — and then some. Have a safe and Happy New Year, everyone!

Two recent blog posts take a shot at trying to determine which IYP and local directory sites have the strongest rankings.

In his IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009 post, Andrew Shotland checked Google rankings for 20 categories (restaurant, doctor, etc.) in the 20 largest U.S. cities. He charted the sites that ranked in Google’s top 10, assigned points, and came up with his list of the 20 best-ranking IYP sites. The top five from Andrew’s list are as follows:

1. Superpages
2. Citysearch
3. Yelp
4. Yahoo Local
5. InsiderPages

Ash Nallawalla of Net Magellan followed up Andrew’s post with one of his own, SEO ranking of US IYPs across 274 cities. As you can tell from the title alone, Ash dug much deeper by examining close to 300 U.S. metro areas and included 28 IYP sites in his sample. But he limited his analysis to just four phrases: dentist, doctor, divorce lawyer, and divorce attorney.

Across Ash’s four keyword phrases, the IYPs with the most consistently strong rankings appear to be:

1. Superpages
2. Citysearch
3. YellowBook

But Ash’s data also reveals that some IYPs are stronger in certain verticals; IAF.net, for example, had the most top 10 rankings for the “divorce attorney” phrase, and was second overall in both legal-related keywords.

While there are inherent flaws in this kind of analysis — IYPs are generally stronger in areas where they also have a print directory, for example — the two pieces together make an interesting addition to the local SEO discussion.

1. Local address in City of search (e.g. a user search on “boston rental cars” will favor rental car companies located in Boston)
2. Citations from major data providers, IYPs, and other local information sites

Since you cannot control what the user types in for a search query the only way to impact the #1 ranking factor is by changing your location. The #2 factor listed is also incredibly important, and something that businesses should strive to address. This is actually much more difficult then you initially might think. Let’s explore why.

The search engine’s challenge

Let’s take a look at the problem from the perspective of the search engines. Here are some of the basic challenges they face:

• There are 15 million or more small businesses in the US. Tracking them all down is an extremely difficult task.
• While there are mechanisms for the businesses to provide data to the search engines directly, very few businesses realize that they could (and should) do this.
• Even if you track down all these businesses, the data the search engine obtains for them could be wrong. Here are are few ways that this can happen:
  1. The data obtained could have been entered in incorrectly in the first place (e.g. typos)
  2. Businesses close their doors, leaving the search engine with a listing with a place that no longer exists.
  3. The business changes location. This is also a frequent occurrence)
  4. New businesses open their doors. Search engines need to track these down and add them to their data.
  5. Businesses acquire other business, or get acquire by other businesses.
  6. Businesses change their name.

To underscore how difficult this is, consider the fact that data provider InfoUSA conducts 30 million phone interviews every year (source: my recent interview with infoUSA’s Pankaj Mathur. The search engines are not likely to want to replicate this expense given the structure of their businesses where they use algorithms to build their indexes instead of people.

One thing that the search engines do is draw data from as many sources as possible. This includes obtaining data from data providers such as infoUSA, Localeze, and Acxiom. They also crawl the web to see what listings for businesses are listed on various web sites, with special attention to Internet Yellow page (IYPs) sites, such as YellowPages.com, or SuperPages, just to name a couple, and other local information sites such as CitySearch and MapQuest.

This is helpful, but there are still many problems that they face. For example, the data between these disparate sources do not always reconcile. They all have different methods for verifying data accuracy and updating their data, and the differences can be quite significant in number. So the search engine must decide what to do when the data from Localeze differs from the data from CitySearch, and so forth.

Worse still, these disagreements in data reduce the confidence that the search engine has in the data. As a result, it can and does impact your ability to rank in the search results — the search engine would rather show something where all the data agrees because their confidence in the data accuracy is higher. The bottom line is that you want to help them out, by getting as many data sources as possible in alignment.

What you can do

Imagine a world in which all data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites provide the search engines consistent data. It would certainly make their job easier to do. But since these data sources are competing businesses, they will not solve that problem for you. You have to do that, and getting all the data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites to agree can be a sizable chore.

The best thing to do is prioritize. You definitely should take advantage of opportunities to provide your data directly to the search engines. Using the Gooogle Local Business Center is a must. In addition, Google makes active use of location data provided to it in KML files (Martin Beijk covers how to this in this guide to KML and SEO). In short, these are files that you place on your server with information on all of your locations. You then point to it in your site map file. The fact that it is referenced in your site map files helps Google identify it as being from you. You can read more about this in an interview I did last year with Carter Maslan.

Once you have taken care of these basics, go as deeply as you can through the various data sources, IYPs, and other local information sites. Here are some of the top ones to target:

Data providers

1. Acxiom
2. infoUSA
3. Localeze

Note that currently Acxiom does not have an operating program for businesses to update their data with them directly, so it may be hard to accomplish that update. But make sure you work with infoUSA and Localeze, both of which have such programs. If Acxiom does offer such a program in the future, make sure you jump on board!

Internet Yellow Pages and other sites with local information

1. Yellowpages.com
2. Local.com
3. Superpages
4. CitySearch
5. MapQuest
6. MerchantCircle
7. Yelp
8. CityVoter
9. YellowBot
10. Best of the Web Local

The IYP and local information sites generally pull data from the major data sources, much as the search engines themselves do. However, it is still best if you can take control directly with the major ones. If you have to choose between spending time on the IYPs and the data providers, the focus should be on the data providers.

The goal is to get as much data consistency as possible! It is not all there is to the art of local SEO, but it is the foundation of local search optimization. It is hard for the search engines to know where you really are, so do everything you can to make it easy for them. There are many other subtleties to this such as what type of data you provide. For example, local phone numbers for each location works better than one 800 number for all your locations. You can learn more about these other types of factors relating to your data from the David Mihm report referenced at the beginning of the article.

Special thanks to Stone Temple Consulting’s local search guru, John Biundo, for his help with the article.

Let’s look at the auto repair sector. We’ll be looking at national chain/franchises, whether they have a corporate address in the footer or on the site, public or private whois data, does the whois data match and do they have a crawlable/indexable location directory. Below is a matrix of all the data:

* – on subdomains

With all of the possible cities in place we’ll look at searches for [ciytname auto repair] we’ll be looking at two separate issues: the local/map onebox listing and the standard listing in the normal SERP’s.

Data for Google local onebox results comes from a variety of sources including telephone listings, so having an address on the site provides very little benefit to getting your website to appear there.

At the surface it would seem that having an address on the site has very little or no influence on organic rankings, as Meineke and Midas are the only websites that are showing up in the organic listings. Looking back at the first chart we can see that while everyone had public whois data available, the only two who had matching on site addresses and whois data where Meineke and Midas, are the only two who showed up in the organic listings.

But look at the SERP’s for Chicago Auto Repair and Charlotte Auto Repair. Midas and Meineke are the only websites that rank—but they are also the only ones that don’t have the city name in the title—nor do they have the address or city name anywhere on the page.

The key point is not to think of having an address or having a matching address as an on/off switch for ranking. Instead think of it as part of a websites overall trust score. Having a private registration, no address, or non matching addresses may not act as a negative, but having matching on-site addresses seem to act as positive. Again it’s not required for a website to rank, but it does seem to help.

It’s also important to note that Google was able to attribute the city data to the home page, when in this case that information was only present on about us and contact pages of the site. Trust has been a component in Google’s algorithm for some time even before Eric Schmidt’s comment about the internet being a cesspool and brands were the key to sorting it out. If you go back to the Google Librarian newsletter of 2006 , you’ll see Google gives some advice on things to look for when determining if a site is trustworthy. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to assume some of these factors are probably already built into the algorithm.

How can webmasters and site owners take advantage of this to help their websites seem more trustworthy to Google? Using fake or false whois data is not only risky but put you at risk of losing your domain as it’s against ICANN regulations. Additionally if you’ve spent any time testing Google maps you’ll also know that Google recognizes real address, or least those it has never seen before, identifying them with “did you mean” response. Using a post office box isn’t a viable solution either as Google isn’t able to locate them on a map.

Another option is using a Mailboxes, Etc. or UPS mailbox location. In a post 9/11 world the postal regulations have required these companies to stop using the “suite” designation for mailboxes. They are now required to use PMB # (Personal Mail Box) for all addresses. In practice if you put suite or just # you would probably get your mail. How closely ICANN regulations are in line with 9/11 postal homeland security restrictions is uncharted territory.

If you’ve come to the realization that Google is all but forcing you to create a profile , you might have learned something in the account verification process. One of the two methods Google uses to verify profiles is via telephone. I’ve had several phone numbers, many of which have been around for almost 5 years, however the only one Google was willing to verify was the listed one in the phone directory. Is Google using the same or similar technology to verify address data that’s on your site or listed in your whois file, only the folks working at the Googleplex know for sure. However I’ll firmly grab the ear-flaps on my conspiracy theorist tin foil hat and say at the very least it’s plausible, and it wouldn’t surprise me if address information worked it’s way into the algorithm in the next 3 to 5 years.

In conclusion, putting a real world verifiable address on your website appears to increase its chances of looking more algorithmically trustworthy to Google. The effects may not be immediate, but in my opinion, are forward-looking steps to give your website a bonus your competition may not be getting.

David sent out a questionnaire listing 49 possible factors that affect local search rankings, and invited the participants (disclaimer: I’m one of them) to rank each factor on a scale ranging from “very important for ranking well” to “can hurt your ranking/lead to penalty.” According to the panel, the five factors with the most significant positive effect on local rankings are:

1. Having your Google/Yahoo local business listing with the address in the city being searched
2. Having citations from major data providers, such as infoUSA, Localeze, and Internet yellow pages providers
3. Associating your local business listing in the proper categories
4. Having a claimed, verified local business listing with Google/Yahoo
5. Having your product/service keywords (i.e., “hair salon,” “attorney”) in the title of your local business listing

Since the survey is in its second year, there are interesting comparisons you can make between what mattered last year and what matters now. David makes some of those comparisons on his blog.

If local search is important to you, the Local Search Ranking Factors is a must read.

This has potentially huge implications for searchers, local business owners, big businesses with a local presence, and search marketers, too. As I wrote on my own blog yesterday, Google is changing the game where local search is concerned. As Andrew Shotland asked, is every search local now? No, but we’re getting there. Google must be very confident in its ability to identify local intent, and its ability to minimize the ongoing map spam problem.

An explanation below of how it seems to work and thoughts on what it means, but first try it yourself: Do a Google search for pizza, and you should see something like this, only tailored to your area:

Even though I didn’t add a city name to my query, Google is recognizing that my search probably has local intent and shows me the “10-pack” of local results with a corresponding map. The results appear to be IP-based; the image above focuses on Kennewick, WA — it’s not my hometown, but is where my ISP is located, about 10 miles away.

How It Works

1.) Singularity / Plurality sometimes matters

Local results will show on a search for “attorneys”, but not “attorney.” Ditto for “real estate agents,” but not the singular version of that. In other cases, local results show for both — “plumber” and “plumbers,” for example.

2.) It’s not always the 10-pack

On some generic searches, you may get the older “three-pack” that just shows three matching businesses. In my area, searches for “bowling” and “ford dealer” only show three matching local results and a map. Makes sense, because I live in a smaller area and we don’t have 10 Ford dealers here.

3.) It’s not just commercial terms

The search marketer in me focuses on business-related queries, but this extends to non-commercial terms, too. A search for “parks” brings up a mix of listings — some community parks, local government listings, mobile home parks, and even a funeral home.

4.) Google’s local targeting is debatable

A search for “restaurants” or “italian restaurants” probably has local intent, and both of those generic terms show the local 10-pack for my area. But I also get local results on a similar, but not necessarily local search for “italian food.” I get local results on generic words like “liquor” and “burgers,” both of which might — or might not — mean I’m looking for something local. It’ll be interesting to watch if/how Google tweaks its algorithm to perfect its local targeting on generic terms.

5.) The local results are never the best match for a generic term

In all the searches I’ve done — as well as all the searches done by a half-dozen friends in the local SEO/SEM field — these local results never appear at the top of the results for a generic term. At best, they’re showing up in the fourth spot — and sometimes further down the page.

6.) Local results show internationally

Fellow search marketers have reported seeing the local results on non-local keywords in London, Canada, and all around the world. After I wrote about this on my own blog, Pieter van Schalkwyk from FlowCentric Australia said he also sees local Sydney results on a Google search for “attorneys.”

What it means

1.) This is great news for small/local businesses

With this change, small/local businesses will now be getting exposure on at least hundreds, and probably thousands of prime keywords. As search marketers, we often tell our small business clients that they don’t want to rank for terms like “lawyer” or “doctor” because they’re too generic, and the competition for those prime terms would be beyond their reach. But, with Google showing local results on this prime real estate, a big door of opportunity has just opened up. A doctor in Topeka can get visibility on the term “doctor,” but only when local folks type it in.

Likewise, this should be good news for local search marketers who understand the ins and outs of optimizing local business profiles and web sites and can get their clients listed in the 10-pack or 3-pack. It also further kills the value of ranking reports, because rankings are now even more tied to geography and even your choice of ISP (see below for more).

2.) Searcher behavior may change

We recently reported that search queries are getting longer, and these generic, 1- and 2-word queries are declining. Perhaps some of that is due to searchers not being happy with the results after using a generic term like “restaurants” or “real estate agents.” All of that might be out the window now. Google’s AdWords keyword tool says there were about 6 million searches for “restaurants” in February. How many of those searchers will be happy now that they’ll get local results for such a broad term? Enough to influence the overall searcher behavior? Possibly.

3.) Suddenly, your choice of ISP matters

With the results based on the searcher’s IP, it now matters who your ISP is — and more importantly, who your customers use as their ISP. Here are the results I get from home on a search for “lawyer.”

Meanwhile, my wife’s office about 10 miles away uses a different ISP. They’re also based in Kennewick, but here’s what she sees on the same search from her office.

Notice that the order is slightly different: results B & C are switched, as are I & J. What would happen if one of us was using an ISP based in Pasco or Richland? We’d probably see an entirely different set of results because the IP address would point to a different city. How different will results be if your ISP is in Minneapolis, but you’re living in St. Paul? One Chicago-based search marketer told me on Twitter that he was getting pizza results for North Carolina! (His IP is based off a corporate server.)

4.) Google Maps will be a big winner

The added exposure of Google Maps and its local business listings will surely increase traffic to Google Maps. As of last January, Google Maps only got one visit for every 45 visits to a Google property. That should start to increase dramatically in the coming months.

The losers are likely to be companies like MapQuest, whose traffic will probably decline as even more searchers are exposed to Google Maps. And city guides / Internet Yellow Pages sites (like Citysearch, Yelp, Superpages.com, and so forth) may also see a loss of traffic, because their pages often ranked highly for some of these generic terms.

We have an email in to Google with some questions and requests for more information. We’ll update this post or publish a new one if/when we hear back.

GetListed.org operates with a simple premise: It should be as easy as possible for small businesses to find and claim their business listings on local search engines. To that end, the process begins with only two demands of the small business owner: enter your business name and enter your zip code. With that information, the site looks for the company’s business listings on four local search sites: Google Maps, Yahoo Local, Live Search Maps, and Best of the Web Local. GetListed provides a listing snapshot, letting the business owner know if any listings were found on each site and providing links to add and/or claim those listings.

That functionality alone makes GetListed.org a valuable starter tool for local businesses. Additional pages also tell the business owner how many local citations and reviews the business has on each search engine, and one page provides a To Do list to help the business owner begin the process of creating or editing local listings.

Search marketers might find the local dashboard helpful for storing all the business listings of a variety of clients, and being able to check on new reviews they’ve received from a single location.

From my perspective, GetListed.org is a very necessary and unique service for small/local businesses. It’s not a guarantee of local search success, but it is an easy-to-use first step in that direction for business that are just getting started with search marketing.

(Disclaimer: I was one of the beta testers while GetListed.org was in development.)

In fact, four of the five on-by-default SearchMonkey applications have local content. In addition to Citysearch and Zagat, Yahoo Local and Yelp are also showing enhanced listings for all users. (The fifth on-by-default app is LinkedIn.)

This is big news for local businesses: By being listed on these local directory sites, they have a chance to get added exposure in Yahoo’s search results. The enhanced listings offer extra details such as address and phone number, ratings, reviews, business hours, service categories, and even a photo. Enhanced listings from more than one provider might appear, such as in this screenshot below where a Citysearch enhanced listing appears a few spots above one from Yahoo Local.

The details included in each enhanced listing depend on how the provider created its SearchMonkey application. In the example above, Citysearch includes links to the business profile, reviews, a map, and “Write a Review.” Yahoo Local includes links to Maps/Directions, Reviews, and a “Send to Friend” link. Citysearch shows business hours, while Yahoo Local doesn’t.

Local businesses can take advantage of this by:

• making sure they’re listed on Yahoo Local, Citysearch, Yelp, and Zagat (these are the four with enhanced listings on Yahoo)
• completing their business profiles with as much detail as possible
• encouraging customers to leave ratings and reviews on these sites

In an earlier announcement about SearchMonkey applications, Yahoo said their internal tests showed an increase in click-through rate of as much as 15 percent.

In addition to these on-by-default applications, users can visit the Yahoo Search Gallery to install other SearchMonkey applications.

This month’s small business online marketing success story is about a business owner who’s using search marketing smarts to win this battle, along with some blogging and social media thrown in.

Meet Cathy Hillen-Rulloda, owner and Design Director at Avante Gardens – floral unique, an award-winning florist in Anaheim, California. Cathy started working for a local florist during high school in West Virginia, and opened Avante Gardens in 1984 after helping design flowers for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Since then, Cathy has become one of the floral industry’s most accomplished Internet marketers. “She’s a watchdog for the floral industry and keeps the rest of us aware,” says Ryan Freeman of Strider Inc, the operator of FlowerChat.com. “Her Web site ranks well and performs well, she blogs intelligently, has a smart mind for business and PR, and has enough chutzpah to take action when it’s needed.”

I first learned about Cathy more than a year ago when she wrote a detailed blog post about telemarketers posing as local florists, a post any veteran SEO would’ve been proud to write. I met her in person for the first time last month at SMX Social, when we agreed to do this interview. As was the case with previous interviewees in this series, I have no business relationship with Cathy. Here’s our interview.

Matt McGee: You could probably write a book on this question, but I’ll ask you to be as succinct as possible: Has the Internet been good for local florists?

Cathy Hillen-Rulloda: There’s definitely a book in that story, but the answer today, overall, is no. Despite the concept of disintermediation, with more consumers ordering direct from product sources, the Web has had the opposite effect on the full-service flower business. Intermediary brokers (like 1-800-Flowers, FTD, Teleflora and their non-florist affiliates) have been highly successful at marketing flower products – and most local florists just haven’t. Total sales of fresh flowers in the U.S. have remained relatively stagnant over the last eight years. With approximately $2 billion in sales now being made through online-only companies, needless to say, the local florist part of the pie has shrunk dramatically. In 1994, FTD had approximately 22,000 independent local florist affiliates. Their most recent directory pegs that number at fewer than 15,000.

How well is the industry adapting to all the new online marketing opportunities at their disposal?

Many are still trying to catch up with the “old online opportunities.” While the good news is that on the local level, more and more florists are getting it, as a group we’re far from embracing opportunities in social media, video, mobile search and other emerging channels.

But vehicles like Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and review sites like CitySearch, Insider Pages and Yelp, have definitely improved the chances of consumers finding real local florists. That wasn’t the case just a couple years ago. Most every flower shop now has a Web site, but a significant number of florists (I estimate approximately 12,000-14,000 in the U.S.) have boilerplate templates filled with wire service affiliate product images and mediocre to poor SEO. Even today, one large hosting company doesn’t bother to put the shops’ local addresses and phone numbers on the home pages, and the phone numbers appear only in image files. With weak signals of content, especially local content, they have little chance of appearing at or near the top for their appropriate keyword searches. We moved from one of those template hosts (with our own unique product content) to our own site and increased online ordering by 45% the first year. The impact on phone sales has been even greater.

What about Avante Gardens—you seem to be embracing online marketing pretty heavily. Is that a matter of desire, survival, or both?

Both. I recognized online marketing would have a strong impact on our visibility. It was a matter of understanding the fundamental principles and embracing the new creative opportunities to show what we can offer consumers.

The national flower services have big marketing budgets and name recognition. How do you distinguish yourself from such well-known competition?

Consumers are sometimes worried that they won’t get full value when they place an order for flowers they’ll never see. We created a Design Your Own section to address just that. Shoppers pick a style and then tell us the size, colors and a few flowers they’d like included. We email them a picture of their custom arrangement. The process takes a bit extra time, but the results and responses have been fantastic.

This is something a national affiliate flower marketer simply cannot do since they don’t actually make or hand-deliver their own floral arrangements.

When I read some of your blog posts (like this one or this one), I get the impression you know as much about SEO and online marketing as many of us who work in this industry full-time! How much time do you spend reading search marketing blogs and sites?

Too much. :) All I can say is thank goodness for SmallBusinessSEM.com, SearchEngineLand.com and Mike Blumenthal’s blog. When I’m short on time, reading those gives me the info I really need to know.

Local search is obviously important to you as a small/local business. But there’s a lot of junk going on in the floral industry these days: So-called “local florists” that aren’t really local is just one headache. How frustrated are you with the current local search scene?

It’s been a big frustration and it’s what propelled myself and other like-minded florists to learn as much as possible about search. We petition florist wire services to clean up their affiliates but we can’t really complain unless we’re out there doing all we can to help our own businesses be found. There are two primary issues to address:

1.) Publishers who accept ad dollars to place phony local florists prominently in their directories or search listings. 24 states have legislation prohibiting some of the practices, so progress is being made on that front. I continue to believe that the short-term sell-out of users seeking local businesses is also a fast way to loose [sic] trust and repeat visitors.

2.) Brick and mortar stores giving out stronger signals of local—and better unique content about our own businesses and services. On that front, the future is in our hands. Phony “local” florists can be pushed out or down in the locations that matter when local sites offer strong, relevant, unique content. Boilerplate won’t cut it. A large group of us meet at FlowerChat.com, an online community for professional florists, and share tips to help improve our local visibility.

Is local search too easy to game right now?

Local search has improved significantly in the last couple years. It’s still far from perfect, but as more florists provide signals of relevance and trust, I believe the segment will continue to improve.

You have more than 20 reviews on your CitySearch page. Do you encourage customers to leave reviews?

Yes. Each customer receives an email order summary and a separate delivery confirmation. The delivery confirmation email asks our shoppers to let us know about how they feel about our services, and invites them to rate us on Yahoo Local, CitySearch or InsiderPages. While most send emails, a few have gone on to write reviews.

Do you find positive reviews on local sites to be helpful to your bottom line?

Most definitely. The biggest surprise has been how many new visitors in our store have mentioned the reviews. Of course, the great reviews make us also feel obligated to continue to live up to the kind words said about our company.

We met a couple weeks ago at the SMX Social Media conference in Long Beach. How important is social media to your business?

SMX Social was terrific. Here I was, a small, local florist sitting among some very heavy hitters of search. I was particularly interested in how the social aspect of search will affect us all in the future. Will the big names and big brands in the flower business overpower us all or do we stand a fighting chance if we focus on our local niches? The answer waffled from presenter to presenter. Bottom line is we need to poke our head outside our front doors ands be a part of the real and virtual communities around us.

When did you start blogging, and what benefits do you see from that?

2005. Friends Rich and Kathy Dudley of Bloomery in Butler, PA, launched Floristblogs.com and invited me to participate. My first post was painful and stilted. I was trying way too hard. Now, I just think of posts as conversations, although I’ve been delinquent on posting of late.

Have you given any thought to putting the company blog on your domain?

Blogging together with other local florists allows our voices to be heard and our issues to be seen. There are now 25 of us and when we are all on the same page about an issue, we have the collective voice to make a ruckus. Of course, most of our posts are about our own stores, but I continue to believe our collaborative effort is stronger than my voice alone. Plus, Rich handles all the tech issues. (And that’s a huge plus for a small business.)

A lot of small businesses are considering starting a blog, wondering if it’s right for them, wondering if they can make it work. What advice would you give them?

Pick your target audience and write like you’re speaking to them sitting on your couch. Promote less, converse more and you’ll gain trust and readers.

You have a real strong visual element to your business. Have you given any thought to using sites like Flickr or YouTube to spread the word about Avante Gardens?

We’ve had a wedding flowers video on YouTube for about a year and definitely have plans for more. It’s a matter of making the time. We upload our images to our blog gallery and they’ve been indexed nicely by Google. The biggest challenge with our images is chasing down sites that just lift and use them as their own design work. (One webmaster told me I should be flattered he thought our work was good enough for his site.) I do believe Flickr offers good opportunities, although most of the flower interest is in garden and single blossom shots.

You guys support local causes and events when you can. What’s the ROI on community involvement for small/local businesses?

When we donate products and services, it’s because we support the charity or organization. After nearly 25 years owning a small business, I long ago learned that customers gained from donations are few and far between. Now we just ask for a link.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned about online marketing since you started focusing on it for Avante Gardens?

For a small businesses like ours, it’s far more cost effective than traditional media. It’s also dynamic and lively with more easily measurable results. Give good, unique content and they will come.

Thank you, Cathy.

Among all the online marketing tools at a small business owner’s disposal, sometimes the best one is knowledge. Cathy proves that staying informed about what strategies and tactics are working—and what the competition is doing—is the foundation to successful small business online marketing.

If you are (or know of) a small business owner with a great story to tell about how you’re using the Internet to grow your business, please contact me at Small Business SEM.

Matt McGee is a veteran search marketing consultant who blogs at Small Business SEM. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Most locally-oriented sites focus their natural search optimization efforts on the big cities of the world — metros like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Yet there is a lot of traffic to be found in the long tail of search queries involving the many tens of thousands of smaller towns in the world. Only problem is, Google’s local ranking methods seem to particularly prefer specific types of local sites for small town name queries. Here’s one approach that can jump you past the competition and into the desired first page of results for small town searches.

Google has focused a lot of time and work on improvement of their local search results as seen in the more dramatically-apparent graphic treatments of the ten local business links seen for many local biz searches, and in the "plus box" treatment for some local search listings. Much more subtle things have been going on as well, in terms of how rankings of sites and pages are handled for local queries, and one case in point is how Google handles searches for city names, particularly for many small towns.

For instance, doing a search in Google for "Zanesville", a small town in Ohio, gives us:

The first link below the map is to the City of Zanesville government webpage. The second is to the Wikipedia article about the city. The third link is to the "Zanesville Times Recorder" site, the webpage for the local newspaper. Interestingly, you can note that the Google Toolbar PageRank for these pages is in reverse of their ranking order: the City of Zaneville page is PR=4, the Wikipedia article is PR=5, and the newspaper is PR=6.

The search for Zanesville shows some pretty typical results for small town name searches. Whether due to some sort of specialized ranking method employed only when city names are invoked, or due to Google’s normal ranking methods, the sorts of sites which most commonly appear at the top rankings for these types of city-name searches are really very consistent:

• Official City Government Websites
• Local Chambers of Commerce
• State/City Tourism Sites & Conventions, & Visitors Bureau Sites
• Wikipedia City articles
• Local Town Newspapers
• Yahoo! Travel pages http://travel.yahoo.com/
• Local Weather – (particularly by wunderground.com)
• Profiles of Cities (city-data.com)
• .EDUs – Local Universities
• .ORGs (such as for events, local museums, and such)
• Local Events Venues sites
• Local Real Estate guides
• Local School Websites
• Local Sports Teams

For city-name-only local queries, most other commercial sites or pages appear to be operating at more of a disadvantage in terms of ranking ability, and this seems somewhat independent of their overall PageRank and keyword signal values. For these local town queries, it would appear that the type of site is figuring in heavily for whether or not the link will appear on the first page.

One method Google could be using for this purpose would be Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) — identifying the geographic themes of the websites and associating them with other related sites about the local area. (I’ve written before on how things like the keywords Google identifies within a site could be used by them to create semantic/thematic associations.)

The types of sites Google is predisposed towards in local town name rankings seems somewhat arbitrary. Conventional wisdom would have it that most users would probably be seeking city guide types of content, local entertainment, and city business information way before they’d be seeking articles about the history of the city or pages full of census data. With the extensive focus Google has placed on local search in recent years, one can’t help but wonder whether Google wouldn’t be planning to perhaps further customize their search results for small towns.

More robust layouts like Ask’s local search results pages for small town searches (see Zanesville on Ask) would likely provide a lot better comparative user experience in most cases.

If you have a site or page that’s targeted to a particular small town, but you’re completely edged off of page one by all these other apparently-preferred sites, one way to trump the bias might be to create and post a YouTube video with that city name. For instance, when I do a search for "Snook, Tx" in Google, the third link down is to this YouTube video posted by the Texas Country Reporter. In this case, Google’s Universal Search process appears to have kicked in to interject the video link into the top of the search results.

The Texas Country Reporter might never rank on page one for "Snook" searches, but their video does, and the YouTube entry has been built to include a number of references to the TexasCountyReporter.com website. If you followed the approach that they did, you could create a little video about the small town, and then provide links back to your local page from the YouTube video.