GMS Local found that most of the respondents spent more on local vs. national advertising and more generally on digital than traditional media marketing:

• 70  percent of marketers surveyed said they spend greater than the national average (60 percent) of their advertising budgets on local vs. national initiatives.
• 70 percent of marketers surveyed answered that they spend greater than the national average (25 percent) of their local advertising budget on digital media.
• 83 percent of marketers surveyed expect their local online spending increases to be more than the projected national growth (25 percent) over the next three years.

However, the agency observed, “There is a large gap between the perception marketers have of their local position and the reality of what they actually implement.” For example, large numbers of respondents failed to actively manage their locations’ listings and a substantial minority failed to use local paid search.

To their surprise, GMS Local concluded that there were some very basic local tactics that these national brands were failing to utilize:

With as many as 45% of survey respondents not invested in directories (e.g., yp.com and superpages.com), nor actively managing their business listings (e.g., Google Places, Bing and Local.com), and not employing the relatively standard practice of running geo-modified paid search, this exposes the need for education about the fundamentals of local online advertising and opportunities for national brands to connect with consumers at the local level.

Insufficient funding, a lack of education or just plain ignorance were the factors behind the flawed national-local approaches according to the survey. You can read the full report here.

Stock image used under license from Shutterstock

There’s a great deal of data already in the market about SMB adoption of social media. What they show is that between 45 percent and 70 percent of SMBs say they already have a presence on social media sites (mostly Facebook).

Borrell reports that between 60 and 64 percent of SMBs have a formal presence on social media sites. An earlier 2011 study by Palore found that 58.2 percent of SMBs are on either Facebook or Twitter. And a late-November survey from MerchantCircle found that about 70 percent of SMBs said they promoted themselves using Facebook.

Borrell also found that social media marketing was just behind paid-search for SMBs in 2011. Given the ambivalence that many SMBs feel about paid search (though not organic) one could expect that social media advertising and other promotional spending would surpass paid search in 2012.

Borrell’s report estimates that roughly $6.2 billion was spent in 2011 on social media advertising (all in) and that Facebook captured or saw about 65 percent of that. The SMB-specific component of social media spending is smaller, roughly $1.14 billion, according to the report.

Another interesting piece of data in the report is the way that SMBs measure social media success or ROI. Most use “new customers” as the key metric (it’s not clear how many actively or successfully track that however). Additional fans/followers comes in at number two.

Borrell says, “On average each [SMB] has a network of more than 4,000 friends and followers. But this statistic is skewed by a few respondents who claim tens of thousands or more. Perhaps a better gauge is the median reported: about 250 followers.”

Yet even 250 fans/followers is probably more than a substantial percentage of SMBs have on their pages. The mid-2011 Palore study argued that about 38 percent of SMBs on Facebook had very few fans/Likes and very little engagement. The percentage of SMBs showing limited follower activity was even larger on Twitter (44.5 percent).

The Borrell report illustrates the increasing demand for social media marketing among SMBs. However it doesn’t explore the gap between that demand and the often ineffectual or inept social media efforts of those same businesses.

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The question asked was: “If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?” The list of choices included SEO, paid search, mobile, social and traditional media. As you can see below SEO beats everything else by a mile.

What’s also interesting is how high “traditional media” ranked. That category would include newspapers, yellow pages, direct mail, traditional radio and so on. Newspapers and direct mail were the top traditional channels being used by this group of survey respondents.

However Facebook (not Facebook Ads) was the most common marketing tool, used by 70 percent of these SMB respondents. The question was, “Are you promoting your business with the following websites/services?”

The online survey was conducted in November. The sample came from MerchantCircle’s 1.6 million SMB member database. Just under 80 percent of respondents were businesses with fewer than four employees. The majority (63 percent) had annual marketing budgets of $2,500 or less.

There are additional findings about the use of social media, deals and mobile marketing that I discuss on my personal blog Screenwerk.

Incorporating images as part of your overall content mix is a good idea for search optimization in and of itself. Images can provide additional opportunities for keyword signals on a page, and they represent good opportunities for ranking in search results under Universal Search.

But, if they’re also associated with places properly, they can convey additional location signals, helping a business and/or its website to be considered even more relevant for local searches.

If you’ve explored around Google Maps for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few images associated with local places in the interface. Google uses a few different methods for identifying image locations.

If you geocode your images in some way, it gives Google and other search engines high confidence that the content should be associated with a particular place.

Geocode Images With Photo Sharing Services

One of the easiest ways to geocode an image is through using one of the top image sharing services such as Picasa, Panoramio or Flickr. (FYI, Picasa may be renamed “Google Photos” soon.)

In each of those services, you can upload a photo, then add various elements such as titles, descriptions/captions, tags and associate images with locations by dragging them over a map:

When you map photos via these sharing services, they take the longitude and latitude geocoordinates associated with the map location and store them with the image’s information. Google Maps reads in syndicated feeds of the images from these services and then is able to use the geocordinates to pinpoint them in the images layer in Maps.

But you may be wondering, once you have geocoded the pictures in an image sharing service, how should you then associate those pictures with your company?

You could leverage the hosting through the image sharing service, and display them on the pages of your site. Alternatively, you may also link to your site from the image sharing service’s pages. Both of these methods may augment your local search signal, and may be particularly efficacious when used in combination.

Using GPS Enabled Cameras & EXIF Data

In addition to the above, a slight variation on this technique would involve using a GPS-enabled camera upfront in the process to take your photos, and then uploading them into the photo sharing service.

GPS-enabled cameras will store the geocoordinates in the image file’s EXIF (EXchangeable Image File format) data. EXIF is a format for storing meta data about the image, such as date/time of the photograph, type of camera used, the image’s color profile, geolocation, and other info. Flickr, Panoramio and Picasa will all read out the geolocation from the EXIF info, and translate it into the geocoordinates when mapping the image.

Having the geocoordinates in the EXIF data may have some slight advantages to merely mapping a non-geocoded image, because image sharing services like Flickr will publish the EXIF data onto HTML information pages in conjunction with the image — so, the coordinate pair provides yet another crumb of local signal on the pages associated with your image content.

Using An Image Sitemap

Another method which you can use is to store images directly on your website, and then add an image sitemap file which includes a geolocation element for each image.

However, it’s unclear precisely how Google uses the geolocation info from image sitemaps. The XML schema only requires a string for the location, and uses a city and country like this, for example:

Image sitemaps appear to be mainly geared towards enabling Google’s Image Search to find and rank pictures. So, the geolocation code probably only affects how relevant an image is considered to be for a query, depending upon the geolocation of the searcher or if the query includes local qualifiers such as the city name.

It’s possible that you could enter an entire street address into the image sitemap, or even the geocoordinates for more precise pinpointing. But it does not appear to me that the geolocation data with image sitemaps is communicated over to the Google Maps silo at this time, and perhaps using the lat/long coordinates wouldn’t work at all. (If inclusion of a full street address or lat/long coordinates would work, Google should provide more examples or a better description in their help pages covering the topic.)

In the past, some developers might have geocoded their images by storing each image on a separate webpage, and then geotagging the webpage.

However, I consider this a poor technique at present, because it doesn’t clearly communicate to search engines whether the geolocation is specifically referring to the image, the website, or other subject matter that may be on the same webpage. All the other techniques here make it clear that the geolocation is referring to the image itself.

Manually Embedding Image Location Data

Another technique for geocoding an image would be to use an EXIF editor and manually embed the longitude and latitude coordinates into it. Google suggests this as a method for adding geocoded images into Panoramio, so this is not a risky method, even if it may seem a trifle arcane.

There are a number of programs out there which will allow you to edit an image’s EXIF data. Google’s Panaramio documentation recommends Exifer, although the Exifer site says the software hasn’t been updated since 2002.

Even so, it probably would function just fine, so long as it will run on your system. There are other EXIF editor packages, too. Here’s an example where I input the coordinates of the CN Tower in Toronto, using the free version of the Zoner Photo Studio:

As you can see, the software provides a fairly intuitive interface for inputting the lat/long values, and a map interface to dynamically show where the coordinates are plotted. (In Zoner, this interface can be accessed under the File -> GPS menu.)

The map can also be used to pinpoint the picture location by panning and zooming to locate the place and then clicking where the image was shot. (If you don’t know how to get the precise geocoordinate numbers for a street address, refer to my earlier article on How To Geocode An Address & Optimize Location Pages.)

To view the EXIF data for my example image of the CN Tower, you can use an online EXIF viewing service such as Jeffrey’s Exif viewer — click here to check it out. There are various other browser extensions and software packages that can be used to view and edit the EXIF data as well.

Once it’s geocoded, you can upload it to one of the photo sharing services such as Google Panoramio, Google Picasa, or Flickr (you should first enable settings allowing geocoded photos to be automatically mapped when uploaded). Once uploaded at one of these services, it will eventually be automatically spidered and made available via Google Maps.

Be sure that the image upload service you use is now correctly displaying the image’s location on a map, and does not make any mistakes reading the coordinate pair.

Google’s Panoramio instructions indicate that some EXIF data cannot be interpreted by them, so be sure the data is accessed and that the image is mapped to the correct location in Google Maps afterwards (the Google Maps interface that is integrated into Panoramio).

Likewise, the image’s mapped location may be checked in Flickr and Picasa as well, via the map interfaces and EXIF content pages they generate.

Having the geolocation embedded in the EXIF part of the image file may be the best option from an optimization perspective, because it not only allows you to leverage one of the image sharing services to get your images connected with maps, but also because you may then store the image on your website where the locational data might help to further augment all the other basic local SEO methods you’re using.

Schema.org As A Geocoding Technique

Probably the newest image geocoding technique would involve using the schema.org protocol which the search engines recently announced, and which allows you to tag individual images on your webpages using Micro Data. Under this protocol, you could use the ImageObject type and embed a contentLocation property within it to specify the place.

At present, though, I think that the location content is likely not yet being absorbed by Google’s Image Search or by Google Maps, nor by other search engines. While this technique has a lot of advantages, it is still too early to effectively leverage — but, stay tuned and expect that this method may well become a defacto standard along with embedded geolocation in EXIF data.

Thus far, I believe you get more local search benefit from uploading geocoded images to the image sharing services I highlighted here, since they are well-integrated with Google Maps.

However, as the search engines become more sophisticated, and as more cameras (and camera phones) integrate location data in image files, we might reasonably expect this information to be harvested and used in local search ranking evaluations wherever images may be stored on the internet.

The answer to those questions is “yes,” at least according to recent data compiled by the online ad network Chitika. The company drew its local search queries from a sample of more than 10 million searches that brought traffic to its network of sites in the US between July 4th and July 11th.

The results, at least to me, are quite surprising: Smaller cities like Chattanooga, Tulsa and Wichita are among the locations with the highest percentage of local searches, while New York City, Chicago and San Francisco — the three biggest cities in the US — are among the cities with the smallest percentage of local searches.

Of the top 50 cities where local searches happen most, Chitika says 64% are located in the southern US. Meanwhile, 48% of the cities where local search happens the least are located in New York and California. In fact, seven of the cities on that second chart above are located in California and New York.

To be frank, I’m not sure what to make of the data Chitika is reporting. It flies in the face of the stereotype that bigger cities (New York, Bay Area and even Seattle) are high-tech hubs where people don’t use the yellow pages anymore and most local search happens online.

I wondered if perhaps Chitika was analyzing only a small set of potentially local keywords — as in, only looking at queries that specifically used a city/county/state name. If so, the data might be skewed by how people search differently in big cities versus smaller areas. But the company sent me a list of 15 sample keywords that it identified as local, and it includes both searches with specific local words (Boston, Austin, Saint Louis) and those without:

• boston car repair
• car service
• business schools
• plumbing austin
• electrician
• pizzerias
• fitness centers
• music stores near Saint Louis, MO
• garbage services
• modeling shots on location
• bikes near augusta, ga
• tourist day trip
• car rental
• house plumbing
• a laundromat

Chitika’s blog post suggests that maybe Internet users in smaller cities conduct more local searches because they may have to travel further to find products/services than people in New York City. That’s certainly possible, but the overwhelming nature of the data is still nothing short of a surprise to me.

How Google+ Could Become A Killer Local Marketing Channel

The Places Stream

One day, we are all going to wake up and find “Places” as a default stream in our Google+ experience and a business’ “Plus” stream as part of the default Place Page experience. When this happens, it will be like local search chocolate meeting social media peanut butter.

Circle Your Customers

In some ways, Google+ Circles are no big thing. Numerous social nets, including Facebook, have allowed members to categorize their contacts, but most have failed at convincing people that it’s worth doing (see Exhibit A). But Google+ has made Circles, its metaphor for categorization of social contacts, a core part of the experience and in my view, has made it more compelling for people to categorize.

So what does this mean for SMBs?

When you start communicating with potential/existing customers via Google+, it’s extremely simple, not to mention satisfying, to group these people into different categories (e.g. Current Customers, Ready To Buy, In Research Mode, Asking Questions, Used a Coupon, Daddy Warbucks, Repeat Customer, Annoying, Complainers, etc.).

You can start segmenting your audience and targeting specific communications to them. I know, you’re already doing this with your email service right? Well, we doubt it’s this easy. And by the way, you don’t need to get someone to give you their email to put them in a Google+ Circle.

So, suddenly a business can have a very simple way to manage who they are talking to if they choose to “go social.”  And I wouldn’t be surprised if over time we see a much more comprehensive business communications suite that involves Google+, Gmail, Google Analytics, Place Page data, Google Mobile, Talkbin, etc.

Customers Circle Your Business

When businesses are permitted to join Google+ it will be simple for people to put your business in a Circle. When this happens, I wouldn’t be surprised if Google offers pre-made Circles for your favorite local businesses. We could easily see them suggesting businesses that you have already reviewed on Google Places, businesses that you have +1′d, businesses your friends have reviewed, etc.

But even if they don’t, it will be simple for Google+ users to categorize their favorite local businesses into a Circle. For example, you could easily create a “Fave Restaurants” Circle and start adding businesses to it. Your mom might not do this, but I might, and in the future I’ll be able to share my Fave Restaurants Circle with mom.

Local Interest Circles Right now, the Google+ Sparks section is pretty lame, but it could become the key to local service provider discovery. Sparks are basically search/news results for any given topic. So an “SEO” Spark would show whatever Google+ thinks are the most relevant SEO articles from its index.

Right now, it is very challenging for local businesses to rank in Google Web results for “national” terms like “how much does a face lift cost?” But over time, I would expect the Sparks algo to get much more sophisticated,so if I were interested in getting rid of that damn turkey neck and searched for it via Sparks, the UI would know to show me content from local plastic surgeons who specialized in turkey neck removal highlighted in the stream.

Social Adwords

While I doubt that Google will be showing ads in Google+ any time soon (keeping the experience “pure” and all that) at some point, they are going to turn on the monetization and that’s where things will get really interesting.

If Google is able to aggregate enough users and activity, it could yield a demographically targeted ad network that is as powerful as Facebook’s. SEM experts like to say that Adwords is “intent driven” media while Facebook Ads are “interest driven”. Combining these two notions into Adwords would be powerful for marketers.

Now, from a single dashboard, a local plastic surgeon could simultaneously target a campaign at people searching for “tummy tuck in Atlanta” Google Search, Atlanta women 35-50 with household incomes over $100,000 who are talking about plastic surgery on Google+, and anyone who has hit an Atlanta plastic surgeon place page in the last 30 days. Oh yeah, and they can do this on an a la carte basis or just turn it into a flat rate automatic package for SMBs with limited budgets.

Place Pages Become Truly Social

The real win here is complete integration of a business’ Place Page with Google+. Here’s what we would expect to see:

• When a Google+ member hits a Place Page, there’s a message to add them to a Circle and/or to join the business’ Circle. We wouldn’t be surprised if there were some kind of default “local biz” Circle that shows up on the Place Page that you can easily drag the business’ Google+ badge into.
• Google Offers becomes a default Circle so you can see local offers in a stream on Google+ whenever you want, filtered by interest and your social graph.
• When you hit a Place Page that is either a member of a Google+ friend’s Circle or has been reviewed by a Google+ friend, you see your friend’s social history with the business.
• Businesses with claimed Place Pages are able to incentivize you to add them to your Circle.

Here’s one Google+ user’s rendition of what a Google+ Places integration might look like:

source: Sean Percival

If Google+ is seen as an enhancement of Google’s Place Search, then this could be a real point of differentiation for Google from Facebook Places, which has virtually no local search experience (at the moment). Marrying the “intent”-driven nature of search with the “interest”-driven nature of social media at a local level seems like the holy grail.

Put all of this together, and Google+ may be the last step in closing the full local commerce loop. Social signals baked into Places, Offers and mobile (not to mention Google Checkout and Wallet for payments) could put the company squarely at the nexus of the merchant/customer relationship. And if Google+ can attract wide adoption, it will get its hands on more granular user data to target ads both within the social network and across its suite.

Oh, and lest we forget, the search ramifications. If (and when) Google bakes + and +1 into organic search to influence page rank, businesses will feel a more urgent need to participate. So they got that going for them, which is nice. Goonga galunga.

As the video below shows, the MapQuest LBC functions very much like Google’s and Bing’s and offers many of the same basic features such as photo uploads, videos, categories and so forth. MapQuest is also offering two premium listing levels at $99 and $399 per year — the latter of which includes distribution of business information to other sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, SuperPages and others.

The MapQuest Local Business Center is currently available to US businesses only. Here’s the MapQuest intro video that shows how it works:

It’s been more than two years since Google Maps surpassed MapQuest as the number one mapping destination in the US, but MapQuest remains a healthy number two in the latest Hitwise travel category market share chart:

Aside from that, MapQuest is also a frequent source of local citations inside Google Maps, so I’d expect local search marketers to welcome the addition of this new MapQuest LBC tool.

I was particularly intrigued by Mike Ramsey’s presentation on research he had done where he compared 28 listings that ranked in the top 7 results for some local queries to 28 listings that did not rank as well. Mike started things off by warning the audience that “correlation does not equal causation“.

In other words, this data is interesting, but that doesn’t mean if you use it for SEO that you are going to rank #1.

First, Mike compared the high-ranking listings to the low-ranking listings for some of the factors mentioned in this year’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey:

As you can see, both the high- and low-ranked listings had about the same number of claimed listings and exact categorizations on their Place Pages – two factors that were given high importance in this year’s survey. The most striking difference is that many more, but not all, high ranking listings had reviews on IYP sites.

While many of the listings had relatively few citations (references to the business on other supposedly relevant sites), searching for information about the business in Google Web Search told a different story:

High ranking listings appear to have significantly more “offsite data”.  A similar gap appeared when checking Open Site Explorer for links to each business’ website:

Similar patterns showed up when checking for exact match keywords in anchor text to the listing websites:

and keywords in the anchor text:

Another great point was how making simple tweaks to the landing page URL like adding the address and phone number to the title tag can result in quick results:

Will Scott spoke about how you really have to work the system to to improve your Google Places rankings such as making sure you clean up listings that might be causing you problems, such as a Place Page for someone who used to work in the same location as yours.

One case study on a Place Page that had duplication and location problems showed how it took seven edits to the Place Page over three months before Google fixed the issues and started ranking the listing on page 1 for target queries. Local SEO does indeed take patience and endurance.

Will also showed off a variety of citation sources including Article Engines (be sure to include all of your location information on any articles you syndicate out about your business), Facebook and “Other” (a.k.a. SPAM).

In my experience, these relatively low value links do indeed seem to do the trick, but in the long run, you’ll want to supplement these kind of tactics with more solid citation sources, which of course are much harder to get.

David Mihm’s presentation had all sorts of good information with a focus on how to maintain a “geographic scent” for your website with the #1 recommendation being having a consistent name, address and phone number appear for your business across the Web.

Since much has been written in these pages about how to do this, I thought I’d focus on a couple of David’s points that were “extra credit”:

1. Submit a KML sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools. This helps send Google the “I am really located here” signal. Here’s an easy tool to help you do it GeoSitemapGenerator.
2. For multiple locations, claim all of your Google Place listings in a corporate Google account. If you are submitting a bulk feed, get it verified. Your Google Account must match the URLs of the Places you are submitting. Each location must have its own unique phone number or it won’t get approved.
3. If you want to generate reviews, find customers with Google and Yahoo email addresses. Since you know they have accounts with these sites, you can send them links asking them to write a review for you on them and they’ll likely already be signed in.

All in all, it was an awesome session. I encourage you to check out the panelists’ sites as they all share a lot of great information:

• Nifty Marketing
• Search Influence
• Get Listed

The findings are not a surprise. Google dominates as a traffic source to local business websites, though in this survey not as much as some other surveys. Mobile was not a part of the results reported.

Here’s how the SEO respondents ranked the top sources of traffic to their clients’ sites:

That ranking is further unpacked in the chart below, showing that Google Places and Google.com drive a combined 58 percent of visits to local websites. Yahoo, Bing, Facebook were are minor players in local traffic referrals. The degree to which these SEOs said Facebook was a kind of non-entity in local traffic referrals might also be considered a surprise.

Data from the consumer survey reflect strong use of local search with 31 percent of consumers reporting they use Google daily or weekly to find local businesses.

Perhaps the single “surprise” of the consumer findings is the degree to which images seem to matter to consumers. Sixty percent of the consumer respondents to the BrightLocal survey said that images associated with local business results made them more likely to consider/contact that business.

The full survey results can be found here.

The survey essentially is trying to find out basic things about local SEO attitudes, metrics and clients. It takes about 5 or so minutes to complete. If you’re interested, you can start here.