A lot of statistical data and analysis is published about SMB online activity in the top US markets, often leaving out many of the tier two cities. In this post, I will share some data on the online visibility of local businesses in Columbus, Ohio. With a population of some 750K, Columbus and its surrounding area are home to over 80K small to  medium businesses.

As it turns out, many Columbus business owners are active online, building websites, updating their listings and advertising their business on various sites. The following chart shows the percentage of Columbus SMBs who have a visible website, who have claimed their local listing, and who advertise online. The data is based on Palore’s coverage of the leading search engines, yellow pages sites and local search sites (excluding PPC ads on search engines that are difficult to track).

As always, it is important not to bundle all local businesses into one group, as different verticals often behave differently online. The chart below shows the same data for Columbus plumbers.

Interestingly, plumbers are twice as active as the average Columbus SMB when it comes to online advertising. However, they are almost half as active when it comes to publishing a website and claiming their business listing. This data is consistent with what we see in other major cities where different verticals exhibit different levels of online activity.

While this does not introduce significantly new or contradictory findings, it merely sheds some light on a tier two market that exhibits similar characteristics to those of larger markets.

Start-ups and large media companies alike tend to focus on large and prominent cities when launching new Internet services. Therefore, your typical coffee shop in San Francisco is bombarded with offers from Internet companies, offering innovative services from online table reservations and virtual coupons to sundry online advertising options.

As it turns out, your average café on Columbus’s High St. may not boast an active Twitter account, but its owner probably has some online activity and is probably more available to hear about new ways to promote his business online.

I’m hearing more and more about “Real-Time Local Search” – that phrase is popping up everywhere; but I’m just not buying the hype that positions it as some amazing new essence that businesses and consumers must embrace… sorry.

I acknowledge that it’s useful to have a label to refer to this concept, but is it revolutionary? Or, is it the next stage in an evolutionary process?  Stay with me a little and I’ll explain why I think it’s an evolution, and also what small and local businesses should be doing about it.

I recently attended the excellent Local Social Summit 2009 event where I had the privilege of contributing in a panel discussion moderated by Greg Sterling on the subject of “Local Gets Social – The Impact of User Generated Content and the Promise of Real-Time Search.”  My fellow panelists were Seb Provencher of Praized Media, Andrew Hunter of Qype UK, and Sokratis Papafloratos of Trusted Places.

It was an interesting discussion (you can read Greg’s summary of the event here), firstly because not everybody agreed on the actual definition of the term “Real-Time Local Search”, but secondly, because it became clear to me that there might just be a big jug of Kool-Aid being passed round here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this isn’t important, only that we need to be a bit grounded and realise that this is an evolution not a revolution. Let’s explore a few thoughts on the subject

The definition of real-time local search

So, lacking any universally agreed upon definition, allow me to make a suggestion at least for the dimensions it encompasses (and please commenters, any insight on this is most welcome.) There are (at least) 3 dimensions that I can see:

1. Timeliness, ‘current-ness’. The information found should have some element of timeliness. For example, discovering that there’s a restaurant on a particular street corner is not timely in itself, but discovering that there’s a restaurant on a particular street corner that’s offering a two-for one deal tonight might be.
2. Localness. Of course, it’s in the title, but what does it mean?  Well, here I’m a little confused, because, you see, the definition of local varies for different people, and for different services, at different times (so that’s at least three variables at play here).Allow me to illustrate: For those living in city centers, life may very well revolve around a relatively small area, and so, in many of their daily needs local does indeed mean local to them at almost any time.

   However, for those living in the suburbs, life is much more likely to extend to a somewhat broader geography so that, at the point of time of looking for a service, location may be very different to the location at which the service is to be consumer, especially if the need for that service is not immediate but is at some future point in time (i.e. any time we plan ahead – busy people take note).

3. Relevance. Results must of course be relevant but, when you’re dealing with information that has both timeliness and localness dimensions, the potential for irrelevance increases. ‘Regular’ search engines ( maybe we’ll have to start referring to them like this to distinguish from real-time) use ranking algorithms to display results in some order of relevance, but what is the algorithm that determines relevance when you introduce the new dimensions of timeliness and localness (perhaps OneRiot has at least part of the answer).

What’s the popular demand for real-time local search?

Well, you see here, I think it rather depends upon who you are, what you’re searching for, and when you need it. For me, it keeps coming back to those three dimensions above.

I do believe in some cases this thing that’s being called Real-Time Local Search is incredibly important, but it’s not important across the board.  The best way in which I can illustrate this is to offer a few user scenarios (I’m sure you can think of many more) where I try to assess whether real-time local search is likely to be important to me (consumer) or a business (supplier).

Scenario 1: I’m looking for a concrete cutter to cut a slab in my driveway at my house in Winchester (from where I take a 60 minute commute to London for work each day) to install a new manhole cover.  I’m time-poor and the only chance I get to do the research is at work (London).

Conclusion: The service is extremely unlikely to have a real-time component, and the point of consumption of the service is far from the point (in space and time) of search.

Scenario 2: My conference wraps up at 6.00pm and I want to network with colleagues over food immediately after the event at some convenient nearby location.

Conclusion: Highly likely to have both an immediate timeliness and a localness dimension.

Scenario 3: My conference wraps up at 6.00pm and I want to find a spot for dinner with my wife when I eventually get home after a long commute.

Conclusion: Less likely to have an immediate timeliness dimension, and localness dimension is complicated because the location at the point of search is not same as the location at the point of consumption.

Simply speaking, there are many permutations of who’s doing the searching, timeliness, and localness that are a bullseye for Real-Time Local Search and others that are way off the board. Admittedly, what’s missing from my discussion is any idea of how often we have a hit compared to a miss, indeed I’d be interested to hear any views on this.

To be truthful, my sense is that there are relatively few categories of business for which Real-Time Local Search may be very important, but let’s not allow my gut-feel to confuse the picture. There are some smart, creative businesses out there that can take a non-time-sensitive business and make it time-sensitive to great effect.

Indeed a story comes to mind, as told to me by a friend in Boulder, CA, of a local baker that tweeted each time he was about to pull a fresh batch of cookies from the oven. Surrounding businesses, as I’m told, stood still as workers who followed the baker on Twitter quit their desks to line up for fresh cookies (I couldn’t resist Googling this, looks like they’re not the only one).

Similarly, it’s obvious how businesses like bars, clubs, pubs and restaurants (even child-minders, dog sitters, and more) do have a very strong local component that’s tied to the location that the consumer is actually in, but less so for businesses such as accountants, brokers of many sorts, and web designers.

Is there a popular demand? I don’t know, but I think in time we will see.

Guidance for local businesses

In all the hoopla, it can be hard for the (business) man-on-the-street to make sense of it all, especially to know what (if any) action to take.

My thoughts? Don’t worry. If you’re already engaged in the local and social web, you’re probably doing just fine. Continue to be engaged in social sites like Twitter and Facebook (there’s already plenty of information out there on using these tools for your business – e.g. here’s what Chris Brogan says on the subject) as well as local directories and the local listings in the search engines. Being active in all those places is important.

Maximise the reach of your activity in those places by utilizing widgets to spread your real-time wings across your other web presences, for example, get your Twitter feed into your blog or website, and link to your Facebook profile or show your status updates if you use Facebook to promote your business.

Also you might consider how you can get closer to real-time with your customers by utilizing widgets like BookingBug’s real-time availability and reservations widgets on your websites, blog, Facebook page and more.

Basically, continue to get stuck into and engaged with social and local media. A lot of the innovation in this space is occurring in Internet companies that are providing real-time-like search experiences for consumers and businesses, rather than in the local businesses themselves, and they’re trawling their content from the same places in which you should already be playing.

Evolution not revolution

I guess if I was to try to summarise this piece, it would go something like this: don’t get hung up on the label “Real-Time Local Search” – at least, not just yet. I’m not convinced that the ‘Local’ bit isn’t a bit of a red-herring in the wider scheme of things.

For some people, at some times, and for some needs this is really important concept, but remember it’s not (yet) universally applicable.

It’s useful to have a label to refer to, and so “Real-Time Local Search” works as well as anything for me, but is it revolutionary? I don’t believe so. Yes, it’s another step along a continuum of increasingly current search results. Do we want search results that are more current? Of course we do, and they’re getting so all the time, but using the words “Real-Time” suggests we’ve reached the end, and we haven’t.

Footnote – Some examples of Real-Time Local Search in action:

Whilst writing this article, I found myself drawn into trying out a few of the ways of searching with both timeliness and localness in mind, this is a mere tip of the iceberg (commenters, please feel free to make further suggestions to try) but this gets you started:

Twitter search Try this – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pizza+in+soho Local? Yes. Useful or relevant results? Somewhat – certainly the results feel more time-relevant than Google.

Try this – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=pizza+in+london – Not really a good local example, too wide to be considered local, but useful to see what happens.

OneRiot

Here’s what they say “OneRiot crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg and other social sharing services, then indexes the content on those pages”

I head about these guys via the excellent Leo Laporte show This Week in Tech (TWiT)

Try this – http://www.oneriot.com/search?q=pizza+in+soho Local? Yes. Useful or relevant results? Yes, I think so. For more info on OneRiot see this piece by Matt McGee.

Google Ah, the old fav, the established ’standard’ for search Try this – http://www.google.com/#q=pizza+in+soho Local? Yes. Useful or relevant? Yes, but no sense of timeliness (so doesn’t really qualify as real-time)

Superpages SP411

I saw this mentioned by Greg Sterling here, it’s interesting but the long set of instructions about how to use it was rather a turn off. Not sure I’d really call this real-time. Sure, you get results in real-time (but don’t you get that from any search engine), but the results don’t seem to have what I’d regard as a real-time dimension. In fact, they appear to be just what I’d get from their directory service, it feels a little contrived and I don’t see why I wouldn’t just use their website on my mobile.  Still, as Greg says in his piece, it’s good “example of Superpages pro-actively taking its data and local search capabilities out to where users are” so hats off to them.

Surchur

I came across this whilst reading Matt McGee here. Try this – http://surchur.com/all/pizza+in+soho A bit thin on results for my query to make a judgement, but interesting in terms of discovery versus search with those ‘hot’ panels on the home page.

Collecta

Try this – http://collecta.com/#q=pizza%20in%20soho Hmm, can’t make up my mind about this one, lots of results like “Yummy pizza in Clerkenwell. Now to Soho for jewellery supplies and general mooching about” but most don’t really help me find any business I can actually use. My jury is out.

We’ve reached the midpoint of fantasy football season, and in our SEMpdx league, my team is hanging on to a playoff slot by a thread.  (Yes, I am “that guy” who roots for the Patriots to get into the red zone and then stall out, just so my fantasy kicker Stephen Gostkowski gets a chance at a few more field goals.)

One of my favorite halftime interview clichés from NFL coaches is “we’ve just got to do a better job of blocking and tackling.” While that’s sometimes a euphemism for “the other team is way better than us,” in other cases the coach means his superstar team is getting sloppy and ignoring its fundamentals,  costing them on the scoreboard.

Tying this analogy back to Local Search, is your business (or agency) losing rankings by getting sloppy with its Local SEO “blocking and tackling?”

A quick refresher on 10 Local fundamentals

1. Claim your business listing at the major search engines: Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local.

This is a total no-brainer. It’s a chance at free exposure and by just by claiming your listing, you’ll give the search engines more trust in your business and improve your chances at ranking (not to mention prevent someone else from hijacking your listing).

2. Submit your business to the major data providers: Localeze, infoUSA, and Acxiom—the latter via UniversalBusinessListing.org.

Most small business owners have heard of Google, Yahoo, and Bing—even with the recent name change. But a tiny percentage of them (and even a tiny percentage of search marketers) know about the “other” Big Three in Local Search—Localeze, infoUSA, and Acxiom. These guys each have their own databases which form the foundation of the search engines’ Local indexes and of a variety of second-tier portals as well. They’re basically the backbone of the entire local search ecosystem.

Acxiom is the only one of the three which doesn’t have an online submission area; the only way in that I’m currently aware of is via Universal Business Listing.

3. Put yourself in the right categories.

One of the main reasons to go through the steps above is to make sure that your business is listed in the right category—which plays a central role in your business’s ability to show up for your target searches.  Sometimes there’s been a mis-entered keystroke or an incorrect mapping from one of the data providers to one of the search engines, and claiming and updating your listing is your chance to correct it.

4. Make sure your business information is consistent.

Google especially likes to see business information match up across the web, because it increases their confidence that their algorithm is returning a relevant, accurate result. This means no keyword stuffing in your business title, either at Google or at the other data providers, and making sure that your phone number and address information matches up everywhere your business is mentioned—the main reason I advised against call-tracking numbers in last month’s column.

5. Get your contact information in hCard microformat or add a QR code on your website.

If you’re a small business owner, starting with this step, this is probably where you’re going to need the help of a developer or a Local SEO company to actually implement these recommendations.

It’s absolutely essential that the search engines are able to see your business’s Name, Address, and Phone number (a.k.a. “NAP”—a great acronym from Localeze’s Gib Olander) when they crawl your website. If that information is contained a fancy font or in a header image, they’re not going to be able to find it.  So make sure it’s in basic HTML, at the very least, and if you want a few brownie points, use the hCard microformat.

6. Create a KML file and upload it to Google Webmaster Central.

Most SEO companies are familiar with XML sitemaps.  Well, think of a KML file as a “location map.”  It’s a specialized file format that includes the latitude and longitude coordinates of the physical business locations listed on a particular website and gives them one more confidence boost in the location of a particular business. Dutch SEO Martijn Beijk has written an excellent KML tutorial to help those for whom this is a fresh concept.

7. Use your official business name in the title tag of your contact or location page.

This recommendation is kind of a new “blocking and tackling” technique that I’ve advised after reading some of Mike Blumenthal’s discussion of the Google Maps patent and hearing him present on it at SMX East last month.  Bill Slawski mentioned this as a Local Search strategy (way back in 2006!) but it took Mike’s presentation to hammer it home for me.

Essentially by doing this you make sure Google assigns your website as an “authority document” for Location Prominence.

8. Use geographic keywords in your title tags.

This is more of a generalized recommendation: make sure that you include your city and state in the title tag of your contact or location page, and if you’re in widget sales, use words like “CityName Widgets” or “Widgets in CityName” on assorted other title tags on your website.

9. Make sure you have Analytics installed on your website.

Think of analytics as equivalent to watching game film in football. If you want to know how your team is performing, you need to revisit how you’ve done in previous games. Analytics can give you great insight into which keywords are bringing traffic to your website, and what pages are engaging your users and leading to new business.

If you’re partial to Google Analytics, check out this excellent post series from SEOverflow on how to track clickthroughs from the 7-pack (i.e. the Maps results shown as part of Universal search).

10. Scout the opposition to see what your high-ranking competitors are up to.

Take a look at both the Organic AND the Local search results for some of your target phrases. What competitors are showing up? Use tools like Linkscape or Yahoo Site Explorer to see if there are particular websites linking to them and not you. Google is now displaying categories publicly as part of Place Pages.  See how they’re listing themselves and ask yourself if there’s anything you can learn from that. While you’re there, check out their “Web Pages” area, too, to see if there are any obvious citations you’re missing.  Are they accumulating user reviews on certain portals where your company isn’t as active?

While these fundamentals might not be as sexy as Twitter or as inspirational as linkbait, they’re tried-and-true methods that are sure to help your business rank better in the search engines and ultimately bring in more business.

All right, team, bring it in. Let’s go get ‘em—“Local Search” on three!

Much has been written lately about the value of combining text ads with display/image advertising online in order to boost visibility and brand awareness. This trend is not necessarily a new one: Yahoo/comScore issued a study in 2006 showing an increase in “online and offline purchasing by consumers who are exposed to integrated campaigns” that combined search and display. It struck me that using only search ads or display ads or even a combination of the two needn’t be the only method by which small businesses tap into their potential customer pool. I would suggest that there are a variety of other products that can also help connect a customer with a business that meets his/her need. Among those:  call tracking phone numbers, video ads, and splash or jump pages.

Let’s take a look at how some of those options can assist local businesses in promoting themselves.

Give ‘em a picture!

Back in the day, display or banner ads were the basic format for online advertising. Standard 468×60 banners were found on publisher sites and were the launching pad for businesses seeking online visibility. As time passed, other display units – buttons, pop-ups, rectangles, and skyscrapers – appeared and were standardized by the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau). Banner ads were the most common online ad format until peaking around 2000-01, when the dotcom crash led to a re-evaluation of the most effective online ad format. The result was paid placement in the form of Yahoo, Google, MSN, and all the other providers who were gobbled up by the big players in the space.

Due to the emergence of search, display or banner ads lost caché and before long did not get the attention once afforded. However, recent recognition of display ads in conjunction with search ads has lent display a new credibility. There are many display networks (ValueClick, Burst, Adify, etc.) that can fulfill the need for online advertising, and Google has made a new commitment to combining search and display via AdWords.

How did they get my number?

While it has been suggested that using call tracking numbers (CTN) can be problematic for local search, I would contend that when used wisely, call tracking numbers can provide a very useful means for measuring the effectiveness of ads. If used with a call recording feature or a whisper element prior to answering, businesses can gain insights on how well their ad campaigns are performing. Callbright, Ifbyphone, eStara, and Marchex VoiceStar among others provide various services depending on merchant needs.

If, for example, one call number is used for a campaign in conjunction with a splash page, the merchant will know that any call reported from that CTN is a result of the ad campaign with which the number is associated. Regarding concerns over using multiple call tracking numbers (see SEL article “Be Wary Of Call Tracking Numbers In Local Search” linked above), a merchant could be advised to use the same CTN in each medium: one for search, one for print, one for display.  That way the number can help evaluate success of each ad medium.

On special this week

A great way to focus user attention on products you want to emphasize or promote is by using a splash or landing page in your campaign. Sometimes called a jump page, this one-page site allows users to see just the information for a product on which the advertiser wants to focus sales. If Best Buy is offering a discount on plasma televisions for the month of October, a jump page can be the destination showing the info on the special offer with ad copy created for the campaign that mirrors the special offer on the page. This provides a specific connection between the ad copy and the jump page that draws users to the product discounted. The direct correlation between ad and page can reveal efficacy of campaign features. Going forward, as other products are spotlighted the same process may be employed.

Almost like being on TV!

Online video is one of the newer ad formats available to advertisers. Advertisers have used video on television for decades, and now video format can be viewed online. If a small business already has a local commercial running on television, the video from that television commercial can be linked to the online campaign for a dynamic means to convey the ad message. If an advertiser website has no video,  Windows Moviemaker and Jivox are just two sources available for creating video for online ad campaigns.  If your ad campaigns are outsourced, have your provider create a video for you!

Online marketing provides a myriad of ad types and formats, all of which can boost exposure for a business. For the small business that is not ready to jump into the effort using all of these suggested methods, adding one at a time and measuring the impact of the new ad type can provide important insight regarding how to allocate ad budget. Some of these may be more useful than others; it depends on the type of business. The point here is that small businesses should not limit their exposure by using just one sort of online ad format. Multiple points of interaction increases exposure to potential customers, which is what all advertising is about!

Local businesses typically use search marketing to achieve two main objectives: getting customer calls and walk-ins. They do this by publishing their address and phone number in search engines and local directories so that an interested customer can take action one way or another – by walking into a restaurant or calling a plumber for example.

But while getting more customers on the phone or through the door is the declared offering of many SEM agencies, “Advertise with us and your mailbox will be packed with new emails every day!” is one advertising slogan that you would be hard pressed to find online. Many small business owners are happy to “Pay Per Calls”, or “Pay Per Actions”, but getting unsolicited emails is something that most people might shy away from.

Last month, Palore was commissioned to research the state of SMB emails online, and the results suggest somewhat different conclusions. SMBs typically appear online in directory sites (e.g. Yellowpages sites, local search engines, vertical sites etc.) and, if available, in their own business website.

When looking at directory sites, we found that roughly 10% of the businesses display an email address on one or more of the major directories. Note that this is an aggregated number covering all major directory sites – when looking at any single directory, we usually found just 1%-2% of businesses that displayed an email address in their profile page.

When looking at the SMBs’ websites, the numbers are also quite low. To begin with, about half of SMBs do not have an active website at all. Of the remaining half, we usually did find an email address in one of the websites’ pages. However, a closer look showed that a fair share of these emails appear to be non-personal email addresses that are not checked regularly by the business owner, but are rather a technical contact of some sort.

In other cases, we found local business websites with multiple email addresses, as in corporate websites.

And yet, in many cases we did find what appeared to be personal, frequently-checked emails addresses.

While our research seemed to confirm the notion that few SMBs would choose to publish their active email address openly, a closer look suggests otherwise. Since only a minority of business owners are actively engaged in updating their listing on directory sites, and less than half maintain an active website, in reality, a very significant portion of “Internet active” SMBs do publish their email address on the Web.

Many businesses use email marketing to communicate with their customers. However, why so many small business owners publish their email address openly is unclear to me. It may be that incoming email is an effective communication channel that generates a lot of new business. Of course, it may also be that many business owners are simply ignorant of the perils of spam.

SEM agencies continually try to demonstrate ROI for SMBs’ search marketing dollars through measurement solutions such as call tracking systems and online reservation systems. If indeed SMBs use search marketing to generate new leads and customer emails, then SEM companies may want to monitor that channel as a result of their search marketing efforts as well. But that is a big IF… what do you think?

We all know that one of the keys to great SEO is making sure you keep your website updated, new and fresh. Weather you do this with a blog, or you change your homepage with new offers, coupons or new products, it serves to show Google that your site is ‘alive’. For many small businesses in particular, this is a real challenge.

As per David Ingrams article on video, we can’t emphasize enough just how beneficial it is to add video to your website, to your entries on directory, business review and IYP sites. At the time of writing this article, this business has had 10,425 views since May 2009. I am sure not all of this traffic is due to just having a video, but it has certainly contributed. What is also very telling, is that the majority of the top viewed pages on our directory (Brownbook.net) contain videos.

So you have new content on your site, you are using video or at least going to start soon, what’s next? Do you know what is coming that may benefit your small business?

Have you heard of QR codes yet? Here is a quick introduction:

What are QR codes?

They look like this:

They come to us from Japan where they are very common. QR is short for Quick Response (they can be read quickly by a cell phone). They are used to take a piece of information from a transitory media and put it in to your cell phone. You may soon see QR Codes in a magazine advert, on a billboard, a web page or even on someone’s t-shirt. Once it is in your cell phone, it may give you details about that business (allowing users to search for nearby locations), or details about the person wearing the t-shirt, show you a URL which you can click to see a trailer for a movie, or it may give you a coupon which you can use in a local outlet.

The reason why they are more useful than a standard barcode is that they can store (and digitally present) much more data, including url links, geo coordinates, and text. The other key feature of QR Codes is that instead of requiring a chunky hand-held scanner to scan them, many modern cell phones can scan them. The full Wikipedia description is here.

How does the cell phone read the code?

The cell phone needs a QR code reader, like this one from Kaywa. It takes literally 1 minute for someone with an iPhone or Android phone to find and install the reader.

How do you generate a code?

You can easily generate your QR code using a site like Kaywa.com or you can use the Open Source code to generate codes for you if you have a smart developer on hand.

How can you use QR codes to benefit search marketing?

We are only just scratching the surface of how they will be used. We have added one to every business listing in our directory. Here are a few examples of how others are using them.

A business card company showing how they are using them for businesses:

You can also watch this BBC Click interview on YouTube.

How will Google see them?

If you add them to your website, the search engines will see that your pages have changed, and that you are updating pages. The search engine will see a new image and index it accordingly. At some point soon, the search engines will likely recognize QR codes and possibly index the content in them.

Will your customers use them?

Today, right now, few may use them, those that do will certainly appreciate your tech knowledge, those that don’t will certainly be inquisitive which may open the door for conversation and a potential sale. Those that do use QR codes will definitely have a high tech know-how and may be more receptive to your presence on the web, your Twitter presence, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube etc.

How could you use a QR code?

Your business, no matter how small or large, could use QR codes in a number of ways. You might auto generate one next to every product on your web site containing all the product details, the number to call and the URL link to the page so they can show their friends on their cell phone. You could add one to your business card containing your contact details so its easy for someone to add you to their contacts on their cell phone.

Add them to any print advertising, flyers, posters, invites, tv ads etc containing:

• product details
• contact details
• offer details
• event details
• competition details
• a coupon
• Twitter, Facebook, MySpace IDs
• a link to your YouTube video

What is it all about really? Well, some may not see it yet, but its another example of the blurring of the edges of media, as we all rapidly enter this totally connected world. It’s the blurring of the lines between our cell phone and the Internet, always on Internet connectivity wherever we are, whatever we are doing and whatever device we have on hand –whether it’s a cellphone, netbook, laptop, pc, camera, or TV.

Call-tracking phone numbers are often hailed as a best practice strategy in paid search campaigns thanks to their ability to demonstrate a specific number of conversions or inquiries generated by the campaign.

The kind of at-a-glance analytics these numbers offer make it easy for businesses and search agencies to calculate Return On Investment, a desirable metric for both parties to gauge the success or failure of their engagement.

Agencies and service providers are eager to demonstrate the value of their SEM acumen to small businesses and large corporations alike, and because it’s such an easy concept for business owners and traditional marketing VP’s to understand, it’s often sold as a value-add for a particular product suite.

Because the local search space is so fragmented, it seems like call tracking numbers would be even more useful.  After all, wouldn’t it be great to know exactly which customers were coming to you from Superpages vs. Yelp vs. Citysearch vs. your own website? Some companies that offer call-tracking may also offer call recording, so that you can gauge not just the quantity of the phone calls but their quality.

Conceptually, both of these possibilities sound wonderful, but in reality, the negative effects on your Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local rankings could be significant. Let’s take a look at why.

The importance of citations for local business listings

Given the vast number of small businesses without a website (~50-55%), or weakly-optimized one (probably an additional 40%), Google Maps and the other local search engines need indicators of relevance and authority that are not based primarily on links. User reviews on major portals like Yelp or Citysearch are obviously key indicators, as is the information that businesses tell the engines directly at the respective Local Business Centers.

But citations are also a critical component of any Local SEO strategy—recall that Local Search Ranking Factors contributors placed them as the #2 most important factor for ranking this year.

What’s a citation? Essentially, just a mention of your business information (your name + address, your name + phone number, or both) somewhere out there on the web—even if it doesn’t contain a link—remember that most businesses don’t have anything to link to!  The bottom line is that search engines’ ability to tie a particular phone number to a particular business gives them increased confidence in that business’s information, especially if that information matches what the business owner has entered into the Local Business Center—so they’re more likely to rank it.

Phone numbers may even be seen as a stronger confidence indicator than addresses, as Chris Silver Smith stated eloquently in his interview with Eric Enge last month:

“The phone number has in the past typically been considered something that doesn’t vary as much as some of the other information from all the different business sources.”

Citations and call-tracking numbers don’t mix

To maximize your rankings on Google Maps, Yahoo Local, and Bing Local, your business’s Name, Address and Phone number (“NAP,” to borrow a Localeze-inspired acronym) should broadcast the same rock-solid signal on every platform.  Think of them as your business’s thumbprint.  As Gib Olander of Localeze  says, they are “not the place for advertising.”

Remember, as Brownbook’s Marc Lyne pointed out, that “you don’t own your business information.” For instance, what happens if you give your business a unique tracking phone number at a directory that Acxiom happens to spider for its own index? That number is now considered authoritative by Acxiom, and gets pushed out to every partner that’s leasing Acxiom’s data. Meanwhile, infoUSA and Localeze probably still have your main line. You now have two different thumbprints.

In a perfect world, Google, Yahoo, and Bing would be smart enough to see that the business name and address information matches, even though the phone numbers differ. They’d “count” all of them as citations for the same business, but continue to display the Local number you’ve given them in the Local Business Center. But given some of the issues with Google’s merging algorithm, do you really want to take that chance?

Other possible scenarios include duplication, which will split your “citation equity” across multiple listings and confuse customers about how they should actually contact you. This is especially possible if Google sees the same tracking numbers on multiple portals, as in the Acxiom scenario I described above.

And what happens if you want to cancel your contract with the provider through whom you’re running the tracking number? It’ll take months to get a new phone number flowing through the Local search ecosystem, even starting right at the top with the major data providers.

Maintaining absolute consistency with your business information is the key to a successful long-term Local SEO strategy.

Not all call-tracking is bad for Local SEO

The safest form of call-tracking is the old fashioned way: train your receptionists or salespeople to ask “Do you mind telling me how you heard about our business?” at the end of every initial phone call. Just keep a running chart in excel (if they’re at a computer) or even on a hardcopy piece of paper. I also quite like the way Matt van Wagner’s favorite bakery, Patisserie Bleu in Nashua, NH, handles call-tracking: by putting up different colored Post-It notes on their refrigerator when orders for new cakes come in.

You’ll obviously want to get a baseline level of call volume before you start your campaign so you know where you’re starting from. Make sure you’re not picking an unusually active (like the holidays) or unusually dead (like summer vacation) sample time in your business cycle.

If you decide that the benefits to call-tracking outweigh the possible risks to your rankings, at the very least ask if the marketing company or search portal with whom you’re engaging can hide these numbers when they display them to search engines.

In some cases, this might be done with Javascript or even something as simple as a non-alt-texted image tag.  This way there’s at least a chance of picking up an address-only citation from that page; No-indexing the page isn’t really a good solution because then you’re just cutting off any chance for potential ranking benefit.

But I doubt that many companies that are providing call-tracking numbers in local search have considered their implications for ranking, so most are probably hard-coding them at present.

Chris Silver Smith posited an interesting solution by calling for an industry-standard “canonical phone” microformat but the Local search engines may have more pressing issues to deal with than trying to adopt a brand-new standard.

Conclusion

Call-tracking numbers are not always bad for your local search presence, but hopefully this column has made small business owners aware of some of their implications. Extreme care should be taken during implementation of a call-tracking campaign to ensure a healthy long-term local presence. It may not be worth the risk of polluting your business’s signal or confusing the primary search engines.

I have worked in the online ad world for a few years now, and have had the opportunity to review a large number of websites. Many were full of information with lots of bells and whistles and features that made them appear sophisticated, while others were skeletal in content and simple in their organization. Either of these types of sites may glean terrific results for the small business owner, but there are a few aspects that help to ensure that a search campaign launches successfully with very rapid ramp up in traffic delivery. Here are a few suggestions that may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many websites do not observe these simple practices!

Location, location, location

Sometimes website owners/business people must assume that if a visitor is looking at their website, that visitor must be in the same geographic location as the business. As we all know, this isn’t a given. Making sure your location is indicated on your website makes all the difference in how successfully you generate business. If you sell goods online, your location is not relevant. Anyone living anywhere can access your site and purchase your product(s). But if you are a brick and mortar establishment, counting on bringing customers in the door, you must provide your location. Potential customers want to know where you are in relation to where they are.

Define a service area

If you provide a service, such as a plumbing, your location may not be critical but your service area is. For any business that works with customers offline, where you are or the area you serve is vital to generate web traffic that can lead to paying customers. In my experience, if I cannot determine where the business is after a couple of clicks through a website, I will give up and move on to another provider. Don’t deprive yourself of available paying customers. Put that location on the site in an obvious, prominent place.

Locally targeted advertising

Related to that, if you serve a local area make sure that is where your ad appears. There is little value in broadcasting your ad placement across a geographic area you cannot service. Whether you are a brick and mortar or a service area-based business, target your ad to the geographic area you either expect your customers to come from or to the area you are willing to serve. Beyond that scope any click traffic to your site is largely wasted.

K.I.S.S.

A third consideration: do not overload your website with too much content or too many fancy features. This may sound counter-intuitive, but think about it: if you bury your primary service or product amidst so much information that a viewer cannot find that salient info, you could lose potential customers. Too much can be as bad as not enough information. This doesn’t mean that if you are a plumber you cannot include information on different types of services you provide. It does mean that it would be wise to place information on different pages of your site. Provide a menu that is easy to find and follow, labeling each menu tab with a unique product or service. In this fashion, it’s easy to provide rich content but still allow the site user to find what they are looking for easily and quickly.

By the same token, don’t overload your site with music, scrolling text, rolling images, or excessive flash images. While each of these features might be nice enhancements, overdoing them can cause delays in page loading, which can cost you customers. Additionally, search engines (Google most specifically) weigh the time it takes for your website to load. Excessive load time can erode your quality score, hurt your ad ranking, and thus weaken your visibility and the consequent traffic you want to gain. Fewer potential customers may find you, resulting in lost business. A good rule of thumb is to make your site clean, clear, and easy to navigate. Make sure needed information can be found in one or two clicks. Your customers will thank you!

Not all non-profits are created equal

Finally, a last suggestion to those working in the not-for-profit sector:  if your site includes a link to allow for donations, make sure you have the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) non-profit status clearly stated on the page where your click lands. Even if a viewer must click to a different page to make an online donation, the IRS info (501 c 3, as an example) must be found on the page where the initial click-through arrives. If the entity does not have this information on the page, a strong likelihood exists that search engines will reject the campaign. Do not run the risk of delaying your campaign launch by not having this content visible.

Unfortunately, there are people who try soliciting funds online for all kinds of reasons. I’ve seen people asking for donations because they wanted to buy a house, because they wanted to go to college, and because they got in trouble with the law. While those may all be worthy reasons and warrant charitable assistance, they are not recognized by search engines as viable solicitations. So for all of the bonafide non-profits out there, make sure this content is included. It will ensure your campaign will begin serving without delay.

If the suggestions here are considered during the construction of a website, the ease of launching a successful site will be evident.

Properly categorizing your business at Google Maps is one of the most important Local Search Ranking Factors, as I mentioned in last month’s column. There’s been a lot of chatter about business categories since then, most notably at the Local Search Summit in San Jose, during August’s Search Marketing Now webinar on Local Search, and on Mike Blumenthal’s Understanding Google Maps blog.

Fellow Small Is Beautiful columnist Hanan Lifshitz offered a glimpse into how most IYP portals categorize the average small business in his own column last month. He found that over 60% of SMB’s in Alexandria, VA are placed into two or fewer categories by Internet Yellow Pages portals. This should be more than a little disturbing, both for SMB’s and end users.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, allow me to reiterate my view that Local search is focused around businesses and locations not necessarily websites. After all, barely 50% of small businesses even have websites, and among the 50% that do, only a handful are even moderately optimized for search. So even for advanced Local search engines that are able to take website information into account, such as Google Maps (presumably), there’s just not a lot of HTML content about the vast majority of small businesses.**

So in my mind, proper (and exhaustive) categorization remains one of the keys to both Local Search Engine Optimization and a good user experience for the local searcher. Other than trying to fix incorrect NAP information (Name, Address, Phone-thanks Gib J ), categories probably cause the most headaches in Local search. Let’s take a quick look at why.

Data mis-entry or mis-translation

Back in the Dark Ages (OK, so it wasn’t that long ago, just before the Internet), NAICS or SIC codes were the primary way that business information was organized. Business data aggregators like infoUSA and Acxiom assigned each business to a particular code to keep track of them in their computer system. Use of these codes, or at least of the data previously organized by these codes, is still widespread today.

Obviously, when you’re talking about a numerical entry corresponding to a verbal translation, one slightly mis-entered keystroke could place a business in a completely different area of the taxonomy.

A similar situation occurs when aggregators try to map other portals’ taxonomies to their own. Even with a proper entry, some categories become lost in translation.

As this data spreads throughout the Local Search ecosystem, the error just compounds itself, and a florist is all of a sudden listed as an auto mechanic. Or a museum is listed as an advertising agency.

And frankly, I was shocked to hear from Pankaj Mathur on last month’s aforementioned SMN webinar that infoUSA sometimes edits the categories that business owners tell them. It certainly goes against the industry grain (and against common sense) not to trust the business owner above other sources.

Incomplete taxonomies

Problems often arise when data providers’ category taxonomies simply don’t describe their business adequately.

One of my favorite Local search portals, CityVoter, is a good example. CityVoter is one of the most powerful citation sources for Google Maps, showing up an amazing number of times on Web Pages tabs in all kinds of industries and locations.

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine who runs an environmental consulting company asked me to help him with his Local Search presence. Naturally, CityVoter was one of the first places we submitted him. My friend’s CityVoter profile currently shows up as the #2 citation on his Local Business Listing in Google Maps.

But, it turns out that CityVoter doesn’t even have a category for Environmental Services. So we put his business in the closest matching category: Home Services > Contractors. It seemed to me to be far better that he be listed in a marginally-related category than to ignore CityVoter altogether and lose the ranking power that its citation brings with it to Google Maps.

Explicit restrictions

CityVoter may not have as complete a category taxonomy as infoUSA, Superpages, or some of the other major data providers.  But even more complete taxonomies that unrealistically restrict the number categories into which a business can place itself are detrimental to Local Search.

Not to continue to harp on infoUSA, but in last month’s webinar, Pankaj explicitly discouraged businesses from using categories to more fully describe their products and services (beginning at the 9:55 mark in the webinar). Given everything that we know about the long tail of search (greater volume in aggregate, less competition, higher conversion rates) this advice simply makes no sense to me as an SEO. And if I were running Local Search portal, why would I want a less-rather-than-more complete picture of what a business does?

In her recent comment on Mike’s categorization post, Miriam Ellis wondered whether Google wants Local Business Center categories to be used to add long-tail information, as well. Their current tooltip in the LBC simply reads: “Which categories (up to 5) best describe your business? Ex: Dentist, Wedding Photographer, Thai Restaurant.” It’s a line which Chris Silver Smith rightly points out confuses the long-tail issue, and may inadvertently encourage unwitting small business owners to enter multiple categories in the same field, a definite No-No.

But at least the United States version of the Local Business Center is still allowing business owners to submit custom categories. Darren Shaw, an SEO from Edmonton, Alberta, reported to me last week that custom categories were no longer available in the Canadian LBC.  One hopes this is a temporary glitch rather than a permanent decision on Google’s part.

To Google’s credit, Maps Director Carter Maslan stopped by the thread on Mike’s blog on multiple occasions and we may see some interface improvements rolled out shortly.

Categories and the future of Local search

Restrictions and incomplete taxonomies aren’t just bad for small businesses; they’re bad for searchers. Studies everywhere highlight that keyword search strings are getting longer. Borrowing two of Gib Olander’s favorite examples, and adding a third of my own: “Pet-friendly hotel downtown San Francisco,” “café with wi-fi in Pearl District Portland,” “old-fashioned diner in western suburbs.”  Without allowing businesses to input that kind of rich information as a category (i.e. “pet-friendly hotel” or “old-fashioned diner”), the results that Local Search portals return for those phrases are simply not going to be as relevant.

Google’s response has been that that information belongs in custom attributes or on business’ websites. But Google, quite frankly, is better at crawling the web than a traditional Internet Yellow Pages portal, which won’t be able to take that kind of information into account. And rather than placing limits on the completeness and accuracy of categories, why not use better-defined, longer-tail versions of them to help solve Local search’s service area problem?

Bringing things full-circle back to Hanan’s column, it might be helpful for data providers and portals to consider categories more like tags-one-size does not fit all. Localeze already seems to have adopted this mindset; UniversalBusinessListing, too, advises clients right on its submission page that “Adding more items to your business listing improves how search engines see your business.”

From the business owner’s perspective (at least the ones that I work with on a daily basis), successful Local SEO is not about spamming the search engines with marginal categories. But I hope I’ve laid out in this article why I always encourage SMB’s and agencies who represent them to “max out” their available categories in Google Maps and Internet Yellow Pages, and to use custom categories where appropriate.

(**Incidentally , this lack of HTML content–i.e. lack of links–is one of the reasons citations are a major ranking factor for Google Maps.)

The handful of SEM companies that we work with at Palore make millions of calls to Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) every year. This raises the question of whether the market for SMB online advertising is saturated, and how much room there is for growth.

A good (albeit somewhat simplistic) way of answering that question is by looking at how many SMBs are currently marketing themselves online, and more importantly, how many are not. It is this latter group, local business owners who still don’t advertise or otherwise promote themselves online, that defines the room for growth in this industry.

In this post, I will share some statistics on what local businesses from two categories – dentists and limo drivers  – are currently doing in one small US market. The following charts present their online activity, based on a project we ran in the Alexandria, VA area, covering over 60K businesses. The data covers these local businesses’ activities on the top search engines, Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and local search sites.

I’ll start with some definitions: “Widely listed” means businesses that appear (even as free listings) on at least half of the leading search engines, IYPs and local directories. “Have website” means businesses that have their website listed on one of the above directories (there may be additional businesses with websites, but these did not appear on any of the main directories.) We assume that the other labels are self explanatory.

The blue section shows how many businesses fall into each category, while the orange section shows the portion of businesses that do not – for example, 48% of Alexandria dentists have a website, while 52% do not.

Obviously, there is more to online marketing than being widely listed and having a website – there is a myriad of effective techniques, from adding a video to properly optimizing your site for search engines. However, this snapshot does capture only one aspect of online involvement by these SMBs.

Getting back to the original question, I would argue that if the orange areas  represents the growth opportunity for both SMBs and marketers, then the answer is a resounding “Yes”, and further, the growth opportunity in online marketing for SMBs is significant, and “No”, the market is still far from being saturated.