As the local search industry continues to grow, so does the terminology! While there are certain terms and phrases that are standard across the industry, there are some that are less commonly used or have alternative terms. Below is a list that might help you navigate your way through the streets of local search and in the process provide a basic understanding of local search marketing. In most of the definitions here, since I just can’t help but get carried away when talking about local search, I have also given some tips on how to best utilize these features to help your local search rankings.

Category: When listing your business with Google Places especially, you will want to choose a category for your business. This is a very important factor in their algorithm. If you have not claimed your business on Google Places, it will choose a category for you from a set of approximately 2,000 default business types based on the North American Industry Classification System. Be sure to select the correct category for your business and up to 4 subcategories to be sure the search engines know what your business is all about.

Centroid: As determined by the local the search engines, the centroid is the very center of a neighborhood or metropolitan area. A business’ proximity to the centroid plays a role in where it ranks in the local search results; however there is debate on how important it is. In my opinion, I believe it matters more in competitive markets. For example, if there are 1,000 plumbers in San Diego and someone searches for “plumber, San Diego, CA” the businesses that are closer to the centroid and have nicely optimized listings are more likely to show up towards the top.

Citation: Citations are to local search optimization as links are to website search engine optimization. Citations are viewed by the local search engines as a listing of a business on a website, preferably with a matching address and phone number to that which is provide on the business website and on that search engine’s local listing. Ideally, you have your complete address and local phone number on your website, you have claimed your search engine listings, and you have matching listings on sites like Yelp, CitySearch and Internet Yellow Page sites. The search engines see these listings as verification and as votes for your business. This will help your rankings in the local search results.

Data Provider, Aggregator, IYP: Companies such as infoUSA, Localeze, and Superpages are major data providers, also known as data aggregators and Internet Yellow Pages. The search engines often crawl these sites to gather business data. These companies often have contracts with the search engines to provide this data. So, if you see that your business is already listed on the search engines, these sites are very likely where the search engine got your information. You will want to claim your listings to ensure all the information is correct.

Directory: A website that lists business contact information in an organized manner, typically in alphabetical order and/or by business type. Just as the search engines look to data providers and aggregators to gather information, they also crawl directories.

Geospecific search: When a user searches for a business or company with a geographic modifier such as a city, state or zip code. For example, “plumbers, San Diego, CA”.

Google 7-Pac: The 7 local listings that appear alongside a map at the top of a search engine result for a geospecific keyword. These results are determined by the search engine’s algorithm. If a particular neighborhood or metropolitan area does not have a large concentration of the type of business the user is searching for, Google might only show 3 results. Similarly, Yahoo and Bing have a certain number of results that will show up next their maps.

Local algorithm: Just as the search engines have an algorithm for the organic search results, they also have a specific formula that determines the ranking for business listings relevant to a particular geographic area. Various factors play a part in this algorithm, some carrying more weight than others.

Review: A customer’s summary of his/or experience with a particular business. Reviews cannot be controlled by the business owner. Reviews can be left on Google Places and on most other local search listing sites like Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla. Business owners should pay attention to these reviews and use reviews as an opportunity to engage with customers. This touches on online reputation management.

This list covers the basic terminology that you will likely hear when you start talking to a local search professional. Knowing these terms will get you on your way to having a better understanding of local search. To continue your journey in learning about local search, check out our “Go Local or Go Home” webinar on the Vertical Measures webinars page.

Recently, here at Vertical Measures, we got a very special delivery: a SuperYellow Book. Wow, totally useful for an Internet marketing company like ours….I made a beeline for the recycling bin and promptly discarded it. It made me wonder though, do people actually still use the Yellow Pages to find local businesses? As someone who knows a little bit about local search marketing, I knew online local search has surged in recent years, but the exact numbers: not so much. Let’s examine the numbers. Local Search Trends Over the past few years local search sites have popped up all over the Internet. From Merchant Circle and Yelp, to Hot Frog and Google Maps, these sites help you find more than a business’s listing. Searchers can see detailed profiles for businesses: what customers are saying about a particular business, links to the company’s website, photos, video, and more. Basically: a Yellow Book on steroids (but not the bad kind of steroids, the natural, good, user generated content type of steroids).

Online users have flocked to local search portals to find more information about businesses. The numbers of monthly visitors are quite alarming. Below you’ll find a visual representation of the overall upward trend on some of the most popular local search sites.

(All figures below are courtesy of QuantCast.com) Google Maps

MerchantCircle Yelp Yahoo Local HotFrog InsiderPages YellowBot

Understanding the Numbers

As you can see, the numbers and growth are pretty astounding in the world of local search. Businesses who don’t have a profile on any of the above sites could be missing out on a significant amount of traffic. An estimated 49 million users visit Google’s local search section monthly (Maps.Google.com). An up and coming star in the local search game is Yelp, with an estimated 9.9 million users visiting monthly. There’s no denying the fact that the trend to use local search engines continues to rise.

Even if your business doesn’t receive a lot of traffic from local areas, there are still benefits to having a listing. A link back to your site, for one, is a great benefit. In addition, having a place for your customers to go to rate your business, discover more information, and share more information about your business are just a couple reasons to put up that local profile.

Want more information about local search? Well lucky for you our very own Sarah and Jason presented on the very topic in this month’s webinar. Check it out on our SEO Webinars page.

Do you own a local business? Do you want to get top rankings for your business when potential customers do a local search for your business?   If you answered yes to either question, you need links citations for your website.  And you’re in luck, because here are 10 great links citations you can get for your website right now.  And don’t worry; if you’re not sure why citations are so vital for local search marketing, I’m going to share that with you too.

What is a Link Citation?

A citation is any reference to your local business, including business name, address, telephone number or other relevant information that may or may not contain an actual link to your website.  That’s right–it doesn’t matter if there’s an actual link to your website or not–just the mention of your business within a local search frame of reference is enough to make it relevant for Google and other search engines to count it as a point toward helping you improve your local search marketing results.  In other words, citations help you get ranked for local search results.

Why You Want Links Citations for Your Website

In his article, Why Citation is the New Link,  David Mihm gives a complete picture of why citations are super relevant to your local business.  It boils down to this: If you want to rank in Google’s local search results, you need to do more than just claim your Google local business account.  And just building more links to your website isn’t necessarily going to help either.  What you need are citations.  From the big names in local directories to small niche directories, you want to add your business information to as many as you can find (or afford).

Where to Get Links Citations

There are many places to get relevant citations for your website to help it rank in the Google 10 pack for local search results.  Here are 10 citations you can get right now.

1. Best of the Web Local
2. Insider Pages
3. Super Pages
4. City Search
5. Hot Frog
6. Yellow Pages
7. Local.com
8. Yelp
9. Match Point
10. Zoom Info

Where to Get More Links Citations

First, look for niche directories where you can list your business.  For example, if you are a florist, you might look at places like this local flower shop directory.  Some get expensive with monthly recurring fees, so start with free ones and if you’re on a budget, choose paid local directories wisely.

Just like you might search your competitors’ backlinks to find linking opportunities, you can search your competitors’ citations to find citation opportunities for your local business.  How do you do this?  Go to http://maps.google.com and search for your competitors by name or category.  Then click on the individual business listing and click on the "Web Pages" tab.  There you’ll see all their citations (see picture below).  Then, go get ‘em!

And if you’re really intent on getting a few links to your website, here are 10 great links you can get in the next 50 minutes. But just remember, they’re not the same as citations…

Microformats are gaining popularity, and if you’re not using them, you should be. Google’s introduction of Rich Snippets in May 2009 is just another indication that microformats will continue to gain popularity. And as more sites make use of this structured content, small businesses can capitalize on the use of microformats to help feed relevant information about their business to other websites by using microformats. 

What Are Microformats?

According to a microformats expert, microformats create structure for "content about people, organizations, companies and places." This is mostly in regard to contact information like name, address, telephone number, and email address. Microformats use class values to specify this information, and this allows spiders to extract meaning from that information. Although it’s a little more work since you have to add these class values to the information, the benefit is that machines like Google’s robots are able to easily extract very specific meaning from your content. For example, the picture below shows the search results for a local restaurant search. The rich snippet (extracted by the Googlebot from various microformat data) is circled in red.

The Benefits of Using Microformats?

There are many benefits of using microformats. The most direct application is for improving local search marketing.  Benefits include:

1. Helps users and spiders discover and parse information about you, and your business or organization
2. Improves local search marketing efforts for local businesses interested in business directory listings in local search engines like Google Local, Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Urban Spoon and others.
3. Improves the visibility of business reviews in relation to user searches for you, and your business or organization
4. Improves the visibility of local events in relation to user searches for you, and your business or organization
5. Contributes to the creation of the semantic web. As more people implement microformats, the more they’ll get used to help machines create relevant structure and meaning from the content and information we provide on websites.

How to Implement Microformats

The best way to implement microformats is to start using them to parse information about yourself on your website. Start with your contact page and create an hcard for your contact information. Next, implement microformats for any reviews or events listed on your website. Then, if you’re really excited about microformats, implement them whenever you mention another person, place, organization, or business on your website.

Don’t worry; if you don’t know much code, there are many microformat tools that can help generate the necessary code; all you have to do is copy and past it into your web page. Here are the specifics.

1. hcard creator – Use hcard format for people, businesses, places, and organizations.
2. hreview creator – Use hreview format for reviews.
3. hcalendar creator – Use hcalendar for events.

The last thing to do is make sure to tell Google you want to be included in its grand microformats experiement. 

Websites and Services Using Microformats

Many websites, social networks and other services are making use of microformats. Here are just a few:

1. Digg utilizes hcard format for profiles.
2. Eventful supports hcalendar for its events and hcard for its venues.
3. Facebook suports hcard for its profiles.
4. Twitter supports hcard and XFN.
5. Google maps supports hcard.
6. Yahoo local supports hcard, hreview and hcalendar.

Convinced yet? Confused? Microformats are just one of the many improvements that can be made to your website to improve your local search marketing.  If you need help implementing this strategy, or just want to discuss your options for local search marketing, please contact us.

Is your business included in local search results?  If you’re a small business owner, you may be so busy building your business in the real world that you haven’t considered the importance of optimizing your website for local search. If you’re one of those business owners, you’re not alone. But it’s also important that you don’t underestimate the power of local search. As Google and Bing continue their quest to deliver relevant results for keyword searches, you and I are seeing more local results for broad searches with local intent. For example, just do a search for chinese food or chinese restaurant and this is what comes up in the #1 position for Google and Bing.

I’m sure you’ve seen listings like these. Do a search for other terms like plumber, dentist, doctor, and florist and you’ll see similar 10-pac results right at the top. What does this mean for you? Well, if you’re a small business owner and you haven’t optimized your website for local search, you’re behind the game. It’s not enough to rank well for keyword searches anymore. Your competitors can now bump you from your top ranking by dominating the local search results. There are many ranking factors involved in local search marketing. But don’t worry, I’m going to share 7 steps you can take to assure your business is included in local search results.

Check your local listings

First things first; let’s check some local listings to see if your small business is already listed, or if it is listed, let’s make sure your business information is accurate. This is a small list of the more important local search engines. Of course, there are lots of other niche local business directories, but we’re not going to focus on those right now. To check your local listings, enter your business name and zip code at these local searches:

1. Google Local 
2. Bing Local 
3. Yahoo Local 
4. Yelp
5. Directory Assistance Plus

7 Steps to Improve Local Search Marketing Results

Depending on how your results turned up for your searches, you’ll either want to add your business listing (if your business didn’t show up at all), or claim your business listing (if it showed up, but information was incorrect).

1. Add your business to the Google local business listings.

If you need some help with this, check out Google’s local business center user guide and ask questions in their support forum for business owners.

2. Add your business to the Bing local listing center.

Need help? Check out Bing’s SEO Guide or ask your questions on their community forum.

3. Add your business to Yahoo local directory.

Bing won’t take over Yahoo’s search results for 2 years, so don’t overlook this one.

4. Sign up for Merchant circle.

When you do, you’ll have access to various tools to promote your local business, including a blog, newsletter, networking with other local businesses, and the ability to add coupons to your local listing.

5. Add your business to Yelp.

Here’s an introduction to Yelp and how it can help your business.

6. Add your business to Localeze business listing.
7. Add your business to the InfoUSA business directory.

Of course, once your small business is included, there’s a lot more that can be done to improve your local search marketing.  Once you’re included, there are multiple factors that can lead your business to inclusion in the 10-pac results on page one. Vertical Measures offers local search marketing services to help assure your website is represented among these, and other, local search engine results.