With attention surrounding geo-location services (like Foursquare, Gowalla, Groupon) and significant enhancements in local business listings in search engines (Google Places, bing). We wanted to focus on creating a “Local” blog post series featuring helpful ways for businesses to garner further visibility online utilizing these offerings as well as what to be aware of when participating. We’ll focus on local business listings and a few free marketing ideas for you to take advantage of. So, let’s begin.

Setting Up Your Local Business Listing on Search Engines
When doing local search it’s best to start with the big three. While Yahoo!’s search results have now been replaced with bing’s search engine results, many things are still in tact – this includes business listings for local search. For the most part all three search engines (SE) ask for the same information for a business.

We’ve compiled a quick list to help you prepare for setting up a local search account for your organization:

Basic Information:
- Business name
- Address
- Telephone number (some SE’s allow multiple phone numbers)
- Toll free number (if applies)
- Web site (some SE’s allow multiple websites)
- Email (some SE’s allow multiple emails)
- Fax

Background Information
There are a good amount of sections that can be filled out; you want to fill in as much information as you can. Google recently made some big enhancement to how local search results from Google Places appears in their search results and it is highly recommended to fill in as much information as possible to help your results. Make sure to put in everything you can think of that represents your company.

This includes:
- Description (Google limit is 200 characters)
- Image (logo or any images, great way to incorporate Flickr if client has images there)
- Video (great way to incorporate YouTube if client has videos there)
- Hours (if apply)
- Payment methods (if apply)
- Brands carried or sold by client. Great way to insert keywords that are specific to your client’s products and or services.
- Specialties. Great way to insert keywords that are specific to your client’s products and or services.
- Slogan or tagline.
- Other requests are for professional associations, languages spoken, parking, and more.

Category Details
There are categories to select that best represent your business. You want to ensure that you select the best choice categories as these may help with your visibility within organic search results. Some of the categories can be hidden and you may have to browse to find what is most appropriate to make sure you aren’t missing any. Some SE’s allow more category entries than others. Try to fill in as many categories as you can, this too will be affected by Google Places search results.

At this point you will want to review all of the choices you have made and all of the information you have entered. Make sure to double and triple check everything as editing in the future may not be as easy as you think. Once you have thoroughly checked all of your information and are happy with your location search entry, proceed to the verification process.

Stay tuned for next week’s post on the details of the verification process and detailed requirements.

This morning I received an email about Google’s update to their social search results, a feature Google has been experimenting visibly with for the last year.

While I was impressed with the technology back then it was really nothing to write home about. To Google’s defense, they have been determined to understand the value of integrating social within the framework of search. I made a short video clip back in January, when the Toyota domino recalls were happening – this is what it looked like nearly a year ago.

Since then, Google has made vast improvements and beneficial enhancements to how they have integrated social into search. It is less intrusive. They show the real-time updates subtly instead of the constant scrolling updates.

If you do choose to click on the recent social updates below the news results, you’ll be taken to a real-time search results update page, a trending timeline and the – pièce de résistance – top links! See video clip below.

Initially, I looked at this page and said, “Okay, this is pretty cool but who cares?” So I took a closer look and came up with a few good ways all of us marketers may be able to take advantage of this new offering from Google:

Trending

• Share Something New: The majority of people who are RTing on Twitter, commenting/sharing on Facebook and other social platforms are most likely saying the same thing over and over and over again. This is your chance to share something new. Join in the banter, but offer a fresh perspective, valuable piece of information or other. Something that out of all 585 comments yours will standout because you are offering a new sound into the noise. Incidentally, at the time when I looked on Wordloo.com this morning to get the top trending search, the most popular item was “Beyonce Pregnant” – just in case you are curious about the title of this post – we thought we would play along in the trend and offer up some new information to be shared (highly irrelevant to the folks that care about Beyonce’s pregnancy, by the way, Beyonce congratulations).
• Profile Audiences: Without going into too much detail on this, clearly the folks commenting on Beyonce being pregnant are not the same folks commenting on Virginia Thomas, but it is a good way to understand what your target audience is most interested in (if you don’t know this already).

Top Links

• Early Bird Gets the Worm: If you can’t be the first to create the news, you can be the first to comment on it, and quite possibly get a link from it. If you can watch (obsessively) for trending topics in your industry, Google will show you who is the most authoritative for that trend – get a comment on there – maybe with your link and you’ve got exposure.
• Identify Authority Sites: If you aren’t the early bird, you may still be able to get the worm. By observing which sites are visible for your target topics, you will discover new opportunities for SEO, such as who to interview or be interviewed by, guest write for and comment on.

These are just a few ways Google’s new social search can benefit you, there are several more.

What is your take on social search results?

In an era when people spend more than half of their waking hours consuming media, the content on your website has never been more important. And likewise, with the vast amount of redundant or otherwise useless information that populates much of the Internet, having a well maintained and well-sourced website has never been more valuable.

Is your site findable?

Content is the key for findable and authoritative websites. It also helps build your brand by injecting both a manageable personality and a point of view into your business.

Regardless of how many keywords you upload to your Adwords account or how much time and money you spend on delivering your ads to prospective customer’s eyes, you’re missing a significant segment of the market if you don’t have keyword-rich, focused and fresh content on your website. Also consider that your “best” ads may not even be showing due to a perceived lack of relevancy to what’s on the destination web page.

What the newspaper industry’s woes have shown us is that the democratization of information is expanding daily. In order to capitalize on this fact, everyone from non-profit organizations to publicly owned companies should be turning their websites into information sources, not simply glorified advertisements or electronic storefronts.

The benefits of content

The first benefit to turning your website into an information source includes increased organic traffic. The more quality information you have on your site, the more there is for browsers to connect with in web searches. One of the best parts of organic traffic is that it’s free, while online advertising can cost a significant amount of money to produce a beneficial ROI. Also, good quality content can produce targeted organic traffic and ROI long after its creation, unlike paid mediums.

Coinciding with your content creation should be an intensive marketing effort to increase your content’s visibility. This includes link building, networking with industry related blogs and news sites, actively participating in social media websites and posting to message boards and forums. Still, first and foremost, regular content production is the key.

Second, you’ll establish your business as a reputable source for the latest news and information about the product or service you provide – preferably before someone else does.

Finally, you’ll show search engines that your site is worthwhile to Internet surfers, which will ultimately increase your website’s credibility and search ranking.

While written content is arguably the most important part of your overall content strategy, multi-media content including videos, graphics, polls and the like, all combine to create a complete content package.

Once you have a content strategy nailed down – maybe you’ve even created an editorial calendar – you need to identify your audience. Who are you writing for? As tempting as it may be, you’re not just writing about your company, product or service. You’re writing for the people you hope to turn into customers. What do they want to know?

With all that in mind, go forth and start producing that content! And remember, the existing information on your site continuously needs to be optimized with updated keyword research and competitive analysis. Keeping your website on the cutting edge of web searches is a never ending process.

We can help you create a viable content and online strategy, give us a buzz.

Image via all-sorts.biz