Google made two announcements this week that, while not being targeted toward small business owners (yet?), essentially serve as a dangling carrot for future local search visibility. One is about better visibility on Google Maps; the other is about expanding the availability of product inventory listings in Google’s search results. So, whether you’re a service-based or a product-based small business, these are future opportunities worth watching. Continued

It’s been a week … well, nine days to be exact … since the launch of Facebook Places.

Are you using it? Do you know anyone who is?

In many cases, the survival of a new product, tool, web site, or whatever, depends on how much adoption comes from the early adopter crowd: tech lovers, web geeks, social media fanatics, and so forth. (Twitter is only recently gaining in general adoption because the early adopters have stuck with it for years despite so-called competition from the likes of Pownce, Plurk, and many others.) But, in my experience, the typical early adopters aren’t bothering with Facebook Places. In fact, neither are a lot of regular users. Continued

One of the most common tactics in link building is to look for sites that link to your competitors and try to get the same sites to link to you. The effectiveness of this varies from site to site and industry to industry, but it’s one of the things you do early on when building links.

In local SEO, if citations are the equivalent of links, how about doing the same thing? How about looking for your competitor’s citations and trying to get the same ones? Continued

Nice move on Google’s part today to give local business owners a way to respond to reviews that users write on the business’ Place Page. That solves a pretty common frustration that I’ve heard from business owners over the years — namely, that reviewers can say whatever they want and the business owner doesn’t have an easy way to respond.

But a few words of caution are still in order, I think. Continued

When it comes to local search optimization and, in particular, the Google Maps algorithm, you’re likely to get 10 different answers if you ask 10 local SEOs, What are the most important local search ranking factors? The answer to that question, like just about every other SEO question, is, It depends. It depends on your location, the industry you’re in, the keywords you’re targeting, and many other things. Local SEO is harder than many SEOs think.

This is an updated version of a post that I first wrote on this blog in February, 2007. It represents a summary of my contributions to David Mihm’s 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, which includes the thoughts of a couple dozen local search marketers. I highly recommend reading that for wider perspectives on the issues I discuss below. Continued

InfoUSA has long been one of the most important places for a local business to have an accurate business listing. The major search engines and other important local sites/directories rely on its business data. And InfoUSA has always had a pretty bare-bones online form for small businesses to use when adding a business listing.

But last week (while I was busy at GetListed.org Local U in Cleveland), InfoUSA did a little rebranding and launched a new and much more substantial business information management service for local businesses. They’re calling it Express Update USA and it’s now under the Infogroup name. Continued

Good news for local business owners in the UK: GetListed.org has launched a beta version specifically for the UK market. GetListed.org is a terrific tool that helps small business owners find and claim their listings on the primary local search engines. Continued

In light of last week’s post about local SEO, this is pretty much what you call perfect timing: David Mihm has just published the 2010 edition of the

Local Search Ranking Factors

This year, 34 local search marketers, small business owners, web developers, etc., have contributed thoughts and opinions on what matters most when it comes to ranking in the Google 7-pack, Yahoo’s local business listings, and Bing’s local business listings. Here’s a quick look at what the survey shows are the most positive factors that help improve rankings: Continued