Local Paid Inclusion is a Google, Yahoo and Bing contracted service and is offered as an approved official program in cooperation with those search engines.

What this means is local businesses that participate can essentially pay for the top local ranking position!

This caused some uproar among the SEO community, and has turned into a big, jumbled, confusing PR disaster.

There was indication from Bruce Clay that a company called Universal Business Listings was involved, but UBL denied this in communications with Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan, who also shares a pair of statements from Google and Bing (respectively):

“We are not working on any program that enables a site to pay to increase ranking in organic search results.”

“Bing has no interest in paid inclusion into the local algo that artificially impacts ranking of algo results…. Microsoft does not have an agreement with UBL today.”

The denial from UBL seems fairly fishy, considering that Search Engine Watch, which first reported on Local Paid Inclusion this week, spoke to them on the phone, and they reportedly said the service was on hold.

LocalPaidInclusion.com, the landing page for the service in question, now redirects to a statement from Bruce Clay Inc on the matter. It says:

Late Monday, we announced the service “Local Paid Inclusion,” which we said gives local merchants higher rankings in the Places and local search results in Google, Yahoo! and Bing. We believed that the service offering was finalized between our backend partner and the aforementioned search engines.

In the meantime, Bruce Clay, Inc. has withdrawn Local Paid Inclusion pending our further research into this matter. And the site LocalPaidInclusion.com has been taken down while this issue is resolved.

Clay himself talked about Local Paid Inclusion in an interview with WebProNews in December.

“There’s a group of people that remember the Yahoo Search Submit Pro, which is a process where you could pay them, and it would get you into the index,” said Clay in the interview. “What seems to be forming is the ability to create a premium, local entity, much like a Places type page,except across the various engines – their own respective ‘Places’ if you will. And that you create a premium account, and that the premium account would allow you to appear at the top of the local results.”

“Now, those premium accounts have additional features,” he continued. “One would be the ability to put in a call tracking type system, where you could actually appear at the top of the local results and have a phone number appear there – and much like pay-per-click, if they click on that phone number or they call that phone number, there would be a fee paid to the search engine. So it’s a fairly similar concept to Search Submit Pro of years gone by. I’m pretty sure we’re going to see that emerge as a significant local resource in 2012. It is in the process, and we’re actually building a product around it, assuming all those pieces come to be in 2012. And I think that it has to be.”

“I think there’s going to be a natural tendency for people to click more in the organic space, and the organic space includes…the Places type results,” he continued. “The local results. And those local results will get a lot of clicks. Or they will get a lot of interest, because a lot more local people are going to be doing searches. There has to be a way to monetize that. And I think that paid inclusion is actually the least intrusive, the most easily embraced, keyword-centric way to be able to do that.”

“The way I envision it working is: there will be a base fee, there’ll probably be a fee added for call tracking…and the search engines are going to share that with a channel,” he said. “In which case you’re going to see a great many people encouraging (as SEOs) their clients to embrace a local paid inclusion program.”

“The earliest adopter, if you can base it on history, will be the Yahoo and Bing environment,” he said at the time. “They’re likely to embrace it, and Google will watch it, and of course invent their own version of it that’s a little bit better in the eyes of Google. Now I think that the program will be somewhat similar across all of them to facilitate the ease of selling it. I don’t think anybody wants to be particularly different from everybody else…”

Based on the statements Sullivan received, it doesn’t sound like the search engines are much interested in this at all.

In the video, Clay then goes on to talk about his company’s other local business service “LocalWare,” which promises: local SEO, custom keyword research, content development, SEO-friendly CMS with “pristine code” to support local organic SEO, optimization of other online avenues such as Google Places, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Yelp, et. and “Bruce Clay’s world-class online Seo training for you and your team.”

WebProNews is communicating with Bruce Clay, and will have more details as they become available.

Looking back at 2011

The turmoil that Clay was referring to was largely because of Google’s Panda update. As WebProNews previously reported, Google rolled out its Panda update in an effort to target low quality sites across the Web. The impact of it, however, was extremely significant. Many people, such as Dani Horowitz of DaniWeb, saw their site drop dramatically and had no idea why.

“We’ve determined, or at least convinced ourselves, that linking, the quality of your inbound link networking, is also part of the quality of your site certainly at a trust level,” said Clay. “Trust scores and components associated with the quality of how your site connects to everybody is part of the factor to determine whether or not you are a site worthy of ranking.”

He went on to say that Panda was “disruptive” but that he thought, in the end, that it had helped Google’s search results.

“Overall, I think that the results have improved,” he said.

Google also released a “Freshness” update not long ago that was intended to index fresher content more quickly. From Clay’s perspective, this update really only impacts news content. Fortunately, most people seem to be hopeful about it.

Another move, however, that Google made that did and will continue to have an impact on the search industry was Google’s move to encrypt search. If you remember, Google said it would begin encrypting logged-in searches that users do by default when they are logged into Google.com. For SEOs, this means that they will not receive referral data from the websites consumers click on from Google search results.

Although Google claimed the move was done to protect user privacy, most SEOs – Clay included – aren’t buying into this theory, mostly because the move did not impact advertisers.

“I really think that the intent there was more to allow Google to see what we are searching for themselves because they are now in the stream,” said Clay. “It’s sort of not a universal privacy issue [because] people don’t know, many times, that it’s an ad.”

While Google announcements have primarily dominated the 2011 recap thus far, the yearly events do go beyond the search giant. For starters, social media is bleeding over much more into search. Clay told us that social media, and especially Twitter, has changed how people find sites.

In other words, social media is becoming a replacement for the browser. Searchers look to their social networks for recommendations and reviews before they visit the brand sites. Clay said that this shift in behavior is still resulting in conversions even though the traffic is down.

Speaking of social and search, Google’s release of its own social network Google+ was another significant move during the year. Clay told us that it doesn’t have a big impact on search at this point, but he suspects it will.

In terms of the other search engines, Clay said that Bing has held its own during the year. Microsoft and Yahoo collectively appear to be growing in search share, but Clay said he thinks the reason is because Ask and AOL have lost some.

Looking ahead to 2012

Going forward into 2012, Clay has several predictions. For starters, he believes that Google Panda will continue. In fact, he said that the image should be changed to a polar bear instead of a panda because it would get meaner and more aggressive.

“Google is in the business of making money,” he said. “Everybody needs to recognize that Google is a money generator.”

For this reason, he believes that Google will also integrate Google+ into search in 2012. A few years ago, Google went from a “one size fits all” approach with search to personalized search results. In order to make these results geared more toward individuals instead of groups of people, Clay explained that Google+ would give the search giant this ability.

“The best way to get your history is to just watch you and, I think, Google+ is that tool,” he said.

“It is entirely within reason for Google, every time you login to Google+, for them to know where you are,” he added.

As far as the other search engines go, Clay told us that Bing has good technology and that it would grow, especially in light of its partnerships with both Facebook and Mozilla.

While some have already written Yahoo out of the search market, Clay said that Yahoo would remain a leader in the space. According to him, it’s out of the spidering business but not the search or algorithm business.

“It’s kind of hard to criticize a company that only did a billion dollars in business,” he pointed out.

In addition, Clay said that local search would continue to grow in 2012. Due to this growth, he thinks the search engines will begin to monetize it through a concept called local paid inclusion. He said it would be similar to Yahoo’s Search Submit Pro and that the companies would pay to get included in the top of the search results.

Clay thinks the premium listing will have a call tracking system associated with it that would work like PPC ads work. For instance, if the number is clicked, the company pays the search engine. Based on past trends, he believes that Bing and Yahoo will offer this service before Google. He said that Google typically watches services from other companies and then develops their own version of it.

Clay said we could expect this element as soon as January and believes so strongly in the concept that Bruce Clay Inc. is already preparing to offer services in this area.

According to Clay’s predictions for 2012, the year looks to be just as interesting as 2011. Do you agree?

What do you think the search industry will hold for 2012? Will it be as “disruptive” as 2011? Please comment.

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It’s become increasingly clear that social interactions with content are in important element in the promotion and visibility of that content. Beyond the simple viral nature of Facebook "likes" and Twitter retweets, they have simply become part of the fabric of the web and discoverability of content, in some cases even more powerful than search. That is why search engines have taken their own interests in these interactions. 

WebProNews recently spoke with search industry vet Bruce Clay, who says, "Likes are the new links." 

"I think that what in general we have seen is that people have gotten so concerned about links as being a way of biasing your search results that in an almost blind way, they’ve been going after quantities of links, and that overtime, the trust score of those links has been dropping, and we’ve been seeing recently top-ranked sites that fall right out of the search results because they have just way too many sites linking to them that are not at all trustworthy," he says. 

"The people that will gladly sell you links on the ‘hi, how many do you want a week?’ basis are just bringing in links to fulfill a contract – not links because they’re the right kind of links," he continues. "Whereas in the social world, the people that like you or share you or review you, they have a tendency to be part of a trusted community, and these are people that you’ve accepted into your community. These are people that you agree are knowledgeable on the things that you share common beliefs, and those kinds of referrals and likes and things like that are far more valuable than somebody in the middle of some city that you’ve never heard of, that you’ve never met that has no idea what you’re doing, linking to you."

Social can be an important indicator of relevancy, and Google knows this, which is why the company recently released its own social-based recommendation engine to tie into local search.

It will be interesting to see if "like buying" becomes a prevalent activity. People will always look for ways to exploit any technology that gets their stuff in front of more people. 

"There’s gonna be new types of spam, like ‘how do I spam likes?’ People are going to start figuring out, ‘ok, I’m going to get a whole bunch of people and we’re going to fight our way into your community," says Clay. "We’re going to work our way in through the holes that are in Facebook, etc. We’re going to start biasing the system that way."

"I think that the PageRank algorithm actually supports testimonial grade links as a vote for you as being worthy," he says. "I think that a more significant signal is when people like you or share or link to you through a social network if they are your community. And I think a community with a matching persona of your user is going to carry a lot more weight in the future. We’re right at the early stage."

It remains to be seen just what Google will be able to do with Facebook data, however, because it just can’t get access to it. Meanwhile Bing has cracked the nut, at least to some extent, through a partnership.

"We’ve all heard how Facebook doesn’t like Google, and how Google’s coming back and talking to Facebook and how Facebook might be talking to Google…well, the thing is, if ‘like’ information (just on a voting system) were somehow integrated into the PageRank algorithm and half of links dropped and was replaced by likes, then I think we’d see that the value of the top sites will no longer be to whoever can buy the most links, but to whoever can earn the most links," says Clay.

"Now, in general, people won’t link to you unless you have quality content," he notes. "That means to me that the on-page SEO is gonna come back…it means that just having somebody write ten thousand articles and publishing them into the network where they’re average quality…isn’t necessarily going to help you, because nobody is particularly going to ‘like’ those kinds of things."

"It really becomes one of doing a few things right and not many things average," he adds. "So we’re going to see a re-focusing of the way search works in the future, and I think that’s a big item."

Clay concludes, "Likes are…one year from now, or six months even…I think that we’re going to see that likes and referrals and recommendations have started to be, if not already are a major, major part of all the ranking algorithms, and there’s going to be a general shift towards improving quality of sites, not improving size of sites."

Do you think classic organic search is losing importance? Share your thoughts.

Local Rises to the Top

WebProNews spoke with well-known SEO industry analyst Bruce Clay of Bruce Clay Inc. at PubCon about search trends and where the search industry is headed. Local is only one facet of this, but it’s a big facet.  "Certainly the enhancements have been gradual…now, anybody that has a local result, the first organic link is down below the fold," says Clay. "I never expected that to happen…the organic links, they’re gone. For the last four or five months, I’ve been saying that the new page one in the search results is really positions one, two, and three. That is page one. And I think Google agrees."

"If you look at some of the results, our benchmarks have shown that commonly, there will be seven organic results on the first page, and sometimes as few as four results that are organic on the first page of the Google results set – right now," he says. "So does Google owe any loyalty to what is traditional organic? Of course not. Now, the argument I would say for Google, is that if they’re gonna throw up some local results, they’re gonna argue that those are organic, and that they’re more targeted to location, and therefore that they’re more relevant to the normal organic results, in which case they’re carrying forward with organic results. It’s just that they’re not organic like anybody in the SEO space has ever thought of before."

So SEOs, webmasters and businesses really have to consider how the SEO game has changed in this way. You can’t expect people to go past the first page of results. It happens, but I’m guessing it happens less and less as people adjust their queries to find what they’re looking for when the results don’t provide it. The addition of Google Instant has only fueled this.

Cracking the Local Code

"It [local] has its own algorithm," says Clay. "It’s based on certain kinds of voting systems. We’ve been able to effectively get people into the seven-pack almost all the time. The difference is that the placement within the seven pack hasn’t been deciphered yet. It seems to be random. It is to some degree an accuracy of data factor, and to some degree it’s a review factor. So both of those will play."

"I think that 30% (I think is the number right now) of all results show some sort of local flavor," Clay continues. "What we’re seeing is not so much that 30% have maps, but that the actual body of the search results change to have local sites intermixed. So if you look at a set of results and find positions one through ten, they’re all laid out. If I change my location (in the column, you can change where you’re at)…if I change it from California to New York, I get an entirely different set."

"I noticed just going from my office in California to Las Vegas I got different results, even for terms like ‘search engine optimization’ which is not a shopping term per se, I had a different sequence in the top ten," he explains. "So clearly Google is using geo-location of the searcher to bias the search results. That’s happening in almost everything I see."

The breadth of terms that Google thinks users want local results for seems to be expanding, or at least has expanded from years past. Google has an opportunity to increase its revenue significantly because of this, the way Clay sees it. 

"We’re also seeing that local’s showing up more for short terms like one-word phrases like ‘shoes’," Clay points out. "You search for ‘shoes,’ you get a map. That’s just the way it is. And you search for ‘tools’ and you get a map. And things that used to just be ‘what is it?’ are no longer ‘what is it?’. They’re considered to be…if you’re looking for shoes, you’re obviously looking for a shoe store, and they’re sort of assuming that as they go. That kind of a behavior when you see it in search results is really what we’re facing."

Google’s Motivation? 

"We’re facing a general shift towards local results, and Google is clearly motivated," he adds. "You would think, using shoes as an example, that there are only so many people that can bid on the word shoes. It’s a national term. If I go local, I have a hundred thousand different opportunities to sell shoes. Every region can have their own bidding on shoes, and people can make money and bid…it’s like local phone books. And it is. And everybody can participate and bid and get on the web."

"And if I do geo-targeted then the return-on-investment’s gonna go up," he continues. "As I make more money, I’m more willing to spend more on my pay-per-click. So on a per-click basis, Google has an opportunity to make 50% more doing nothing more than allowing it to be targeted by location. So Google, perhaps at a greed level or a business level or a democratic level is actually able to make more money the more they promote it."

What’s good for Google is also good for users though. The fact of the matter is that location does matter a lot, when you’re talking about relevancy. It’s one of many factors, much like social (which we’ll no doubt see a great deal of emphasis from Google on as well, going forward) that caters to the individuals searcher, and as location tracking is becoming the norm, these results can get pretty fine-tuned to where the user is at any given time. 

Moving Forward

"I think that local is here to stay," says Clay. "I think it’s big, and I think you either play in the local space and either figure out how to get into the seven-pack or you’re not gonna get the clicks, even if you’re number one."

While there is no question that SEOs and marketers are going to have to continue to adapt to this ever-changing landscape, it may actually mean great things for people working on the web including SEOs, but also designers, developers, etc. 

"It turns out that 92% of all businesses in the United States – serve a 50 mile radius from where they’re physically located, and that hardly any of these…are on the Internet," says Clay. "That means, especially when you couple it with the emphasis of Google to start doing local kinds of results, that means we’re going to see a massive influx of websites. Brand new websites are going to enter…they’re going to star showing up, they’re going to start ranking, they’re going to start competing. These are sites that have never been here before."

"There’s going to be a multitude of web designers now getting involved, a lot of SEOs or wannabe SEOs are going to be getting involved," he adds. "We’re going to see a lot of people wanting a quick hit – ‘Hi, I built my site, how come nobody’s beating my door down?’ There’s going to be a little bit of a two steps back approach to SEOs – a bunch of people ripping us off. There may be some attempts at spam, although I think Google’s going to be fighting that."

There will likely be new kinds of spam, as he suggests. 

Read this for more interesting commentary from Clay regarding the search market in general. 

Do you think this shift towards local is a good thing for Google? For users? Tell us what you think.

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Google has been dominating the search market for years. Simply put, if you ask most people to search for something on the web, their first instinct is to go to Google. More and more people might be getting reprogrammed to go to Bing, however. The "decision engine" still has a ways to go before it reaches Google-like numbers, but it’s come a long way since its launch last year. The search market has also lost an old player and gained a new one. 

Do you think Google is in any danger of losing a significant amount of search market share? Tell us what you think. 

A Shift to Bing?

"I think that we’re going to see a shift to Bing," predicts Clay. "Understand that this is a very complex dynamic. The market share, (if you’re going to use that as a measurement) for Google is holding steady. The market share for social is where all the play is. Even YouTube is now the second largest search engine (above Microsoft). We’ve seen the Bing and Yahoo numbers switch pretty aggressively. So now we’re seeing that Bing has a much larger market share than Yahoo."

"Now if the results are substantially similar between Bing and Yahoo…I think that market share comes out to approximately 30%," adds Clay. "At 30%…yeah, it’s a power. I think Google, for many years, was quite happy to allow Bing and Yahoo and Ask and others to fight it out, because it was a divide and conquer kind of a thing. You divide your competition into smaller market segments, they don’t have the power to compete. I think that with a 30% market share going to Yahoo, it think that it has got some power to compete."

Add the new Windows Phone 7 operating system to the mix, and things get quite interesting. Also consider that Windows Phone is already getting things that Android is unable to get at this point – major things like Netflix. Last week, Netflix announced that because a "lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism" for Android, it has been unable get its service on the operating system (though it intends to get the service on some models next year). That could be the difference between choosing an Android device or a new "shiny object" like the Windows Phones for a lot of users in the meantime, and with Bing as the default search, that could mean some Bing converts. 

Clay compares the evolving search market to the browser market. "In the beginning, there was Netscape, and it was the browser, says Clay. "Then it was IE, and it was the browser. Then there was, ‘what is it? Firefox? A new browser?’ And now there’s Chrome…I think things shift, and I think that the leader is subject to change if they do things that the public doesn’t like."

"Obviously a lot of the things that Google’s been working on and implementing, I think have been confusing to a great extent to the end user," he adds. "There’s way too much now on a page. I think Google’s gotta figure out what is gonna work and what is not gonna work, and take it off or Bing is gonna have an excellent opportunity to come in with the ‘keep it simple’ approach, and they’re going to win the hearts of the novice searcher. And let’s face it: the web is still growing."

I personally wonder how common the "novice searcher" is at this point. Kids are being brought up with search these days. Search isn’t new anymore. That’s not to say there aren’t still some new to the web, but  there are far less people just getting into searching the web. It’s become a way of life. And it’s still essentially just typing queries into a box, at least if you’ve gotten as far as going to Google to perform a search.

In some ways, one could argue that Google’s made searching easier by adding visible filtering options to the column, and even giving results before the user is even finished typing. I think people are getting more proficient at searching. How often do you have to go past the first page of search results to find what you’re looking for? It happens, but probably not nearly as much as it used to. You’re probably more apt to refine your query.  

Google will always try to improve though. "Google has a lot of engineers and they have a lot of users, and there’s a lot of feedback and interaction, and Google has the ability to figure out what works and what doesn’t work," notes Clay. 

Out with the Old

The search market recently lost another "major player" (besides Yahoo serving Bing results). Ask announced that it was pulling out of search to focus on Q&A. That’s one less competitor for Bing. 

"A lot of people, including a lot of the people who work for me, really like Ask," says Clay. "Ask had done a lot of very, very creative items. They had changed the format. They had done blended search…actually they were all set to announce blended search, and Google ran up and said, ‘oh hi…Universal.’, the day before blended was supposed to come out."

"The general feeling I have about it is that they didn’t make an impact on the market," he continues. "And over the last three years, their market share has been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. They haven’t been moving forward as a search engine. So, clearly if you keep doing the same thing that’s failing over and over and over again, then you’re going to fail. So they’re obviously having to go in a different direction."

The market has been whittled down gradually over the years, and it’s probably barely been noticed by most people. "Pulling out as a major search engine is nothing unique," notes Clay. "In the beginning, we had our search engine relationship chart. It had like twenty-some bubbles on it. Now there’s like eight. You know, a lot of engines have been consumed or went away, so I think Ask just moving out is not a big deal. It may actually cater more as a supplemental platform than a primary platform…I think it will be around. It just won’t be the same."

The New Kid

While the market may have lost a well-known player, it has also gained some new blood. Rich Skrenta calls his new search engine, Blekko, the "third search engine" behind Google and Bing/Yahoo. "Google and Bing really is the competition," Skrenta told WebProNews. "All the rest are folded or gone away." 

"I don’t think it’s necessarily the ‘third search engine’," says Clay. "I think that they’ve done some things rather in a smart way. One of the things that you’re going to have to know is if you want the SEO industry and the webmasters and the people that are able to influence customers by saying ‘Hi, you have to rank in this search engine’,  that search engine has to communicate back to that community, and I think a lot of what they’ve done is very smart." 

"They’ve provided a lot of statistics, they’ve provided a lot of ways of looking at traffic, of looking at your site…I think a search engine that embraces how to get ranked in that search engine is going to find more people willing to get ranked in that search engine," he says.

Finding a niche audience in SEO might be Blekko’s destiny however – more of a useful tool than a mainstream search engine. Time will tell, but that’s the general feeling I’m getting. Clay seems to have a similar view.  

"I think that the kind of tools that they have are great. I think people will use it," says Clay. "I think we’re gonna use it. You’d be foolish to ignore them. I just don’t know that a person that is a novice searcher is going to particularly know to go there…There’s gotta be something that they’re able to do…maybe their approach to keep it simple is gonna work or not. Are they going to have more relevant results? That I haven’t really seen. Is it going to be a player? I think that what we ought to do is just give it six months and see what they’re doing. It certainly could become another Ask – great, great technology, but nobody knows to go there."

We’ll see. I think in the meantime, Google is more worried about Bing (not to mention Facebook and Apple).

Which search engine do you prefer: Google, Yahoo, Bing, or Blekko? Something else? Let us know. 

At the event, WebProNews talked to Google’s Matt Cutts about it. Talking about how Caffeine affects webmasters, he compared it to having a limo waiting to pick you up at the airport, as opposed to having to catch a bus (the system before Caffeine). As much as Matt’s commentary is generally valued throughout the industry, it’s always good to hear commentary from people outside the company as well.

WebProNews has interviewed Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. a number of times at various conferences, and he always has a lot of interesting things to say about the search industry. Hear what he has to say about Caffeine among other plenty of other things in the following interview:

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It’s been over a week since the Caffeine announcement was made. Have you noticed your content getting indexed faster? Comment here.

At SMX West last week, WebProNews sat down with Bruce Clay of Internet Marketing firm Bruce Clay, Inc. who made some interesting points about understanding searcher behavior, intent-based search, and how that should affect keyword research.

Note: We talked to Bruce about quite a few search-related topics, but this subject is focused on more toward the end of the video (about 20 minutes in).

Clay talks about Google delivering more personalization in search results, taking into consideration things like how prior queries influence future queries. "Ranking is going to be less of a measurement," he says. "We’re going to be focused on more the traffic."

"When I decide I’m selling a hammer, I have to actively go out of my way not to have certain things appear in my site, because the search engines could be confused about what I’m talking about….I don’t mean the Armand Hammer Art Museum at UCLA. I don’t mean a bowling ball…you know, the things that show up for hammer are all over the board," says Clay.

"One of the things that I think is important, and that we’ve been working on is how do we actually do keyword research without knowing the behavioral aspects our personas that are actually going for our product? You have to understand personas now a little bit better – what kinds of things are they likely to search on, in sequence – before they type in hammer…so if they’re on an arts and crafts site, and then they type in hammer, I ought to understand that behavior in sequence, so that I can better do my keyword research and determine how I’m gonna put the words on my page. I don’t see a lot of people even thinking that way."

Personalized search is nothing new. Google’s been personalizing search results for some time, based on various indicators, and it appears that Google is looking for more ways to deliver users a personalized experience (whether they want that or not).

Between personalized search and other sources of information infiltrating search results pages, traditional SEO is becoming harder to accomplish, and Bruce says, even ineffective. That’s why it may become increasingly important to focus on relevant elements of the SERP for queries you hope to be found for.

There is a good discussion taking place in our WebProWorld forum on the topic of local search. If you have any insight, you can contribute there or comment on this article for other WebProNews readers to see.

There are a lot of variables to consider when mapping out (no pun intended) your local search marketing efforts. Jeff Howard at Search Engine Guide has a very informative piece about such variables that search engines, and Google specifically employ when returning local search results to users.

"They have variables such as size of the map, and definition of a region’s center that combine with trust, a citation, or sometimes what I call ‘sureness factors’ to determine what businesses should be recommended," he says. More specifically, the variables Howard is talking about are:

1. The size of the area as defined by the keyword search, or map space being viewed.

2. Google’s sureness that in fact there is a business at the listed address doing what it says.

3. How Google defines the region’s center, either by keyword or map parameters like zoom level.

Howard goes into some quite interesting examples of the variables at work.

It’s not just about how the search engines define local results though. Businesses should also take into account how users/customers define them. Your business may be so many miles away from a user’s location, but other variables can factor into this as well. Neighborhoods may matter to users. Obstacles like rivers, for example, may matter. Maponics CEO Darrin Clement made some good points on this subject in a recent interview with WebProNews:

As it stands right now, there are a number of measures businesses can take to help users find them in local search. Howard offers the following tips to let Google and other mapping search engines know where you’re located:

- Have your address listed with major data providers.
- Claim your listing at the local business center.
- Have reviews either at Google or elsewhere.
- List your business in the proper categories once it’s been claimed.

Search specialist Bruce Clay recently shared some further local search tips in another WebProNews interview (below). One particularly important tip he shared involved getting local people to link to your content. It helps if you have content that is actually localized.

Bruce also aimed to debunk some local SEO myths in that interview, and one of those is that local SEO is cheaper than SEO on a broader scale. He basically noted that just because a site’s target audience is smaller, SEO is still SEO, and essentially the same work is involved when it comes to fixing a site and optimizing it. That’s just something to keep in mind.

That said, SEO may still be SEO when it comes to the effort that goes into it, but just because your site is optimized well for regular search, does not mean that your local search presence should take a back seat. Even if your site ranks well organically, Google may be pushing it further down the page, simply because of the search engine’s use of Universal search, which for many queries that yield local results, will simply return a set of local results, which are often near the top of the listings. This is pulled from a separate index. This topic was discussed in a quite interesting interview we had with Brian Combs, who founded local SEO firm ionadas local.

The new redesign of search results pages that Google has been testing could have important implications for local search. As some have pointed out, the interface involved with this redesign alters the presentation of local universal results. It only shows five results as opposed to the seven that Google currently shows.

"In the new UI, the map is now wider, the local listings are shown below the Map and an obvious pin to a Map centric view is visible along the left menu," notes local search blogger Mike Blumenthal. "In an of itself, the change means more SEO competition for fewer spots. Whether the change will drive more people into Maps is unclear as highlighted Map pin is offset by fewer links into Maps."

He also provides an interesting look at what this possible new interface could mean in connection with Google’s local listing ads for businesses that the company is also testing.

Doing well in local search means much more than simply having a listing in Google Maps. Local search is a competitive and increasingly critical space of the web that local businesses need to take seriously. Take into account the rise of the mobile web, which is only going to greatly increase in consumer use, and local plays that much more of a role in getting customers to your business.

How much emphasis do you place on your local search marketing efforts? Are you seeing the benefits? Discuss here.

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More WebProNews Videos

Things Clay mentions as good ways to keep up with search industry changes include:

- Training
- Attending Conferences
- Reading the right blogs
- Following Matt Cutts and reading all the stuff he’s ever written
- Paying attention to the videos

"If you listen to experts and follow experts’ advice, you’re probably going to do much better than if you read a forum, and it’s misleading, and you think you understand, but don’t quite," he says.

Among other things, Clay talks about some elements a lot of SEOs are missing, and should be paying attention to. Watch the above clip.

Ask has an interesting blog post up interpreting this data, and the gist of it is summed up with this paragraph from it:

In a nutshell, users are now expecting search engines to not just index the Internet, they are expecting search engines to process the data on the Internet. Searchers don’t consider their query to be just keywords; they are starting to expect that the search engine will understand the intent of the query better. Expressing a query with intent requires more words, and the user’s investment of more words means that his or her expectations on the search engine are higher. We are clearly experiencing a transition in the way that people are using the Internet.

Intent-based search. We’ve been hearing the phrase dropped more and more. In a popular WebProNews interview with Bruce Clay, late last year, he spoke of where search was headed and a good deal of that had to do with personalized search. The SearchWiki side of that has gotten the most attention in this area, but he had some things to say about intent-based search as well.

He talked about Google looking up your IP and revising results based on it while making assumptions about the intent of your search. This would have an affect on SEO, obviously. "The page that ranks for a shopping query is an entirely different architecture than the page that ranks for a research query," said Clay.

It’s a topic SEOBook author Aaron Wall and I discussed recently as well. Aaron noted that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a recent conference call, "Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that [we] are going to roll out in the next little while."

Get Him to the Greek (2010)
Fair Game (2010)
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)
The Ghost Writer (2010)
Iron Man 2 (2010)
The Last Airbender (2010)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I (2010)
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)
Robin Hood (2010)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
The A-Team (2010)
The Spy Next Door (2010)
The idea of relevancy based on intent is a fantastic one, but chances are the search engines are still going to have to rely on the content that users create to increase search relevancy, at least in this manner. Google still has "a long way to go to get where they want to be with relevancy, but some of the issue of search is simply creating the incentive to make people want to create the content that really answers search queries well in a good format," Wall told WebProNews.

"Sometimes I see Matt Cutts post great how to posts about how to do different things in Ubuntu," he continued. "I believe he does that in part to feed answers into the search engine, especially if/when it did not provide an answer that was as good as he would like."

What is another great way to feed answers into a search engine? Keith Hogan, VP, Technology at Ask offers a piece of pretty sound advice for online businesses: "Web business should take notice of Question/Answering sites that have been built and SEO’d to fill the search engine rankings for these types of user questions (e.g. Q&A aggregators like WikiAnswers, AnswerBag, and Yahoo Answers). While this content is generally very relevant, content directly from companies could be more authoritative. Web businesses may benefit by creating FAQ content that is targeted at answering real user questions about their products."

FAQs as relevant results to intent-based searches about what your business offers. What a concept. And considering the emphasis Google seems to be putting on brand (although Matt Cutts says it’s not so much about brand exactly), it sounds like a can’t-miss.

As Mike McDonald of WebProNews suggested around New Year’s, look for more intent-based stuff coming from Microsoft as well, as it rebrands its search engine. That is what the company’s acquisition of Powerset was all about.

In concluding, let me work in two clichéd (but true) statements. Content is king and the " Internet is a cesspool." If only the entire world could work together to build quality content and clean it up, the web (or at least Google’s search results) would be a more relevant place. So which one will happen first, that or world peace?