Don’t want to hire a pro to get yourself ranked in the Google Local listings? With some time, elbow grease, and a willingness to learn, it’s certainly possible—like most things nowadays, all the information is on the web for your digestive pleasure.

A great place to start is here: David Mihm’s annual local results search engine factors for 2010. For the last several years, Mr. Mihm has put out this very helpful guide on what factors search engines like Google use to determine who comes up on those increasingly important listings at the top of most local search results. The data is aggregated from experts in the field and the result is a very comprehensive view of what works and what hurts.

If I had to sum it up into a few key points it would be these:

1. Claim your local business listing on Google.

2. Don’t cheat! Don’t put things like your city name or specialty in places it doesn’t belong.  Put things where they’re supposed to go.  Your business name should be nothing other than what you go by, not “John Adams, Dentist In Schaumburg, Specializing In Cosmetics”

3. Make your listing complete and user friendly. Put up pictures, and preferably video. (See here for why I love videos…)

4. List yourself everywhere you possibly can.  For instance, sign up and create an account on Yelp and many similar sites like it.

My summary is a 30,000 foot view and the original article goes into more detail, so if you want to DIY your own local search results, check it out.  I will also be going into more detail on some of the more intricate points above in future posts.

Have you had a thought along these lines: “Wow, if I could have seen the internet boom coming in 1994, I would be a billionaire!”   While I can’t promise you private islands or tuxedo’d butlers, I can help point you in the direction of growing your business far and away faster than your competition.

While the internet has been around for seemingly ages, only recently have people started turning to it to make their purchasing decisions, from where to eat lunch, to who cleans their teeth, to where to buy a house. Potential customers trust online reviews of your business second only to word-of-mouth references and more than they trust your advertising. They go to the web to decide between you and the 50 other Crystal Lake Dentists. And they’re doing so in droves.

Local Business’s Response? In 2009, less than half of local-based small businesses had a website. Many have no clue as to the importance of online reviews. And far far far fewer are reaching out to their customers via social media.

This is the opportunity that has presented itself today.  In 5 years, it will be painfully obvious that those that adapted to the changing landscape of how local businesses get found will have done very well for themselves. They will have seized this opportunity to build a lot of trust with their customers and will have taken a big chunk of the marketshare that was up for grabs.

In the coming posts, I will do my best to share with you the facets of this opportunity.  In the mean time, there’s a lot you can do to impact your online foot print, with not a lot of time or money.

I had a client ask me this interesting question the other day, and although I had a (admittedly biased) hunch, I did not have any real data to back up what I thought to be the answer.

Could it still be worth a web advertisement with one of the paper-based operations like the Yellow Pages or Dex, even if their big yellow books are mostly headed toward recycling bins?  (There is a fresh one in mine, right now…)

Data shows that droves are moving online to research their buying decisions, but where exactly are they going? Are they just simply typing what they need into their favorite search engine? Or is “Yellow Pages” so ingrained in their minds that YellowPages.com is the first place they go?

Let Us See Some Graphs.

I could not find any research that had already been done on the subject, so I looked for my own. Google Trends is a tool that allows users to compare the popularity of any number of search terms graphically over time.

I compared Maps.Google.Com to YellowPages.com.  These are the results:

(Maps.Google.Com : red) (YellowPages.com blue)

Two things stuck out to me: Google Maps got (and is getting) huge. And although not as steep, we can also see a slow decline in searches on YellowPages.com.

(As a side note: I didn’t include Dex because the line was too small by comparison.  Picture a third bumpy line along the bottom of the graph.)

What Does It Mean?

Well, to say that we can write off YellowPages.com entirely would be hasty. However, if it is on the decline, there may be a point in the future when it no longer has any significant relevancy.

Now, even though YellowPages.com appears to be on a downward trend, that doesn’t mean that it does not (and will not) have significant traffic well into the short-term future. If the advertising is cheap enough, it just might be worth it.

To find out more, I put in a call to Yellow Pages customer service, and spoke to a friendly customer service rep. He told me that there are a variety of options YP offers for online-only advertising, ranging from about $150-$500/month, depending on the prominence of the ads and the area.

At a conservative $200/month, that’s $2,400/year. Is it worth it? Well, it is hard to draw a conclusion without knowing how much the resulting increase in business is worth to your company.

However, from the chart we can see that Google Maps gets roughly double the traffic of YellowPages.com. Compound this observation with the clear trends for each site, plus the added fact that Google.com is displaying its preference for Google Maps entries by including them at the top of the results for any local search (an example of a local search is “Elgin, IL Dentist”). Additionally, there are multiple search engines returning local results, but only one Yellow Pages. For the expected return from advertising on YellowPages.com to be worth it, getting a high and relevant result in Google Maps and other local search engines better be pretty darn expensive.

Just Call Me Paul Harvey…Not.

I didn’t even see this pitch coming! But, getting a prominent spot in Google Maps is not expensive compared to working with Yellow Pages online. (Think about it: they are a large and old institution with executives, salespeople, and HR people to pay, and then they need to make a profit on top of that.) No doubt that there is room for both online advertising and local search optimization, but as the graph shows: times, they are a changing.

Give us a call to find out more.

-Craig