Unlike messy search engines that force you to spend time looking though pages of results for one piece of information, WhitePages may become your new solution. When I found out the online directory just announced its new version of WhitePages Business Search, I was immediately interested and wanted to know more. After all, features include people search, reverse phone and address lookup and a store locator, all of which are available for mobile.

After I got over the initial shock of finding my own name and address on the “People” tab of the site, I decided to look for an actual business. I searched for a few of my favorite places around Denver and even downloaded the free app on my Droid. In my short time using both the app and site, this is what I thought…

Pros:
•Good if you know exactly what you’re looking for and just want to get a phone number or address.
•You can text the listing to a phone if a friend doesn’t have access to mobile web both from the site and the app. Plus, you can choose to add the listing to your contacts if you need it.
•The Store Locator can be useful especially when you’re searching for larger brand names.

Cons:
•Limited content. It doesn’t really help if you want more details on services provided or lots of menu options. However, if you know a little about local advertising and have already provided detailed content on sites like SuperPages or YellowPages, some of that content is pulled into WhitePages if you search by keyword or category.
•No review space. Can’t read ‘em, can’t write ‘em.

Suggestions for Users:
Try it out. See what you like. If anything, you can take a break from stalking people on Facebook and find out where they live instead.

Google is taking their street view a step further by now going inside actual businesses. Google has hired professional photographers in select cities to go into businesses and take photos inside the location that will later be displayed on that businesses Google Places page. Businesses can apply for a photo shoot using this form: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlemapsbusinessphotos/

These photo shoots will take about an hour and will be minimally disruptive for most types of businesses and like most things Google, it’s free! Although this service is roughly a month old, I haven’t heard much response until a local Denver book store posted a blog sharing their experience. You can read a summary of the visit here including why they think Google selected them for the initial run: http://bit.ly/bMo42V

Out of curiosity, I checked their Google places page to see if anything might be unique to warrant such special treatment and was surprised to find that they had not even claimed their listing yet. Even more surprising or not, depending on how familiar you are with Google Maps, the URL is directing to a book store in Washington DC with a similar name.

With Google investing more and more time and money in an effort to get small business owners to take hold of their listings, it’s unbelievable that this store owner wouldn’t be in the know on how to claim their own listing. This is especially interesting considering Google’s visit, but for whatever reason this just serves as another example to the mess Google is trying to clean up.

To Capitol Hill Books: If you find this blog post, please reply and I’ll personally help you claim your listing for free and set up you with exposure on other search engines as well.

Why isn’t my business showing up on a local search? I have all the content I need and it still   isn’t   showing up!  If you find yourself asking this question, I would suggest taking a look at all the reviews written on your profile.  Do you have any reviews?  The truth is, reviews help to increase or decrease your location position and are one of the most important factors in moving you up or down.

The tricky part however, is getting your customers to actually write them.  How do you do that?  I recently found an article that gave some great suggestions to motivate your customer.  Below is my take on these suggestions:

Incorporate Links –Search engines make it easy for customers to write reviews.  Let your customers know that it’s easy as making one extra click to write one.  Every location profile has its own link to write a review and sites like Google and Yahoo! pull reviews from other engines. This makes it easy for a customer to write only one review and still have it show up on other sites.

Use your mailing list – You already know who your customers are.  They’ve trusted you with their information, now it’s time for you to trust them and their opinions about your business.  When you send promotions out to them, let them know that you care what they have to say.  No matter what, the reviews will help the listing position, even if it’s negative.

Follow up after order confirmation – After doing business with your customers, make sure to provide adequate information, letting them know exactly where they can go to rave about your services.  They’ll be sure to tell others of your service and products.

Offer an incentive –$5 off your next purchase or more?  Automatically entered into a drawing? Getting something extra in return will not only convince the customer to write a review, but will also convince them to return.

Keep them coming back – The incentive alone is a great way to get them back in the door.  If they know they can continually get these incentives, why not come back again?

Not only do the reviews give more content to your listing, but informs your customer on the product they want and why your location is the place to get it. Encourage your customers to do it as often as possible, as you will continue to offer great service as often as possible.

Great news coming out of Google for small businesses. Over the past few years a large number of Google reseller’s have flooded the market, offering to manage a small businesses marketing on Google and others and providing traffic and leads to the small business. It is a great concept but as we’ve monitored these folks and have worked with clients leaving them the big issue has always been the amount of mark up they put on the ad spend.

Look I understand why they’ve needed to do this, as we looked at the local space years ago we realized we couldn’t manage the small local business while charging our normal rates. Trying to come up with unique keywords, ad copy, and optimization on a $100 monthly spend was never going to be profitable. I’ve always maintained that the local business should take a few days or a weekend and really learn Google and make that part of their business practices, but I digress.

Apparently Google is not happy with the large markups from these resellers and are revamping the programs as we speak. For a more detailed account: ClickZ I think this comment does a great job of summing up the current issues:

“It’s hard to create $1,000 worth of value in the client’s mind for $400,” Bean said, while addressing the mark-ups that some resellers put on SMBs. “In [Google's] mind, at least their clients will know where their dollars are going… I think in our industry, there’s not a lot of transparency with the small-business clients. Google’s been pushing for more transparency.”

Bottom line: this is a good thing for small businesses and we will report back when we hear more from Google.

Google Maps is in the process of rolling out a solution for businesses that don’t want a street address attached to their listings, namely home-based businesses or those that offer a service to a large geographic area.

When you log into Google’s Local Business Center, you can click on a tab called “Service Areas and Location Settings,” where you can specify if you want your address to appear in Maps results. This is great for people that run a business from their home; previously, if they didn’t want their home address displaying, they didn’t have a map listing or had to find a (somewhat questionable) workaround.

Additionally, service-based businesses can select either “Distance from one location” or “List of areas served” to display their location. Google hasn’t made an official announcement yet and has not indicated if all LBC users can take advantage of the service. Visit Search Engine Land for more info.

Through the local business center (LBC), Google allows business owners to update their location and store details that display in the search results. When editing or creating this profile, it’s suggested you include as much information as possible, which is proven to help with rankings. Although name, phone number, and address are important, a business should go well beyond and create a profile with a personal touch. Some of that customization can be done with images, video and specific content about that location.

The tip of the week is: how to add social media and other custom related links to your maps places page and have those hyper link. While it’s not entirely obvious in the LBC interface, Google does allow quite a bit of customization to these listings. In the ‘additional details’ section, simply add the web site in the left column and the URL with the http:// in the right column. This ensures the link will hyper link in the actual live result.

We had our Google Ad Words reps in our offices last week for their ‘state of the search industry’ address, which is always interesting and helpful. Google’s client/agency support has always been miles ahead of Yahoo and MSN, but that’s a topic for another day. In Google’s presentation they had a slide illustrating the increase in long tail keyword usage and the huge decrease in one to two word keywords. At first I didn’t think anything of it as it makes sense and is something we have known from our own data for years, but then I remembered a blog I had read the night before from Matt McGee that describes the exact opposite.

In Matt’s blog he presents data from Experian/Hitwise which indicates that one word keywords have actually increased by 17% in 2009. It’s important to point out that the Hitwise data represents all search engines, while Google’s is specific to their results. So what might have caused a rise in one word keywords as of late?

I would first look to how the search result pages have changed in the last year with Google, Yahoo and MSN all displaying much more content through universal search based on a users IP address. When someone searches with single keywords such as ‘sushi’ or ‘shoes’ results are returned that provide much more options than before. As I’ve noted in previous blogs the engines display local businesses that are relevant to the search term entered. Similarly, sponsored ads can attach a local address to the text ad for that search query as well. Personally, I know this new format has changed my search behavior as I’m able to put in less to get more results.

Another contributing factor to this increase can be applied to the dramatic rise in mobile usage. Mobile phones provide a resource for immediate on the spot information and that information is almost always requested through as little searching as possible. The convenience of mobile browsing has developed a search behavior much more dependent on location rather than keywords.

So how does this affect advertising strategies? From a sponsored campaign perspective there is no argument against the need for long tail keywords and the effective CPA’s they generate, but a searchers behavior should also be observed when building a keyword portfolio. This includes the select use of one and two word search terms that can ‘assist’ with the overall performance. Without going too deep into visitor acquisition channels and attribution models, it’s thought that these ‘top of the funnel’ keywords are usually clicked on well before the actual conversion is made.

Organically, this puts even more emphasis on having a correctly optimized map listing as trends show those will be appearing more frequently for generic search queries. Achieving high positioning on a general search term in the maps can provide significant web, phone and in store visit traffic.

Although an advanced tactic, it’s no secret that a business can add their Facebook and Twitter pages to their Google Maps Places Page, but as of yesterday Google is now hyper linking these sites. Previously, Google would display these as a plain text URL and a searcher would have to copy and paste that URL into a browser, which would obviously never happen. Now, a new page is opened when each link is clicked.

This isn’t limited to just Facebook and Twitter as it appears any URL relating to the business such as a company blog or a LinkedIn profile can also be added. Adding these new fields is easy in the Local Business Center by simply creating a custom item in the additional details section for each URL (e.g., Twitter: http://twitter.com/location3, then repeat the process and submit for Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.).

This is clearly another step in the right direction for Google as they aim to provide an area where business owners can include more than basic (name, address and phone) information. With Google now making more online and offline pushes for Local Business Center participation, this new feature is surely an enticing option to attract just that.

Click on image to enlarge.

Erik Whaley, director of Local Search Traffic and frequent expertSEM author, chats about local search marketing. Erik discusses the importance of claiming your business’s listing, the threat of map listing fraud and how local search applies to mobile phones and GPS devices. He also offers predictions for local search in 2010 and beyond.

Remember coupons? Well, those rectangle pieces of paper that you used to watch your mother cut out of the Sunday paper just got a huge face lift.

Early last week, just in time for Black Friday, the Google Local Business Center extended the ability to offer coupons on mobile devices. Previously, this was only done through printable coupons.

Now, when consumers search for businesses from their mobile devices, they will be able to see coupons from the device. Rather than bringing a printed coupon into a store, they will be able to show the coupon, formatted correctly, directly on the screen of their mobile device.

For business owners, coupons can be added and updated by claiming your business in the Local Business Center. Searchers can find these coupons on Google.com and Google Maps by searching for products and services in their area and then click through to the ‘places page’ of that specific business.

There will always be adaptation periods to wait out with any new release, but the simplistic nature at which Google coupons can be created should ease that along. That coupled with new opportunity for exposure afforded by Google, will likely inspire a fresh wave of mobile marketing exploits aimed at lifting the sagging holiday sales expected for many small businesses amidst a still-tenuous economy.