These days, local marketing can seem a lot more complicated to the average small business owner than it used to be—and for very good reason. With advances in digital offerings, small businesses are now confronted with a growing range of possibilities for their ad dollars. Moreover, owners are faced with the harder task of determining how to link their various initiatives into cohesive strategies that deliver the strongest rates of return for their businesses.

Since the start of the year, I’ve watched first-hand as several Yellow Pages companies in the U.S. and Canada have expanded and retooled their offerings in order to help small businesses overcome these types of obstacles.

Major players including SuperMedia, DexOne Corp., The Berry Company, and Yellow Pages Group have recently announced new services, partnerships, and acquisitions that provide their small business clients with the means to combine the most recent digital marketing possibilities with traditional print and online options that they’ve used for years.

When I say digital offerings, I’m not just referring to Internet Yellow Pages, which millions of small businesses already know and use. I’m also talking about new vertical web sites including digital coupon sites, shopping comparison sites and user review sites that are among the latest drivers of local leads and are increasingly being added to the portfolios of various Yellow Pages companies.

As recent statistics show, these sites are among the most popular and trusted destinations for online shoppers and present exciting opportunities for local businesses:

Digital coupon sites: Digital coupons, which provide users with discounted promotion codes for online products, are quickly becoming a regular part of the online shopping experience. Coupons allow small businesses to generate new business and online buzz about their offerings.

They’re popular—ranked among the most-utilized tools for online shoppers, second only to major search engines, according to Compete.com’s Online Shopper Intelligence Study released last month, Approximately 35% of U.S. online users surveyed said they visited coupon sites when shopping online.

They’re also proven to generate sales. About 20% of U.S. online users—or nearly 45 million consumers— used digital coupons in 2009, an increase of 18.4% from 38 million users in 2008, according to research compiled by Coupons.com. In January, coupon traffic measured more than 14 million users and generated $34 million in online sales, a study by coupon aggregator RetailMeNot.com found.

Shopping comparison sites: Shopping comparison sites allow users to browse a range of products sold by participating retailers and compare prices, features, seller ratings and reviews, and other indicators. These sites provide a new platform for small businesses to gain visibility and compete directly with local and national retailers based on facts—not who, for example, can outbid the other in purchasing key search engine keywords.

Approximately 80 million U.S. consumers use shopping comparison sites, according to the Compete.com study. The survey also found that 22% of online users said they visit a shopping comparison site when purchasing products online.

User review sites: User-generated review sites provide the first-hand experiences of past customers who have purchased services or products from local businesses. These sites, which including ratings and other features, allow small businesses to let their clients promote their offerings for them by sharing positive stories and recommending that others patronize their services

User review sites are well-trusted by consumers. In fact, consumer opinions posted online are among the most trusted forms of advertising, bested only by recommendations from people known, according to the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey released in July 2009. Businesses gain credibility and can generate new business leads by supporting their presence on user review sites.

As these online destinations continue to grow, small businesses will be looking for advice on how best to promote their offerings. Our industry will need to live up to its important role of counseling local advertisers by providing details of how they can engage in this new digital marketplace.

Many management advice books recommend that businesses should make better use of what’s often their biggest investment: employees. Yet, a lot of companies fail to inspire, motivate and exploit the good ideas of their employees. Local search marketing often has an employee component that’s overlooked as well. Read on for some tips on leveraging your employee capital for better local search rankings!

In the Business 1.0 world, employees were often treated as depersonalized, faceless drones, replaceable cogwheels in corporate machinery. This perspective often seems to be reflected in traditional corporate websites where individual employees are relegated to the background, and rarely are any individuals highlighted or recognized on those company webpages.

For example, one of the most famous employees of the Masry & Vititoe legal firm in California is Erin Brockovich, the famous legal clerk and crusader for pollution victims depicted in the film that bears her name, starring Julia Roberts. However, Masry & Vititoe’s website does not rank in the first couple of pages of search results for “erin brockovich” keyword searches in Google, in large part because the site does not have a profile page dedicated to Erin.

There’s no employee profile page dedicated to Erin Brockovich on the Masry & Vititoe website. As their most-famous employee, this constitutes a missed opportunity.

Now, I can imagine that Masry & Vititoe might feel conflicted about presenting a profile page about a former employee, but they should’ve had a profile page while Brockovich was still an employee, and then altered the page slightly after she left the firm, clearly marking on it that she’s a former employee, and linking to her personal site. Masry & Vititoe likely does not realize that they’ve missed out on having more traffic and in-bound links because of this squandered opportunity, and those inbound links could be the difference between having their site rank better than their competition’s for various keyword searches.

In some companies, the only employees mentioned on the corporate website are the executives, but even for these companies, those pages are rarely designed properly for search. Quite a few major corporations list out all of their executives on a single page (including Google!), and this just is not effective as having a dedicated page for each exec which “sings” a unique song that’s more precisely targeted for the individual’s name than a group page ever would be.

Within local search, the types of businesses which have the greatest need to feature key employees are doctors offices and legal firms. Some of these have learned over time to create good webpage content around their partners’ identities, but for many there is still room for improvement.

One doesn’t have to be a medical clinic, legal firm or large corporation for there to be a strategic benefit to presenting employee pages. Even small-to-medium businesses may often benefit from featuring a few of their top employees on their websites.

In cases where an employee may be known and searched-for online, companies should seriously consider highlighting that employee on their website to make their businesses far easier to find.

Here’s how to do it:

• Place the employee’s name in the Title and H1 tags on their profile page.
• Include a brief biographical sketch of the employee within the body text on the page, and explain what they do for the company.
• Include contact info for the employee, and hCard Microformatting around their contact information.
• Include a photo image of the employee. Use a descriptive caption below the image and within the image’s ALT text parameter.
• Include information about whether the employee has special certifications or won special awards in the past, related to their professional work.
• Have a unique phone number for each employee. If that’s not realistic, then using the central office/business number is fine.
• If various employees post on the company blog, be sure there’s a unique author’s page for each one, and make it so their name is hyperlinked to it from each of their posts. If you already have profile pages on the company website, link the blog author names to these profiles—it doesn’t make sense to have two pages for each employee.
• Encourage employees to register-for and update their LinkedIn profile pages, and link those pages back to the company’s main site.
• Likewise, link the employee profile pages on your site over to their profiles on LinkedIn.
• If employees have positive ratings with speciality rating sites such as RateMDs.com, DrScore, LawyerRatingZ.com and Avvo, link their profiles on your site to their rating pages on those sites. This is just the sort of info you’d like to see performing well (ranking well) in search results!
• For larger companies, seriously consider setting up an employee directory that allows searches by name or by office/location, and also which links down to all employee profile pages, allowing profiles to be crawled and indexed by the bots.
• Finally, encourage your employees to link to their own profile pages from their blogs and personal websites to help reinforce those pages’ rankings.

Employees are one of your top assets, so consider using them in this way to augment your findability in search engines. But do so in a mutually-beneficial manner. Not only is this an opportunity for your site to be more easily found by people trying to find your employees, but this is also an opportunity for you to promote your employees and what they do for you at the same time. The employee/company relationship should be symbiotic and not unidirectional. Using this method, you can help each other to be more successful.

I am not afraid to admit I am an opportunist. We all rooted for Julia Roberts when she persevered for years to win the big case in Erin Brokovich, but let’s face it, do any of us really want to work that hard? Me, I would have taken the settlement right after I coughed up my first organ and then started scanning the classifieds for clinical trial ads.

Being egrets who makes their livings sitting on Google’s head waiting for a half-eaten carcass to fall out of its mouth, we online marketing types need to always be on the lookout for the new thingy that’s going to make us a lot of bucks fast before everyone else figures it out. And I am here to tell you that thingy, that thingy, that thingy-ingy-ingy, is the onslaught of local search APIs.

For the past year I have been predicting how yellow pages apis and local search monetization apis are going to be big areas of opportunities for enterprising folks. These APIs will allow developers to quickly and cheaply create new local search applications. The release of CityGrid by CitySearch a few weeks ago is likely the beginning of an onslaught. It only makes sense that companies with a lot of data and advertisers will use APIs to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible. And APIs that pay you to use them tend to be popular. I heard through the grapevine that when CityGrid came out it quickly became Mashery’s top API.

So I thought it might be helpful to point out some of the more interesting local-related APIs out there:

Alcatel Lucent Open API Service Tap into network data to pinpoint a user’s location via their mobile device, enable geotargeting of ads & offers and finding friends nearby.

CityGrid (CitySearch) 15M+ business profile listings. 3M+ user & editorial reviews. 500K+ local advertisters (in other words they will pay you to use this API!).

Earthmine 3D street level imagery to make your maps and local pages look really cool.

Foursquare Become the mayor of your own money-making application. Create strange new ways to check in at places at all over the globe.

GoWalla Like Foursquare’s but with a twist. I particularly like the LunchVote feature that helps you decided where to eat for lunch.

Hoovers Access 65 million company records and 85 million people records. That’s an insane amount of data. Includes historical financial performance, executive contact information and a lot of other stuff to make a sweet local business directory.

Outside.in Easily integrate hyperlocal news into your application.

Praized API Create a social local recommendations service.

TownMe Find and share local info. Gives a set of points of interest close to a lat/lon. These guys are creating an open platform for local.

Trulia Get geolocation data like lat/lon on neighborhoods, cities, counties, states and zip codes. Also provides a lot of real estate related data like the average price of a homes listed on Trulia.

Twitter/MixerLabs Do I really need to provide more info on this one?

Yahoo! Local Search for businesses near a specified location and return lat/lon and Yahoo! user ratings of the business.

Yelp API Retrieve business review & rating info, neighborhood name and pictures for a particular business or businesses in a particular geographic region or location.

WhitePages.com Allows you to add Whitepages’ people search to your site.

Zvents Restaurant and event venue listings, local events & performers. Zvents users and tags.

If you have any other great local-related APIs please add them to the comments below.

No one needs a new survey, study or pundit to tell them how important mobile devices have become to consumers. Just look down the street where everyone from teens to corner-office suits appears sidetracked by communication on the go—texting, talking, thumbs jumping across tiny keyboards in a hurried attempt to reply-all.

This is the audience of the future. And 2010 may just be the year for advertisers to tip the scale in reaching it. The technology powerhouses (i.e. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Apple) are finally diving into mobile advertising in a huge way, recognizing the approach of critical mass.

None of this is new. The market has been predicting that mobile will explode for years. Somehow, it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway. But that is all about to change—partly because of the dissolution of advertising in traditional media, but mostly because consumers are beginning to demand it.

The “smart” in smart phones is finally proving itself. And the businesses that have the most to gain from this newfound demand will be local, small business advertisers offering what consumers want to buy right now. In our experience, restaurant takeout, florists or home/consumer services such as carpet cleaning, self storage or auto repair are good examples of business categories that are particularly well suited for mobile campaigns.

An improving economy is bringing about a resurgence of small businesses—make that local businesses. Businesses with traditionally shallow advertising pockets, but all the more need for exposure.

High conversion rates, low cost and the ability to target highly local audiences will push mobile advertising into the spotlight this year. We have experimented with a number of mobile ad offerings and while we can’t give out all the secrets, we can say that we’ve had significant success with mobile search and increasing click-to-call ratios with mobile landing page optimization. Some best practices around succeeding with mobile include building campaign architectures and keywords specifically for the mobile user. This may include shorter keyword phrases, acronyms and even slang terms. Marketers should also consider the landing page for mobile campaigns – while iPhones and Droid phones are able to view full HTML pages, at least 85 percent of the market (according to a 2009 comScore study) still use other types of phones where mobile-friendly landing pages are a must for effective viewing.

A recent New York Times article made similar points, noting a prediction from Juniper Research that mobile ad spending worldwide will more than quadruple, to $6 billion, by 2014. Analyst Windsor Holden goes on to say that, while everyone has been hoping for the past five years that mobile advertising will take off, this will actually be the year it finally gets significant traction.

The first rule of business: give customers what they want when they want it. For example, a busy working mom who needs to send a bouquet can easily use her mobile device to find a florist. But her smart phone might go beyond mere directory search to display geo-targeted ads that only show results near her location, and then present a local florist’s phone number that she only has to tap or click to call.

Highly specific targeting, including leveraging aggregated consumer-related information, will also aid in the advent of mass mobile advertising. Much like paid-search ads, that local florist’s ad might appear on the working mom’s smart phone reminding her of a special occasion. Additionally, seeing the florist’s ad on a smart phone allows the working mom to easily store the business’ name and number for future reference, increasing the likelihood of repeat business.

Not only are the conversion rates generally high with mobile ads, the cost of entry is incredibly low compared to traditional local advertising. Mobile advertising campaigns are comparatively easy to set up as well. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that the time for taking full advantage of mobile ad inventory is now, while the costs are artificially low as a result of many advertisers still spending their budgets on PC ads. According to eMarketer, only 1 percent of total U.S. advertising spend is directed towards mobile. Of that 1 percent, the bulk is used for SMS advertising, which generally is harder to make work for local.

With the power of search at their fingertips, consumers have become increasingly dependent on information on the go. Advertisers can capitalize on this trend and offer their potential customers service with convenience via mobile advertising.

An update on the conferences I'll be speaking at/attending this Spring: GetListed.org Local University, SMX West, SearchFest, Local Search Summit, DFWSEM, and SMX Advanced.