I am not going to bitch about snake-oil salesmen, ethics, how many good SEOs there are, etc. Instead I am going to ask every small biz out there who is reading this to sit up straight, stop mumbling, look me in the eye and pay attention. It’s time to wise up.

Now I know you are no search marketing expert. That’s why you’re looking for help with your SEO right? So I thought it might be useful to put together this list of questions for the next time you take a pitch from your friendly local SEO consultant:

Can you tell me exactlyhow you do what you do? Local SEO is not magic. There is a long list of techniques that are known to work. Some work better than others. While how a SEO campaign is executed can have some proprietary aspects to it, in general a good SEO consultant should have no problem telling you how that are going to go about improving your rankings. In particular you want to make sure they are not using any spammy techniques that could potentially harm your business. If they avoid the question or they don’t seem particularly transparent about their methodology, hang up the phone. It’s not particularly hard to switch out a toilet, but most people would prefer to hire an expert so it gets done right. Your plumber doesn’t have any secrets (at least I think he doesn’t) so why should your SEO consultant?

What are you going to need from me to be successful? While it typically takes some time to analyze the state of a business’ SEO, the consultant likely has a list of tactics they will deploy which they know from the start. Some of these will require input from the client. It’s important for you to understand up front how much of commitment will be required. Knowing how much time, money and human resources you will need to spend will help you determine how profitable this effort will be.

Do I control access to all accounts? Typically local SEO engagements require updating your business’ profiles on a number of sites: Google, Bing, Yahoo, yellow pages sites, etc. I hear from businesses all of the time who can no longer get into their Google Place Page account because their old SEO agency or a former employee created it for them. It is critical that you control admin access to the account for any profile or page created for you by a third party. This can save you a lot of headaches if you part company in the future.

How are the spammers doing it? Most SEOs I know typically work inside of the various search engines’ guidelines to achieve great rankings for their clients. It can be tedious, not-very-glamorous work, but in the long run it pays off. That said, there are a whole host of successful SEOs that use less-than-kosher techniques that can pay off fast and drive a ton of new customers to their clients. While these techniques can be risky, the short term ROI on them can be stellar. I would never recommend that a client go this route, but as I watch the same spammy fake address listing rank #1 for a valuable local query for the third month in a row, I would be hard-pressed to tell a client that it is not worth doing. If you are going to play in this game, you need to know both how to play by the rules and how to break them. If the consultant doesn’t know about these techniques, how are they going to know how to beat them?

What is a typical return on investment for one of your clients? This is always a great question. Depending on the client’s business, a good search marketing consultant should be able to come up with some kind of tangible ROI metric that you can relate to your own business. Instead of “increased traffic 50%” I like stuff like “generated five breast augmentation customers at $1,500 a pop and twenty qualified leads in sixty days.” That one always starts a good conversation with the prospect. :)

How do you measure your effectiveness? Pretty simple question. How are you going to prove to me you did what you did and that it worked? Typical answers include: increase in rankings for targeted terms, increased qualified traffic to your site, increased inbound email and phone calls (via a tracking phone number usually), and ultimately increased business.

How do you communicate your effectiveness to me? The consultant should have a system that regularly communicates what they have done, what is going to be done and when.

Who’s my point of contact? You or a 22-year-old? Enough said.

If we part ways, will you remove all your work from my website and the links you have secured? This is why it’s important to understand the consultant’s methodology from the get-go. SEO consultants often rely on networks of sites they control to get links to your site. Then they hold you hostage by threatening to remove those links if you don’t renew a deal. Make sure you understand up front that this is not the case.

Can you show me some representative results? If they can’t show you a company that they have successfully ranked #1 for a variety of competitive terms and give you an idea of how they did it, then say sayonara.

Can you give me some references?

Why do customers leave you? I doubt there is any agency out there that has a perfect record when it comes to performance and customer retention. Customers change their strategies. Consultants don’t hit home runs every time. An honest discussion about challenges the consultant has had with customers and how they are improving things is always a good thing. A good consultant should almost be proud of their mistakes. I like to tell my clients that when I started doing SEO I lost a lot of traffic and learned enough so that you don’t have to.

What sets you apart from other SEO companies? The answer here shouldn’t be “we get you ranked #1.” What you really want to know is why they think they deserve your business vs. the thousands of other guys out there?

Thanks to Mike Belasco of SEOverflow and Will Scott of SearchInfluence for contributing some of these questions.

Two relatively new macro trends have converged on the phone. First, as everyone’s data will attest, web searches are increasingly local in nature, focusing on discovery of products and services offered in the physical world. The second is the migration of a very large small and medium business marketing spend from antiquated offline models (the phone book) to performance-based online vehicles (search, etc.). But while consumer behavior has changed (using search and social media instead of the book), nothing has changed the fact that the great majority of local businesses—whether the sole-operator plumber or a national advertiser like Roto-Rooter—still consider phone calls to be the lifeblood of their business.

To sweeten the deal, for many of these businesses, the phone call is much closer to what they consider the “transaction.” And as we already know from operating an active pay-for-call exchange, phone calls in aggregate convert at 3-10x the rate of clicks.

After a half-decade of connecting, tracking and analyzing hundreds of millions of phone calls, most generated from online marketing activities, we know that one of the key challenges our customers face is preventing fraudulent calls. In the search world, giants like Google and Bing have invested heavily in their ability to detect, understand and scrub fraudulent click activity. But in the calls world, we’re still at the beginning of a long learning period.

Unlike fraudulent clicks, which merely skew tracking data and cost calculation and which can often be backed out of totals for a marketer, phone calls that don’t come from customers have a serious side effect: tying up the line and blocking calls from live customers and leads. And much like the conventional wisdom from the web, a dropped call results in the same outcome as an abandoned visit: a lost customer.

Since the 2003 advent of the National Do Not Call Registry in the U.S. enabled an estimated 150 million consumers to block telemarketing calls, bulk dialers have turned to targeting business lines with B2B offers. And with the explosion of web-based activity focused on finding local businesses, those local business numbers are easier and easier to crawl, scrape and aggregate.

For some of our largest customers, the problem reached a critical point not long ago. Our response—which is half research and half product feature—was to deploy a “honeypot“ (a pool of hundreds of thousands of inactive numbers) to detect bulk-dialing activity. When we detect and confirm patterns of repeat call activity across multiple calls, we can calculate the likelihood of telemarketing activity and block the origin. Over time, the system learns more and more about bad behavior and self-corrects for false positives. And because we’re using a dedicated, ever-shifting honeypot, we can learn without affecting actual customers.

While we have thus far been very successful at identifying and blocking hundreds of thousands of fraudulent calls, we’re just at the beginning of the learning process. And given the axiom I laid out above and some of what we see on a daily basis, making good on the promise of “local” is going to mean—for all of us in the industry—beginning to identify, understand and creatively solve the challenges that stand in the way of delivering phone based leads to local businesses.

But while the tools available to deliver business messages to consumers are increasing, the key considerations have stayed the same. When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of advertising, return on investment (ROI) is the most important factor. Building brand awareness and market share are positive long-term goals, but growing a business requires a measured, tactical approach to advertising that is based mainly on turning a dollar of marketing money into a pile of sales revenue. Otherwise, the business won’t be around long enough to achieve its long-term objectives.

Before a conversation about advertising options can even begin, a local business must have a firm handle on three aspects of their operation: 1) demographics of their target customers, 2) geographics of their marketing area and 3) psychographics of their customers. These data play key roles in determining which marketing tools will make the most sense from an ROI perspective, so that businesses don’t waste valuable resources on offerings that won’t generate leads.

To help explain the importance of background research, let’s use the example of a new ice cream shop opening on the main street of a busy suburb. Here are the types of questions its owners should consider:

Demographics: What is the demographic profile of the local area? Let’s say there’s a large share of families with kids and college students living in dormitories. Based on that information, what customers will the shop try to attract – all of the above? Or just one of these target groups?

Geographics: What are the geographics of the area like? Are walk-ins mainly college students, while most of those driving to the store are families? How close are nearby competitors, and what demographics do they target? Depending on established competition, the initial target geography may be very small – requiring an even closer look at the demographic profile in the store’s vicinity.

Psychographics: What will motivate target customers to purchase ice cream from this shop? What are their spending patterns? What influences their buying behavior, and what specific promotional efforts will they respond to? While an ice cream shop’s business typically peaks in the summer months and drops off in the winter, do these rules apply in this particular area?

It’s only when the ice cream shop owners have firm answers to these questions that they can begin to map out an advertising strategy designed to deliver high ROI.

For purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the owners determined the following:

• They want to target both families and college students, and because of several already-established competitors, they’ll pursue potential customers within a half mile radius.
• Research shows that while the local student population includes frequent social med and mobile users, many of the local families spend less time with online and mobile technology.
• Indeed, many college students in the area walk to where they need to go, while families are more prone to drive.
• Summer months are busy with families, but college students go home for the summer.
• Disposable income is limited and price oriented stores do better than high-end establishments across both demographics.

Based on these determinations, the shop owner can work to develop a marketing strategy that will work to deliver quality leads for the business. Here’s a sample of how that might look:

• Due to differences in purchasing patterns, the shop will establish two distinct advertising strategies: one directed to college students and another to families.
• Since the shop is new, focused on a narrow area, and includes target customers with limited disposable income, coupons are determined to be an effective first step to get customers in the door.
• Because local college students are high social media and mobile users, a local coupon distribution channel on Twitter and a popular online mobile app are seen as effective, targeted delivery methods for coupons. Since these students are less likely to be in town over the summer—and summers are easier times to draw customers than the colder months—the majority of this marketing budget will be spent during the winter.
• Parents of families are also attracted to discounts, but those in this community are less likely to spend time finding them online or via mobile. Also, since most families in this area are drivers—they may need more incentive to travel to the store than the average college student who walks by it every day.  In this case, direct mail with coupons is seen as a good option in reaching local families.
• In addition to offering coupons, the shop owner can ensure additional referral business by listing the shop in print and Internet business directories.

While this scenario is hypothetical, it provides real lessons about the types of considerations local businesses must make when drafting their marketing strategies. There are an unlimited number of local advertising options out there—everything from Internet Yellow Pages to website creation and SEO/SEM visibility—but each individual tool may not be effective in delivering ROI in certain situations. In some regions or specific business categories, circumstances may apply that make it imperative for a local business to advertise in print directories—while in others, online directories plus a variety of additional digital tools may be considered critical to reach target demographics.

In the ice cream shop scenario, it may take years before the store establishes a reliable customer base and reputation. Once the store’s reach stretches beyond its initial half mile radius to compete with other shops and attract new types of customers, it will need new advertising strategies in order to maintain growth. At that point, its owners will need to go back through the steps of determining who their customers are at the time, where they’re coming from, and what motivates them to buy their products before changing or adding advertising resources. They must ensure that their local advertising efforts consistently deliver high ROI, or their efforts will be in vain and the business will suffer.

A large component of Facebooking is “preaching to the choir”—most of the people who will “like” you and follow you on Facebook are those who already know your company exists. Existing customers will search for you by name, and people might discover your Facebook link on your website. Marketing to this audience which already likes you and knows about you is certainly worthwhile for the sake of increasing sales and for retaining existing customers.

However, you also want more customers and for more people to discover your business and think about it.

A feature introduced by Facebook back in September enables your status updates to appear on other popular pages, opening the possibility that a lot more people could potentially discover your page/business. The feature was overlooked by many people who aren’t staying up-to-date on Facebook development news, so relatively few make use of it. The functionality I’m referring to is “tags,” which allow one to connect up names of people and pages which you’ve “liked” to create hyperlinks within the status updates by prepending with the “@” sign.

To set up a tag, once must first “like” a page or “add as friend” the subject you’re attempting to link up. For instance, to mention my name and have it link up to my profile page after friending me, you’d first type the “at”-symbol, “@,” in the status update box for your page and then start typing “Silver…”. Facebook will display matching pages/people below the status update field, which you could then select:

What catches my eye about this feature is that once you’ve tagged a post, it can then appear on pages which Facebook has created for all sorts of various topics, such as for well-known items and places. As people have customized their personal profiles, they added in lots of “likes and interests” which Facebook subsequently linked up with pages about those topics. For instance, when setting up my personal profile, I’d selected “listening to music” as an interest, and more than 2.3 million other people have as well. Some of these types of “community pages” are light on content, while in other cases Facebook has sucked in Wikipedia articles to populate them out a bit more.

Increasingly, people are visiting these topical pages on Facebook after searching for the page’s name or after clicking through when they’ve found the topic under a friend’s info tab. And, as people visit these pages in greater numbers, the pages become worthwhile targets for their promotional value.

Status tagging allows your status updates to appear on these Facebook community pages, allowing individuals to discover you, click through, and potentially “friend” you or “like” your page. For an example of this, I’m going to use a couple of Whole Foods Market status updates from the past week. They are not one of my clients and I have no affiliation with them—I’m just using them as an example because they do so social media really well. They already enjoy 300K-plus people who like their Facebook page, and I just like Whole Foods.

Here’s a couple of their status updates from the past week—one about iced tea, and the other about a film:

As you can see, they don’t have any tags within the text of their posts like I’m describing, although their status updates are otherwise well-constructed. But, what if they’d added tags? How many more people might these status updates reach if they were pumped-up a bit?

For the iced tea one, I did a quick search on Facebook for “tea,” and I found a Facebook community page for “drinking tea“—”19,541 people like this”. I also found a page for “iced tea” which had 6,145 people liking it. Further, the blog article Whole Foods is promoting mentions “whole trade,” which is their branded name for something like “fair trade” products. By searching for “fair trade” on Facebook, I discover the “fair trade certified” page for an organization that 42,582 people “like” which validates whether a product is fair trade or not.

Returning to Whole Foods’ update about their iced tea contest here’s what it would look like if I rewrote it to introduce tags for the related pages that I discovered:

Once this optimized status update is published, it would appear on the “drinking tea,” “iced tea,” and “fair trade” pages where people interested in those topics could discover it:

If you add it up, tagging the Tweet would’ve increased its potential reach by a bit over 68,000! Of course, the relative popularity of the topic/community page involved will impact its actual audience reach. The “drinking tea” page has a lot of people associated with it because they mentioned this on their personal profiles, but relatively few of them are likely to actually visit that page on a regular basis. Even so, the tagging will increase the pages where the status update appears, which increases its promotional power. And, for some popular topics, the tagging would likely result in bursts of more visits if done effectively.

The Whole Foods status update about the film, Fuel, might appear to have much more potential than the iced tea example. The Fuel movie has 7,263 people liking it according to its Facebook page, and it’s a Sundance Film Festival winner—a topic that has another 151,795 people liking that. However, Sundance has perhaps set their wall to not display posts from people who like them—so, it’s virtually pointless to tag their name.

As for SMBs which market primarily to local areas only, the potential audience is going to be sharply reduced, but still worthwhile. Local businesses might want to mention the names of their local towns and neighborhoods as well as local events—with tags—in order to attract more people who could potentially convert into Facebook “likers” as well as customers. For instance, various competing Chicago pages have hundreds of thousands of people associated with them, but some are operated by companies who would not allow your status updates to display on their pages.

You want to tag the pages which are set up to have visitors to default to to their wall pages when first arriving, and which allow your tagged status updates to appear on it. In the case of Chicago, you’d probably select the community/article page for Chicago which shows the related Wikipedia content since it has 44k of people liking it and it allows status updates to display by default. It’s tempting to associate with the pages for the Chicago movie or band, since they are more popular. Even though they might match your geographic term, they’re off-topic for your uses, so avoid tagging those since they’re the wrong demographic for your business.

Mentioning your geographic areas as tags consistently will allow local consumers to discover your company. By using this tactic consistently over time, you may be able to increase your Facebook audience and your customer base.

Additional tips for status updates for your local business within Facebook

• Include tags within posts, as described above, particularly for local topics.
• Finding reasons to use multiple tags within updates will expand your reach more than using only one. Facebook puts a limit of six tags per update, however.
• Include links to pages outside of Facebook with your posts, particularly links to pages which have images that will display a thumbnail in your Facebook status update. Pictures are more compelling than mere words.
• Sing more than just one song! Post stuff that’s not solely about you and your company. Mentioning local charitable events and local news items intermittently can help break things up and keep you from being boring.
• Periodically update by adding items to your Facebook photo albums. Include pictures of local interest in addition to pics of your business.
• Similar to adding images for status updates, upload videos sometimes, too.
• Reward those who follow you with a spontaneous discount offer every so often! One of my favorite local eateries in the Dallas area, Cafe Brazil, offers free entrees sometimes to their Facebook fans—and it gives one the delicious feeling of being an “insider in the know” to be able to show up on a certain day with a Facebook page printed out to get a freebie. They’ve been particularly effective with their Facebook promotions in large part because of this generosity, IMHO.
• Say something witty occasionally, so people will “like” your status updates. Facebook watches interactions to assess how effective a page is at engaging with its audience. So far, this doesn’t translate directly to any benefits that I know of, but if they allow one’s page updates to appear on the pages of the people who “like” it down the road, they’ll almost certainly work in various factors to assess the popularity of the page to decide whether to show an update or not in people’s news updates.

One suggestion I have for Facebook is a feature that would be very useful for companies managing their pages—if they could moderate posts submitted to their wall as well as posts which tag them. In this way, companies could allow posts to display that they like while keeping unwanted content out. Currently, user-posting to your company page is an all-or-nothing according to one’s settings.

Some other articles that are helpful/interesting for optimizing for Facebook:

• 8 Tips For Getting Your Fan Page Found In Facebook Search
• How To Quickly Customize Your Facebook Page To Attract More Fans
• How To Put The Facebook “Like” Button On A Site
• Facebook Marketing: how to locally optimize your Facebook presence
• Facebook Pages & Local Search Engine Optimization

Change the name of your Facebook business page. Perhaps your business’ name could use a little updating so you decide to change it. In most cases, you go to all of your profiles on the web, submit changes and over time they are updated—except on your Facebook page. Once you select a user name for your Facebook page, you can’t change it. I have heard that you can petition Facebook for one change but this seems pretty impractical. The option Facebook endorses is to delete your current page and create a new one with the new name. Too bad you had spent the past year building up thousands of fans on your old page.

Local keyword estimator. One of the problems with trying to target local queries for search marketing is that there is not enough volume around particular local service queries to generate meaningful data. Marketers try to get around this by creating paid search campaigns to see what kind of volume a particular query can generate, but it would be a lot easier if you could use one of the big keyword tools, typed “Pleasanton butcher” and got a report that aggregated this query with similar queries across every U.S. city to show the most popular variations when a city name is appended to the query. Bonus points for allowing me to filter the results by city size, location and cultural bias—perhaps tea party members search for local tea-bagging providers differently than latte-sippers, for example.

Local Twitter deals. I am sure this one is in the works, and there are plenty of services offering local deals via Twitter, but it would be great if a verified business could feed deals into Twitter and have them show up in a “local deals” list for users in their service area. Bonus points for being able to filter by product/service types.

Google maps analytics. A plugin or modification for Google Analytics that provides useful local/maps referrals without having to jump through hoops.

Competitive citation checker. Think SEOmoz Link Comparison tool for citations. I found this while writing this post. It hadn’t launched yet, so even though it may be live now, it doesn’t count.

CraigsList spammer (er, I mean Marketing Tool). Craigslist is one of the best marketing vehicles for local service businesses. It’s cheap and it’s simple. The problem is that it’s crowded and the chronological nature of the posts gets your ad pushed down pretty fast. I’d like to see someone build a tool that knows how to defeat Craigslist’s spam detection (or even better, a tool that is blessed by Craigslist and can bypass the spam filters) and allow a marketer to schedule new posts and take advantage of trending queries (Craigslist trends? Craigslist insights for local?). We’d only use this to make the world shinier and brighter right? And 10% of profits will go to feed families of mediocre marketers.

Centroid ranker. So the big local engines have all decreased the importance of centroid proximity in their map ranking algos, but location still makes a difference for a variety of reasons. I want a mobile app for businesses researching new office locations. It locates you on a map and shows you where your location will appear in the current set of local results for each of the different maps displays (Google, Bing, Mapquest, Yahoo, etc.) for specific queries (e.g. “pleasanton restaurant”). I guess you could do a mobile search and just look at the map that comes up, but if I have learned anything from my years on the web, it’s that same s#%t, different wrapper can work wonders as a business model.

Place page citation blocker. Citations on Google place pages can be helpful or hurtful, usually depending on how vocal your customers are. Google recently introduced the ability for merchants to respond to customer reviews on place pages, which helps in dealing with the great unwashed. But what about those citations that show up in the “details” section? Quite often I see lead-gen sites that businesses advertise on show up here with a “request a quote” link which takes you to a lead-gen page with a call-tracking phone number. So instead of just getting a potential customer call from a Google search, the merchant now gets a call they have to pay for. How about giving merchants the option to block these types of links?

SMB “pitch me” list. A common problem with selling marketing services to small and medium size businesses is they don’t have a lot of free time to take calls from the numerous services competing for their attention. Another common problem is the SMB typically does not have a lot of knowledge about web marketing in general so when they are ready to start buying marketing services, they don’t even know who to contact. How about something similar to the “do not call” list, except it’s a “pitch me” list that SMBs opt-into when they are ready to consider their options? If they are not on the list and you call them, you automatically lose half your Google traffic.

Fake address finder. A browser plugin that highlights listings with fake addresses that show up in Google Maps and tags them with a “WTF?!” emoticon. Paid version includes ability to purchase property, file with municipality to create an actual address and automatically create new place page to further screw up Google’s local database.

Do you have another genius idea for local search? Would love to see your thoughts in the comments section below.

New research released today provides some support to that argument, showing that the number of mobile subscribers turning to their devices to find local businesses is growing by double digit percentage points.

The study was conducted by comScore and released today by the Yellow Pages Association (YPA).

The report shows that the number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in March 2010. This increase outpaces 10 percent growth in the number of mobile media users who browsed the mobile web, used applications or downloaded content during the same time period.

Additionally, the number of people accessing business directories on a mobile device at least once per week increased more than 16 percent year-over-year to nearly five million in March 2010.

This is good news for Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs) and other local sites because it suggests the opportunity to reach more consumers is growing quickly. This high growth illustrates that as more consumers use mobile devices to search and access content, they are continuing to rely on Yellow Pages’ convenient and reliable business listings to help them find local businesses on-the-go.

So what do these results mean for advertisers?

The data shows that in addition to the benefits of advertising with IYPs to attract those searching for business information on their personal computers, local businesses are receiving added value in online listings being accessible to a growing number of mobile users.

The report provided additional contexts about the ways consumers reach business directories on their mobile device. According to comScore, the mobile browser was the most common access method for users, with 10.8 million subscribers in March 2010 and 21 percent year-over-year growth. But even as the browser remained the most used mobile feature for access, apps grew at a more rapid pace with 42 percent year-over-year growth, totaling 4.1 million subscribers in March 2010. These results indicate that IYP reach is not limited to a specific platform within the mobile category, but accessible to a broad range of mobile users.

The research also found that consumers accessing business directories via mobile represent a younger, wealthier, and content-hungry base to advertisers:

• 58% are 34 or younger.
• Over half of those have a household income in excess of $75,000. These are attractive figures for local businesses seeking to better position themselves to attract local leads.
• Mobile users are three and half times more likely as the average mobile media user to access women’s magazine content, health information, real estate listings, and job listings via their mobile devices.

And while local mobile grew double digits, local searches on personal computers saw single digit growth year-over-year. Searches on IYPs and portal sites increased 4 percent to 444 million in March 2010, or 5.3 billion annually — indicating that more consumers are coming to rely on Yellow Pages when searching from their computer.

As local businesses look for new ways to maximize advertising opportunities in today’s changing media landscape, Yellow Pages continue to provide attractive platforms to reach important consumer bases as they increasingly adopt digital and mobile. And as this new study shows, an integrated approach pays offs when listings on one platform are easily accessible on others—giving advertisers added exposure and more bang for their buck.

The new design might best be described as more of a business directory listings page than a keyword search results page. This new layout appears only for Google’s regular/main keyword search, when locally-oriented keywords are used, such as “dentist chicago,” and presumably doesn’t affect the layout of results in Google Maps itself. Previously, such searches resulted in regular “organic” listings of pages which the Google algorithm deemed relevant for the search query, along with a 7-pack of local listings from Google Maps embedded somewhere within the listings under Universal Search. In the new experimental layout what were 7-pack listings are now distributed within the main listing area of the page, with “A,” “B,” “C”… enumerated marker icons matched up to their locations within the small map image. The map is moved from the middle-left to the right hand column, above the sponsored listings, and its position stays within the visible area of the browser when the page is scrolled.

Others have been seeing the new layout, too, and we’ve been comparing notes. The new layout is better understood when seen, rather than described:

Mike Blumenthal quotes a Google spokesperson as confirming the layout test: “It is an experiment — we’re continually trying out new tweaks to a portion of our users.” But, the alternate design is considerably more than a “tweak”—it’s a major evolutionary change.

I can see some compelling reasons why Google would try out such a layout. From a usability and user-experience perspective, the new layout seems to provide searchers with a handful of improvements. Users want all the “answers” to their queries when submitting keywords to a single, unified search box (which is why Google introduced Universal Search in the first place). This appears to give them more of the Maps experience within the regular search results, satisfying that need for instant gratification.

Also, users do not want too many options—when seeking a business they want a top handful of listings, and not dozens upon dozens of links.

The also want to get those listings straightaway, as opposed to being made to click upon a secondary page that takes them to yet another page of listings from which to choose.

As you may know, Google desires to avoid indexing “search results in search results,” and as such their Webmaster Guidelines specify that one should use robots.txt to disallow search results pages from getting indexed. It’s easy to see why they don’t want search results in the index—imagine searching on Google for “blue widgets,” then clicking upon a result only to find it’s yet another page of search result listings for that query from another search engine site.

And this requirement surfaces a problem that has had me seriously concerned on behalf of online directories for some years now. It doesn’t take much to realize that many of the internet yellow pages (“IYPs”) and business directory listing pages from some of the top biz info sites could easily fall under the definition of “search results”.

Considering that Google has their own comprehensive business directory results now, it’s likely only a matter of time before they might begin penalizing or disallowing SEOed IYP listings pages. This new layout would achieve this pretty nicely by simply pushing indexed directory pages off of the first page of results.

During the past year, I’ve been asked multiple times whether I thought SEO might no longer be a viable source of traffic for IYPs. You may recall that I wrote about how Google’s move last year to invoke the local 7-pack listings for many keywords, based upon searchers’ geolocations, appeared to have strangled traffic of yellow pages sites which previously enjoyed higher prominence on search result pages. While that move certainly made things more challenging for the SEOs at IYP companies and other online directories, I felt that many of them had not done sufficient optimization in the first place. I still believe that SEO can and should be considered a major traffic/revenue source for those sites, even if this new search result layout goes into wide release. Most of these companies fail to detect the areas of opportunity remaining, and fail to execute upon them effectively.

As things currently stand, there’s no question that this design change would be seriously devastating to the SEO projects for most directory sites.

But, another question is: what will the effect of this be upon local small-to-medium businesses (“SMBs”)?

On one hand, you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea change could easily result in far lower numbers of organic referrals. Companies which aggressively have been marketing themselves have often enjoyed placement within the 7-pack, as well as having their homepage ranked in the top organic results—real estate on the search result page in multiple places. Some even enjoyed presence in the top directory and social media pages that were ranking highly for the term as well. Under the new paradigm, these companies could lose overall referrals along with the spaces they enjoyed on the pages.

It virtually goes without saying that the change would negatively impact the CTRs of the sponsored listings in the right sidebar which will be pushed down by the new map position, too!

So, this experimental layout for local leaves me concerned. It seems potentially good for consumers, but very bad for SMBs, IYPs and even possibly AdWords advertisers.

Google’s overall philosophy of putting user experience above monetary concerns or any other priority is noble in most cases, but in the area of local businesses, there’s perhaps more context which should be considered. One might dismiss the probable negative impact to directory sites, but the likely impact to SMBs cannot be seen as acceptable. Will Google notice if businesses were to be negatively affected by the design change? Would they even care?

Some months ago, a handful of local search marketing professionals held a brief back-and-forth email discussion with one of Google Maps’ product marketers over some upcoming UI changes that were in the works. We ultimately asked whether they performed any usability or focus group testing with small business owners prior to deploying changes (to the “local business center” now named “google places”), and we were shocked to hear that they had not.

So, it may not be surprising that a dramatic change could be in the works which might feel rather punishing to SMBs which have invested a lot in marketing themselves online and via search. Having such a change following the deployment of the new tag ads could feel unfairly extortionary to businesses which might be negatively affected, I would conjecture.

So, what are the options for IYPs and other local directory providers? This may drive more online directories to sign data provider agreements with Google Maps, and they should step up their SEO work to take advantage of unexploited areas as I’ve hinted at before. Oh, and perhaps the traffic to Bing will keep growing enough to take up the slack!

Postscript: After writing this, I saw Andrew Shotland’s hilarious post, “Dead Fingers Walking?,” and while it’s wonderfully snarky, it simultaneously makes a number of points about the impact to IYPs and the relative “evilness” of Google’s new experimental local search results.

As a search marketing consultant working with both national players and small local businesses, I have seen a noticeable trend of the franchises providing recommendations for the franchisees that aren’t always in either side’s best interests. For example, one client recently was referred by corporate to an “off-page SEO” company to do link building. The proposal was to submit the client’s site to 50 directories per month for $300 per month to help rank the client for three search phrases. The sales materials promoted link building as critical to the SEO process. They also offered to claim and optimize the client’s Google Local listing for an additional $500.

On the face of it there’s nothing wrong with this proposal. It seems reasonable to think that it might take a few hundred dollars of time to do an initial optimization of the a Google Local listing. It also seems reasonable to think that it would take a few hundred dollars of time to submit a site to 50 directories. We can debate how effective directory link building is or isn’t, how black, white or grey hat this technique is. The fact is that a lot of people do it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. And let’s not even get started on the “three search phrases” thing.

To me the bigger issue in the communication was that the franchisee had no tools to make the decision as to whether this was a good idea or not for his business (which is why he called me, by the way).

So I thought it might be useful to provide some thoughts on how the two sides can best work together.

Start with education. I know everyone is always in a hurry to get customers but when you are pushing something as relatively new and foreign as SEO or social media marketing, it’s probably best to start with an education process. Franchises should hold regular webinars to provide examples of best practices and keep everyone current on the state of the industry. Search is complicated, but it’s an important channel and everyone should understand the basics.

Let knowledge bubble up. While there are plenty of SEO companies who can provide effective services, chances are there are franchisees who have already figured out how to rank well in their markets. These guys should be encouraged, perhaps even paid, to share their experiences step-by-step with the rest of the organization. Chances are their advice will be just as—if not more—relevant than anything a national SEO provider could offer.

Be transparent about relationships. In the above example, the off-page SEO company’s proposal was above market rates (and in my view wasn’t even proposing the right things). Often when a national organization provides a partner with access to their local affiliates, there is typically some kind of quid-pro-quo. I am not saying that the franchise was getting a cut of the franchisee’s spend, but the pricing sure made it seem like they were. It would probably be more beneficial for everyone involved if instead of marking up a service, the franchise worked to bring the cost down for their franchisees. It would have been a great message to say the price was usually $500 but we got it for you for $300.

Recommend multiple service providers. No one wants to over-complicate things, but there are a variety of approaches to SEO and instead of making a bet on one company trying to make it happen for all of the franchisees, it would be beneficial to get proposals from multiple providers so price and methodologies can be compared.

Provide access to unbiased advice. In this case the franchise recommended that these businesses spend 10% of their total marketing budget on SEO. That’s a huge number for someone who most likely doesn’t have a clue about it. The provider recommended by the franchise may be awesome or they may be weak, but there is no way the franchisee will know this until they are well into their campaign and have spent a nice chunk of that 10%. While I am sure the person at corporate has some knowledge of SEO, chances are they are also the ones making recommendations on direct mail, email marketing, social media marketing, PPC ads, banner ads and car wraps. They can’t be expert at all of these things and I am going to go out on a limb and guess that SEO is probably one of their weak spots (it is for so many, after all). Franchisees need unbiased advice to help them make decisions about these kinds of programs. So do the franchises by the way. There are several reputable SEO communities that provide this kind of advice. My guess is that they would be more than happy to give a discount on membership fees to these kinds of clients.

Work together on SEO. Treating each franchise as a separate SEO program makes sense as each location might need some customized work, but corporate should be devising a strategy that works for both the corporate site and the franchisees. The corporate web site should be optimized to promote local partners. Whatever link building and content creation corporate is doing should do the same. Franchisees should be given explicit strategies for helping both themselves and the corporate site rank well. I have yet to see a franchise implement such a program, but if they did, it would be pretty powerful.

Some of this is blue sky kind of stuff. Inevitably it’s easier for everyone involved to outsource SEO to a skilled (or perhaps non-skilled) provider. But too often these corporate-devised strategies don’t always translate well to the locals, and they end up acting like guinea pigs and blowing their budgets in the process. Not all corporate programs are bad per se, but they would all work a lot better if the ultimate client had better tools to understand and evaluate what it is they are buying.

While implementing an integrated, multi-platform advertising approach is an important aspect of the local business search experience, so is making sure that the advertisements businesses employ contain the types of information that consumers need. Local businesses risk missing out on potential leads they’ve worked so hard to attain if their ads don’t include basic background information on the operation and its offerings.

Released in March, the first annual “Local Media Tracking Study,” conducted by Burke and commissioned by the Yellow Pages Association, includes some interesting findings about consumer ad satisfaction. The survey found that 21% of print Yellow Pages users and 18% of Internet Yellow Pages users said that the amount of information in the ads they found was too little.

Of those who said there was too little info, the following percentage of respondents pointed to these information points as missing:

• Hours of operation: 19% in print Yellow Pages; 17% in Internet Yellow Pages.
• Details about projects: 16% in print Yellow Pages; 19% in Internet Yellow Pages
• Details about services: 16% in print Yellow Pages; 9% in Internet Yellow Pages
• Prices: 15% in print Yellow Pages; 20% in Internet Yellow Pages
• Not enough info/too vague: 9% in print Yellow Pages; 11% in Internet Yellow Pages
• Locations/area of the city: 6% in print Yellow Pages; 9% in Internet Yellow Pages
• Website: 4% in print Yellow Pages; 12% in Internet Yellow Pages

So what does this mean for the local business advertiser? The key takeaway is that a “less is more” approach when it comes to the types of information included in local ads does not satisfy consumers’ needs. A “more is more” approach—in essence, creating an info-rich ad—ensures that the consumer is fully informed about the local business, its services, and the nature of the products and services they offer.

A great-looking ad in a heavily used directory can fail to maximize the level of leads one expects if it doesn’t include all of the information that consumers want when making decisions. To satisfy the consumer decision process, local businesses should recognize the value of info-rich ads and work to implement them into their marketing strategies. And they need not worry that too much information in an ad will overwhelm consumers. According to the study, just 2% of print Yellow Pages users and 5% of Internet Yellow pages users said the amount of information in ads was too much.

Printed yellow pages directories first popularized the notion of categorizing businesses. Reuben H. Donnelly was probably the first to thoroughly categorize business listings by their services and product types in 1886. The ease of selecting from a list of similar types of businesses resonated with consumers, and the long history of YP directory usage from then to now really solidified into a consumer behavioral norm.

As print yellow pages evolved into their internet yellow page (IYP) counterparts, business categories migrated over to online directories as well. Google maps and other local search engines have changed user behavior as well, primarily through encouraging keyword searches instead of browsing through hierarchical category lists of businesses. However, the keywords that online consumers type in are frequently business category names.

Because searches by category persist, both IYPs and local search engines seek to formally categorize businesses, and they tend to give category associations a bit higher relevancy weighting in search result rankings than mere keyword associations.

Behind the scenes in yellow pages and local search sites, there’s often a lot of work to build sophisticated classification systems and methods. Keywords may be associated with particular business subcategories, and subcategories may roll up under broader category families. The business listings themselves, obtained from many sources, may be devoid of proper categorizations and thus require some method for being assigned to a category (one chronic issue I’ve seen involves how many directories may contain a huge percent of “nonclassified establishments”—a sort of defacto category unto itself that does no one any good). Business listings from other sources may be categorized, yet the source classification system may not be a one-to-one match for the directory absorbing them, further requiring them to be mapped to another taxonomy during processing to be listed.

The result of all this is that within many online directories, some businesses may not be assigned a category, or they may be miscategorized, or they may just be assigned to one broad category.

Most companies don’t even notice that they may need to tweak their category within a directory, since most merely check to see that they’re listed.

Even for companies which have been assigned to a category, it’s more optimal to get listed within multiple categories for the sake of maximum visibility. For each category where a company is listed there are additional chances that interested consumers will discover the business and come to them for products and services.

For instance, within the North American Industry Classification System (“NAICS” is a standard taxonomy for categorizing business establishments, created by the U.S. government) there are two separate categories for “florists” and “flower shops, fresh.” If a directory site out there used NAICS and you were a florist listed within it, you might be categorized under either heading, “florist” or “flower shops.” A consumer might search for either name, and your listing would only appear to half the people searching for your type of business. Unless you’re listed under both headings!

In fact, there are a lot more possible categories that florists might appear under. Google Places offers florist, dried flower shop, artificial plant supplier, silk plant shop, and wholesale florist. Superpages offers florists, floral consultants, funeral flowers, floral wire services, floral & balloon arrangements, gift shops, wedding flowers, and more. Yellowpages.com offers artificial flowers/plants/trees, florists, flowers/plants/trees/silk/dried/etc, flowers-preserved, gift baskets, gift shops, and more.

For most businesses, it’s worthwhile to be listed under both broad and more specialized headings. Broad categories enjoy the most searches in many cases, while more granular, specialized categories often result in significantly higher conversion rates since they may more closely match consumers’ intent when searching.

For instance, when I search in Google Maps for “Restaurants, Seattle, WA”, the fourth restaurant listed is “Palomino.” When I click into the Place Page for Palomino, I can see that they’re listed under only a single business category: “restaurant.” Yet, when I browse down the profile for them, I see that they feature “European, Italian, Mediterranean” cuisine.

There is a significant amount of traffic to be had for those restaurants listed under the “Italian Restaurants” category—yet, the Palomino isn’t ranking upon the first page of results for that subcategory! Considering how it’s enjoying the #4 position in Seattle for “Restaurant,” it likely would rank very high for “Italian Restaurant” as well, if they only had that category associated with the listing.

Many businesses are in the same situation as the Palomino, and the lack of fine-tuning of their category options represents a considerable degree of lost opportunity.

Miscategorization is also a chronic problem among business directories. I’ve seen cases where a directory might attempt to run algorithms across masses of nonclassified establishments to categorize them, only to make tons of mistakes. For instance, it might seem logical to classify all businesses which include the word “garden” in their names into a “gardening supply” category, but you’ll discover a ton of Chinese restaurants that are abruptly receiving visits from people interested in purchasing fertilizer if there’s not some sort of adjustment.

Miscategorizing of businesses also happens when directory listings get collapsed down in processing. If your company is located at an address formerly occupied by another unrelated company, accidents can happen which end up applying the former company’s category to your listing. Hotels frequently get their listings confused with restaurants located in the same building, resulting in them getting listed under restaurant categories or catering. Fixing these sorts of issues improves visibility while reducing non-converting traffic.

Most of the online yellow pages and local search sites allow a business to associate with multiple categories. If your business is currently listed under only a single heading, addition of a few more categories could well double your traffic from that particular directory!

Here are some tips for effective optimization of your categories:

Do keyword research to discover common industry names consumers may be using to find companies like yours. Google and online directories often provide you with tools and functionality which suggests proper categories within the interfaces for adding/changing your listings’ category selection. Also, consider using tools such as Trellian’s Keyword Discovery or Wordtracker to find related words people are typing in for your industry/product.

Use Google Sets to discover search terms that Google considers to be semantically associated with category names you’ve already chosen. To use it, type in a few category names and keywords that you believe are frequently used to locate your type of business, and then hit the “small set” button to see other terms that Google relates to the ones you provided.

Don’t restrict yourself to only broad category names! Search for industry names beyond the obvious ones you’re commonly listed under to include more. For instance, many florists often sell items other than flowers, and those florists could validly be listed under “gift shops” as well. Does your restaurant offer catering services? If so, you’d add “caterers” to your designation. Restaurants might sometimes benefit from associating with some semantically related categories, too—for instance, “Asian food” for “Chinese restaurants” or “bistros” for “French restaurants.” An optometrist might also be able to select “sunglasses shop,” and physicians and attorneys often ought to be listed under categories which reflect their specializations.

Be honest and avoid “heading jumping.” Heading jumping is when a business gets itself listed under an inappropriate business category that may only be tangently related to the products and services they offer. For instance, if a luxury cruises company selected “luxury hotels” as a category, because they might desire to advertise to the demographic of consumers who shop for luxury hotels. Heading jumping results in receiving unqualified referrals, can cause consumer confusion, may annoy consumers, and is against the rules in most online directories—so, don’t do it!

Select as many categories as you are allowed and which are appropriate for you in each directory or local search engine. The more categories you select often equates with the more opportunities you have for appearing for your target audience.

Take advantage of free-form category options! Some directories such as Google Places will recommend categories to you, but their total list of categories is pretty small. However, they also allow you to submit custom categories, free-form style. It’s a good idea to select some of their standard categories, and then also enter a few more specialized category names which you may have discovered in your keyword research. Warning: avoid adding brand names and city/place names into freeform category fields because this is against the rules for many directories and commonly gets businesses penalized in Google Maps.

Optimize your categories in all top local search engines and IYPs. Since your listing appears in a great many places that consumers are using to research and find businesses, using the same advantageous enhancement changes within each of them will increase your findability across the board.

Following these tactical tips can pump up your online presence significantly, merely by improving your categories. For businesses which have been miscategorized or limited in the categories associated with their listings, these changes could easily result in their referral traffic doubling, or multiplying even more.