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Oct 7, 2008 at 11:59am Eastern by Mike Blumenthal Small Business Alert: Claim Your Google Local Business Listing Before Someone Else Does! Imagine going to the Post Office to check your post office box to discover that all of your mail and receipts for the past few weeks had been forwarded to an unknown party. The Post Office informed you that there was no chance of getting your receipts back and if you wanted to start receiving your mail at your PO box once again, you needed to go over to their new business center and fill out some forms to claim your box. Just notifying the Post Office that it was your box was not enough to protect it in the future. Due to normal delays in processing it would be 2 weeks before you started receiving your mail and money again. If you're a small business with a local listing in one of the major search engines, you need to beware: the same scenario described above could happen to your local search result info if you're not careful. The apparent hijacking of a large number of independent florists in Google Maps several weeks back is just such a story. Google, in the role of Post Office, allowed someone to hijack listings in the Florist industry using the community edit feature. For those of you unfamiliar with the incident here is a brief recap. The technique, apparently in widespread use in the locksmith, pay day loan and other industries, exploited weaknesses in Google's Community Edit capability. In this newly reported case in the floral industry, affiliate mapspamers targeted high ranking florists in major markets that had not claimed their business listings in the Local Business Center so as to be able to benefit from an existing businessâ ranking and reviews. The spammers, using these community edit tools, would change the phone number to another local number, change the location of the business slightly and then proceed to add a category, a new URL and ultimately the change name of the business. Apparently the smal

Google Maps: relative value of a OneBox vs top organic results Category: Google Maps (Google Local) - Mike - 5:50 am Steve Espinosa has some interesting preliminary research on the relative click thru rates of a #1 listing in the Local 10-Pack and a simultaneous #1 listing in organic. The organic listing showed 1.6x the click thru of the the Local 10 Pack listing. As it is preliminary research and only looked at click thru not call in or other measures of action, it is an important piece of research but doesn't speak to ultimate customer action. According to TMP's Local Search Usage Study : Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%). If one works out the combined math of the two studies (a not very reliable number I assure you), in the end the top local ranking would still provide more client contacts either via phone or in person than the organic ranking. At the end of the day, Steve's research can not be viewed as a reason to not focus on local but rather as a call to action on the organic side. I think he would agree that, in the excitement around local, you can't forget organic's power and that in an ideal world a business would use every tool available to them. However, many times, due to the nature of a business, a business may not be able to legitimately play in the Local space and their only recourse is to optimize their website for local phrases. Another interesting outcome of Steve's initial research was "the fact is that the majority of the users who got to the site via the natural link had resolution above 1024×768 and the majority of users who visited via the Onebox result had resoultion of 1024×768 or under." As Steve pointed out, this could be do the greater real estate visible to those with larger screens and thus greater visibility of organic listings above the fold. It could also, however, be

Oct 22, 2008 at 7:13pm Eastern by Greg Sterling Relying On Print Yellow Pages? Most Local Customers Turn To The Web! Online marketers have been predicting the death of print yellow pages for years. While that will never happen, print yellow pages are no longer the primary way that people seek local information. In fact, the internet collectively - through search engines, local search sites, online yellow pages and other venues - is the top way consumers look for local information. A new study underscores this change and documents with hard numbers why local advertisers have to take the internet into account when trying to reach customers. The study The shift from print to web was captured by advertising agency TMP Directional Marketing, which commissioned comScore to perform a study in May 2007 about local search user behavior - online and off. The stated purpose was to "understand the use and value of on- and offline local search sources," including Internet yellow pages, print yellow pages and search engines. That study involved behavioral observations and survey responses from 3,000 members of comScore's US consumer panel. TMP followed up that original study with a second one this year, in July 2008. The results were released late last week. This overview compares the topline findings from the previous study and those just published. Internet now 'primary' local information source When asked about their "primary" source for location business information, here's how survey respondents answered: In the 2007 findings, print yellow pages were the single, leading source for local business information. However the internet, in the aggregate, was used as a primary tool by almost twice as many respondents. In the 2008 survey, search engines (e.g., Google) have pulled ahead of print yellow pages, while internet yellow pages (e.g., Yellowpages.com) saw growth and local search sites (e.g., Google Maps, Yahoo Local) experienced a slight usage

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