Excerpts from Chapter 21 of the book, “Online Marketing Heroes,” featuring Paul O’Brien.

Exploiting Local Search

Paul knows a bit about search, and is applying that knowledge and experience to the local space. If you’re marketing a local business, the advice he imparts could prove profitable.

So if you’re running a local business, just what should you be doing to promote yourself on the web, locally?

I think that the search marketing industry today is too focused on local search, in the context of finding the business: IYP [Internet Yellow Pages], the incumbents, the business listings. So as marketers read about how to optimize for local listings, they see the recommendations that explain how to put your address on your web site, how to put your address on every page of your website, how to include your address on every page of your web site, how to include your location in your page titles and page headers. They’re really addressing the needs of Superpages.com and Yellowpages.com and to some extent Google…

Do we know how people are finding local businesses these days? Are they still using offline media like the Yellow Pages? How much of that has shifted online?

I don’t have any specific numbers in terms of how many folks are still using offline. I can only speak anecdotally; I haven’t looked at a Yellow Pages in years. I’m sure most of my peers are the same way. I do know… that those ad dollars are shifting online much more quickly than any other advertising space has shifted in recent history. We’re dealing with, roughly, a $60 billion ad market dominated by newspapers and Yellow Pages but shifting online at a rate unseen in recent history. Most of that money is directed to search engines – not online display, not online email, but to search engines…

How important is mobile search going to be in the context of all this?

Perhaps more so. Critically so. As the technology catches up, and it’s doing so still slowly relative to Europe and Asia given the hurdles created by the mobile providers, users will increasingly use mobile to search locally while finding things to do with that handheld device. It’s a very seamless transition between the search experience and a map experience which allows folks to see exactly what’s going on near them. The challenge with mobile, though, is that it makes most search optimization by businesses that much more important, because of the display area that’s available to search results and advertisers. What’s exciting for search engines is that it makes really good search technology that much more important. What I mean is that, ineffective search engines can depend on five or ten or fifteen different listings on a web results page to insure that they’ve got something that the user is looking for. When it comes to mobile, there’s only enough room to present two or three results to a search query due to the limited amount of space. Only exceptional search technologies, like Google, can respond with exactly what the consumer is looking for, delivering a positive, engaging, memorable experience that will prompt that user to continue to use mobile.

What general advice would you give to local business today, planning their online marketing?

In regard to local businesses, online in particular, the one thing that I think is still most significantly overlooked is search optimization. It is critical to prioritize the structure of of your web site, the use of local keywords, the presentation of calendars and event content and store locators, through search engine friendly, exposed, basic HTML – and not buried within Flash of JavaScript. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter how exciting your offers are, it doesn’t matter how compelling your marketing or your opportunities might be. If the search engines can’t index you, they can’t crawl your web site and absorb your content to include it in their own index well. Ninety percent of everybody in the Internet uses search; if you’re not in the search engines, your business doesn’t exist – you’re not in front of the customer. It’s much the same way that 20 or 30 years ago, if you weren’t in the Yellow Pages, people didn’t know how to get hold of you. The same is true of search now. So focus on the priorities. Define the priorities for your business and focus on things like search optimization before doing anything else. You need to attract an audience before you can figure out how to compel them to convert, how to convince them to buy, or interact with your business.

So what excites you the most about what’s happening in search today?

What I’m really excited about is the future of local, in particular, and the opportunity that it brings with mobile. The local and mobile spaces are converging at a very rapid pace. You’ve got Nokia acquiring NAVTEQ. You’ve got TomTom expressing some interest in Tele Atlas. So mobile, in the case of Nokia, is recognizing the importance of owning the most significant local map player in the industry. That says a lot for the future of those two industries converging, and those two industries really becoming the future of the Internet, in a sense, becoming the future of the web and the way that folks interact with businesses. I think that within the next six months or the next year, there is going to be a big shift in where marketers will need to spend their advertising dollars. They’ll be better able to take advantage of opportunities with NAVTEQ and Nokia, and certainly with Google, who is making some interesting moves into mobile as we speak.

You mentioned TomTom. Do you see GPS playing a part in this?

Absolutely. One of the things we’re most excited about here is that at a local level, the industry typically thinks of local as an address. But at the map level, what’s important is that every business has associated with it a latitude and longitude designation that allows mapping technologies to present that information in any environment where the platform requires a latitude and longitude for a business – like GPS. What it means is that on Magellan devices, on Garmin devices, local search becomes much more relevant, because the platform can then present results in a map interface. Not in a search-results experience, but literally right on the map. One of the things that we’ve done is to present search results through a Google Maps application… As users drag the map up and down, north and south, or east and west, the results update in real time to show you anything going on – directly on that map. Certainly, the same can be done on GPS devices, with auto-updating as people move through locations in their cars, bikes, or even while walking around. A GPS device could show that there’s a shopping sale right around the corner – up the block is a farmer’s market this weekend that you didn’t know about. I think this is a wonderful opportunity that’s really emerging right now, with NAVTEQ being much more prominent in this space. It will give marketers a completely new platform on which to promote themselves… A handheld device, as small and with as much real estate on the display as the iPhone, can integrate seamlessly with a GPS device…

Conclusion

If you want to convert local shoppers into customers, you need to take advantage of local search. As Paul O’Brien points out, that means doing the following things:

• Optimize your site for local search – make sure you include locality information as part of your keyword search.
• Focus on local directories as much as you do the big search engines.
• Think beyond the business listing. You’ll retain your customers with a business listing but attract customers with search engines.
• Make sure you have a version of your site available that’s optimized for mobile devices. Include latitude and longitude information for inclusion in upcoming GPS-enabled devices.

Author Bio: Daniel Flood is the Director of New Media for Sneaker Academy and runs his own boutique online marketing consulting firm, called LavaLink. He is also a speaker lecturing on search engine optimization topics and online marketing best practices. He has worked with clients in numerous niches, helping them to maximize their online visibility.