Initial steps toward local search optimization should include:

• Claiming your company’s listing on online sites. Essential sites to claim your listing on include: Yelp, Google Places, Yahoo Local and Bing Local.  Here are few to help:
  • Google Places
  • Yahoo Local
  • Bing Local
  • Best of the Web Local
  • Superpages
  • Citysearch
  • InsiderPages
  • Yelp
  • Local.com
  • Yellowpages
  • Hotfrog
• Embrace social media to promote your brand, interact and engage with your customers and promote your website.  Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the obvious social media choices.
• Explore the use of location based marketing sites such as Foursquare and Gowalla.

All of these techniques work together to enhance the local search optimization of your site.  However of these three techniques, claiming your local listings on search engine sites can most quickly and significantly impact your ranking results.  When claiming and validating your local listing, you are taking control of the data that is seen online.  By taking control of your listing, you also prevent others from claiming your listing.

When claiming your listing, pay special attention to:

• Business Name. Be specific when identifying your business name.  Include the full name of your business.  However, if your company is just named “Qiigo”, consider adding a descriptor that includes keywords.  For example, enter “Qiigo Search Engine Marketing”.  Don’t be tempted to stuff your business name listing with keywords, but do add them when your business name is too vague to deliver adequate search results.
• Location/Address. The search engines place significant impact on your business address when ranking results.  Be as detailed as possible, including latitude and longitude information.  Don’t know your address’ latitude and longitude coordinates?  Find them here.
• Category. Choose the category that best describes your business.  If one category doesn’t exactly fit, test several over a period of time to determine which category garners the best results.
• Reviews & Ratings. It never hurts to ask!  So ask! Ask your current customers to go online and review your business.  Provide them with the link for easy access.  Good reviews and ratings not only help your ranking, but also drive new business.
• Citations. These are mentions on other sites about your business.  In Google Places, they can be found on the “What People Are Saying About” page.  This is another case of the more the merrier, so work on securing citations from many sources.

With these areas completed, you will be well on your way to improving your local search rankings.  The more complete you can get your profile the better.  It is also recommended that you claim your website and submit it to primary local providers listed above.  The time and effort you put into these tasks is bound to pay off in improved ranking results.

Certainly the investments from the Microsoft partnership have helped.  They accounted for $43 million of that revenue in a one-time “net transition cost reimbursement,” with an additional $35 million coming from search operating costs. 

Along with revenue increases in 2010, Yahoo is expecting to see search engine share increases this year.  Positive results are already coming in from the new Yahoo/Bing partnership with ComScore reporting Yahoo’s search engine share in March rising from 16.8% to 16.9%.

The real impact of Bing’s year-over-year growth is seen when comparing their numbers to that of Yahoo.  The December 2009 report showed that Yahoo had a slight decline in month-over-month share.  However, it showed a significant 2.83% decrease in Yahoo’s year-over-year share of all search traffic.  Yahoo’s decrease, combined with the increase for Bing in year-over-year search traffic, seems to indicate that Bing will surge past Yahoo into the number 2 spot for all search traffic by the end of the first quarter 2010.

While this change in the number 2 position is certainly notable, it is also important to acknowledge that Google continues to see increases in its total share of the search market.  Google’s November to December share rose 0.78%, while their year-over-year share grew 3.01%.  Google’s continued success in capturing and maintaining the search market could push them past the 80% share of market level by the end of first quarter 2010.