Here’s how the new service works:

When you type in a general search like ‘IT support’, Google will continue to display listings in the same way it always has. But if you type in a locally-focused search like “IT support Chicago,” Google will automatically change its display to a Google Place Search page. Here’s what it looks like:

As you can see, it shares a lot of similarities with the Google Places “onebox” that currently appears: local business listings appear next to a map, with a corresponding red pin indicating where they’re located in that geographic area. The big difference is, the new Google Place Search page eliminates all the non-local listings from the page and includes a lot more information for the local listings that are displayed.

What this means for you: since Google is displaying a lot more local listing content on its Place Search pages, it stands to reason that they’ll give strong preference to displaying Places pages that already have lots of content first. It also stands to reason that if your small business’s website appears at #1 in the organic search results for a local query, but has no Google Places listing (or a poorly-optimized local listing), you’re about to lose a lot of market reach.

We’ve recommended that small businesses optimize their local search listings for a long time on Small Business Tech Tips – the new Google Place Search results are a perfect illustration of the benefits of having a well-optimized local listing. If you haven’t claimed and optimized your business, do it! And keep in mind, it’s not just about optimizing the Google Local Business listing itself – the more directories across the web that include your listing, and the more reviews your business has garnered at various different sites, the more content Google will pull in.

The read the full announcement from Google, click here.

If you live in Baltimore, you may know Miss Shirley’s Cafe. This popular brunch spot is particularly hard to get into – on Sundays, the wait often passes 2 hours to get a table.

Miss Shirley’s also shares the honor of having perhaps the best Foursquare Mayor incentive we’ve ever heard: If you’re the mayor at Miss Shirley’s, you get to skip the line.

(In other words, you get automatic rockstar treatment. It’s a great way to impress your friends/girlfriend/whomever, and a great way to tick off the other poor schmoes who’ve been waiting there since 8am).

Since introducing the campaign, Miss Shirley’s has seen a 427% increase in the number of people checking into their 2 locations. This gives them a better chance of showing up in the ‘What’s Hot’ pages of Foursquare, which can have a ripple effect throughout the web (provided their page is well-optimized).

They’ve also heard from several people who say they’ve been coming by more often to check in, just to try and secure a Mayorship. Proving that there’s nothing like adding a little competition to the mix to increase customer loyalty.

Although there’s no good way to correlate an increase in checkins to an increase in business, we see another benefit of being a first mover on Foursquare: the press and awareness Miss Shirley’s has gotten from this campaign has been significant. If their local small business can create this much buzz, yours could, too.

You can read more on the campaign here.

According to direct marketing intelligence firm Mintel Comperemedia, direct mail volume is up 16% in Q1 2010.  Obviously direct mail is still working for a lot of businesses!

Amazingly, insurance-related mailings account for 43% of all direct mail volume!

Mike

Each year David Mihm surveys a number of top SEO practitioners regarding the local listing results they’ve seen, and compiles all the data into a list. The result is a comprehensive explanation of almost all the factors that contribute to a local business’s Google Places position.

Today, Mr. Mihm released the 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors. Anyone in the business of local internet marketing should stop what you’re doing right now and give it a read. You’ll learn a lot.

As Jonathan Volk points out, you can even automate the process. By feeding various articles to a locally-targeted Twitter feed, you can direct prospects to a trackable phone number or a local landing page to capture their info.

Granted, you’ll see much better results if you participate on a regular basis, since a 100% automated Twitter feed is fairly easy to spot (even for novice Twitterers). You’ll pick up more followers if you at least give the impression that you’re a real person.

But for the amount of effort required, Twitter can be extremely effective way to drive traffic and leads towards you or a client’s local business.

Last week, a new service called ChoiceVendor launched. Essentially, it’s the Yelp for B2B companies. Businesses of any size can create an account on ChoiceVendor and review other businesses they’ve worked with.

The implications for small and medium-sized businesses here are huge. As you know, Google Places leverages reviews from across the web to determine a company’s star ranking (hence, the importance of sites like Yelp for locally-focused businesses). Every positive review on Yelp can be extremely valuable to a company’s local search ranking, since Google places extra weight on listings with reviews.

Additionally, there’s an intangible value – the value of trust. If a customer finds a company where customers have gone out of their way to write 4- and 5-star reviews, they’re more likely to consider that company to do business with.

Which brings us back to ChoiceVendor. Up until now, small businesses haven’t had a great venue for their clients and customers to post reviews. With the deployment of this new service, that all changes. We expect to see Google indexing ChoiceVendor’s reviews sometime in the near future. If you have clients who operate in the B2B world, they would do well to make sure they have a claimed listing on ChoiceVendor, and try and solicit reviews from happy clients.

In the long run, the dividends will be huge.

**UPDATE 9/23/2010 – Looks like we weren’t the only ones to take notice – as of today, the ChoiceVendor team has announced that they’ve been acquired by LinkedIn. Congrats, Yanda and Rama!

Although the service is no longer available, we wouldn’t be surprised to see something coming from LinkedIn leveraging their data and technology soon. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet claimed your business on LinkedIn, now’s an excellent time to do it!

The fact of the matter is that most small businesses have done next to nothing to give themselves a fighting chance online, so anything you do for them – even if not technically perfect according to the standards of the top SEM’s – will still most likely have great benefit.

What does this mean for the person just getting into the business of helping other businesses succeed online?  TAKE ACTION!  Apply what you are learning each day and you will see results.  Don’t over-complicate things and seek perfection – neither in  your understanding nor in your application of online marketing techniques – it does not exist.

The following is an excellent post from Hanan Lifshitz at Palore, that clearly demonstrates that most small, local businesses have done next to nothing to help themselves online, and that applying some basic concepts on their behalf will yield strong returns.

Mike

Small Businesses With Low Online Visibility Can Easily Improve

May 6, 2010 at 11:36am ET by Hanan Lifshitz

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Thanks to Google’s extensive API, developers for web and mobile applications can leverage the Google Local Search data in their applications. Since the mobile web is the hotbed of local search marketing, Google’s dominance is a big deal…and it’s poised to only get bigger.

For local small business advertisers, what this means is that optimizing your local listing on Google Places is crucial. But as David Mihm points out in his in-depth Local Search Ranking Factors article, since Google uses the data from other directory sites to calculate who shows up on top, it’s not enough to just optimize your Google local listing. You need to make sure you have a presence on various other directory sites, too – and that your listing is consistent across them all.

But there are thousands of online local directories – how do you find which ones you need to focus on to rank highest in Google?

The folks at SEOMoz have a great answer to that question – to find out which sites are working to help people’s Google rankings, they recommend simply doing some local searches yourself. It’s a dead simple tactic to rank higher in Google Local search results – and while it can be tedious work, the benefits gained translate directly into traffic to your local business.

• Service businesses that work in multiple cities but only have an office in one
• Home-based businesses that don’t want to reveal their home address on their Google Maps listing

The first scenario has been particularly troublesome for us and many of our clients, as our physical office addresses often limited our presence in the Google Local results to  a very limited area, when we actually service and want visibility in a broader selection of markets.

Google seems to have resolved these issues with recent enhancements to the Google Maps features in the Local Business Center.

Businesses now have the option to select service areas outside of where their office is physically located, and also have the option of not showing their address at all, providing the privacy that many home-based businesses were looking for.

Matt McGee provides more details in his post titled Google Maps Finally Welcome to Home-Based and Service-Based Businesses.

This is an important change for anyone offering local SEM services to small businesses, as it makes it easier to provide more value to a wider audience of businesses.  We’ve often struggled with customers being frustrated that their local listings were only getting visibility in the market where their office is located, even if their services are offered primarily in other markets.  Google must have heard enough complaints, as they have rolled out what seems to be a simple and effective solution.

Mike

The impact of reviews on local search marketing results – I think people intuitively understand that having reviews of your business is better than not having reviews, but how does it impact your local search results, and what specific strategies should you use?

The following post does a fantastic job of looking into the impact of reviews on your local search results; it’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far:

An Extremely Nifty Guide to Reviews and Local Search

Once you’ve read that one and your convinced that you need a strategy for getting more reviews, check out this great post on Online Reputation Management Strategies – The “Rate Us” Page and Local Reviews.

Mike

GetListed.org

Here is a look at Everon’s results for our listing in Broomfield, CO:

It’s got some great features, like being able to save your listings to a dashboard for easy future reference, and a handy list of “To do’s” that are automatically generated to help determine next steps to get the most from your listing.

The service is free. It was put together by local internet marketing expertsDavid Mihm and Patrick Sexton – nice job and thank you, guys!

Mike