Either way- if you have a target market in a particular locality, your company should have a Google Places page. A Google Places page allows you to specify all sorts of information about your business- the address, hours of operation, services offered, reviews, awards, etc. And this Places page can show up in search results, alongside a map showing your location. It can be a great way to reach a local audience.

What to Consider?

1. Define Your Local Market(s)- Do you have multiple locations or serve two different markets? You can specify multiple locations on your Google Places page. Or you can create two separate Places pages if each location offers a slightly different set of services. Also be sure to determine which keywords apply to each location.

2. Know Where You Rank Now- You’ll want to have some idea where your Places page ranks now so that you know where to focus your optimization efforts. Do a few searches for your keywords of focus- and be sure to either include a geographic qualifier in your search (like “in charlottesville, va”) or actually be located in the area of interest. Note whether you appear in the Local Listings. To be sure you’re looking at the right results, click “Places” on the left-hand side of the results page.

3. Optimize Your Google Places Page(s)- If you’re not ranking well for a local search on one of your keywords of focus, then work that keyword into the content of your Google Places page. Be sure you list your business under the best “category” available. Encourage your loyal customers to review your business with a star rating.

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We often forget that no every speaks, or reads, English. The US, Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland and Guyana are the only areas that speak English as the main language. There is a handful of other countries that speak English, but not as their primary language. Then there is everyone else.¹ There are billions of people who don’t read English, yet few blogs offer translation options on their site.

To easily translate your blog from one language to anther you can add a Google Translate menu to your site and let Google handle the translations on the fly. They may not be perfect, but they are better than having none.

I like the Google Translate option as it’s easy to install and doesn’t cause any duplicate content issues. Plus it will work on any blog or website.

Another option is the Global Translator WordPress plugin. This one adds flags into your sidebar and creates sub-directories for all the translated content. All these sub-directories are then indexable creating a lot of additional pages on your site. They are duplicate content, yet in different languages, so I guess it’s up to the search engines to figure out how to handle that.

No matter how you do it, offering up your content in different languages opens up your site to a larger audience.

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The Asian contestant, Alex Wong, is a ballet dancer. Yet for his challenge, he had to do a hip-hop routine with all-star dancer hip-hop dancer Twitch. Something completely out of Alex’s comfort zone, but as you can see from the video and crowd/judges reaction, he nailed it. He took a chance, knew what had to be done, and nailed it.

Now think of you and your business, and how this can relate to you.

Comfort zones are funny things. On the one hand, they keep us safe because we don’t expect any surprised. On the other, they stunt our growth because they keep us safe.

Staying within our comfort zone means we don’t have to worry about taking chances; we’ve found our niche and success level and we’re happy to stick to it. That’s fine, and if you just need a certain level of success to achieve the results you first started your business for, then comfort zones will absolutely work for you.

But if you’re looking to really push your business buttons and stand out in your niche or industry, comfort zones will only take you so far. The real success only comes from taking risks.

Push yourself mentally and creatively. Look at everyday things and see how you can take that to the next level. See beyond the simple.

There’ll be a lot of stumbles along the way, and it won’t be easy to take off your comforter blanket and take the steps into new directions. But think of it this way – your customers aren’t standing still. They’re always looking for the best for them, not just the best full stop.

Comfort zones might make you the best; but they don’t necessarily make you the best for your customers. There’s a difference – step outside your zone and you’ll have a better view of what that is.

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ComScore‘s most recent search engine ranking report offers new insight that will make us rethink how we publish content, increase its findability, and facilitate sharing.

In comparing February to January, Google remained on top with 65.4 percent of all core search activity. Yahoo followed with 17 percent and Microsoft ranked third with 11.3 percent.

Things become interesting when we analyze search queries as opposed to core search activity. The landscape broadens beyond traditional search.

Just behind Google, but ahead of Yahoo, YouTube ranks second for search inquiries overall. In 18th and 19th place, Facebook and MySpace also make appearances in the top 20 list respectively. Perhaps most intriguing is that neither Facebook nor MySpace offer true search functionality — but they still account for increasing search activity. Facebook is up 10 percent between January and February.

What does this all mean? As social networks gain in prominence, the amount of relevant information within each ecosystem increases in value and, as such, we deliberately seek content within the networks in which we engage.

It’s the Journey That’s Important, Not the Destination

Destination sites across the board are losing traffic and ultimately favor, simply because destinations are obsolete as intended or designed. The days of the traditional “start page” are coming to an end, only to be replaced with the “attention dashboard” — a dedicated application that aggregates the activity of those we follow in social networks into a series of digestible streams.

TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, Seesmic, HootSuite, Brizzly, and Facebook each represent a new generation of attention dashboards as they funnel social feeds into one clickable view. These streams look a lot like slot machines as information flies through dedicated columns, almost blurring the text beyond legibility. But this is where attention is focused and the content that appears within it represents the future of the information life cycle.

So how do we compete for attention if attention itself is learning how to adapt to a new media landscape?

Our job is to ensure that information travels outside of our domains and to the communities of interest in order to create a bridge back to our hub. And, content must adapt based on consumption and sharing patterns with our existing and potential stakeholders.

This is an important point and one that can’t be ignored. Social activity indicates that we are already moving away from the act of proactively traveling to traditional sites as a source of new content.

With the dawn of social media, the activity that brings social graphs and networks to life is quickly changing how we discover, learn and share and it is also forever reshaping the idea of online destinations as they exist today. It all comes down to attention and understanding where it’s focused and how it is tempted, lured, or distracted to click away from it.

The socialization of information is changing everything.

Connect with Attention Where Attention is Focused

Competing for attention is paramount. We lose most of the battles before they’re begun because we’re working against years of behavior that now represent the complete opposite of tomorrow’s consumption and sharing patterns.

Everything begins with identifying where attention is focused, combined with the new laws of attraction.

Gigya reviewed data from Compete from November 2009 and observed that some of the top media properties were already realizing a dominant effect in traffic from social networks. For example, USAToday receives upwards of 35 percent of its referral traffic from social networks and just over 6 percent from Google. People Magazine receives 23 percent of its referrals from social networks and 11 percent from Google. And, CNN earns 11 percent of its referral traffic from social versus 9 percent from Google.

Peer-to-peer activity strongly influences the resulting behavior of impressionable nodes defining social graphs, much in the same way we rely upon trusted referrals from our real life contacts. The more something appears within the attention dashboard, the more likely it is that someone will click through. In addition, the more intriguing it seems, or the stronger the reaction it engenders among peers, also increases its enchantment and thus beguiling spectators to willfully lunge towards a shared experience, most likely triggering a public response that continues the social effect.

Social Architecture and Connecting the Dots

Information is already socializing and changing the behavior for how people search, find, react, and curate. The difference between our present and future is defined by the roads and bridges we build between relevance and prevalence.

As content producers, our responsibility is to connect information and stories to existing and potential stakeholders. It’s also essential to package and optimize our content as social objects in order for them to work for us in our absence, when individuals actively seek content through contextual searches.

In part two, we’ll look at 11 steps for optimizing your brand for sharing and social search.

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• www.yoursite.com/seattle_windows
• www.yoursite.com/everett_windows
• www.yoursite.com/charlotte_windows

Now within each  pages you should have the following optimized:

1. Optimized Title Tags -’Business Name + Service Type, City, Province/State’ | Keyword 1 & Keyword 2′. Eg:‘Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, ON | The Best Wedding Cakes and Twinkies in Toronto’.
2. H1 & H2 Tags – Use header tags that reflect your full business name and service type. Eg: ‘ Joe’s Bakery, Toronto, Ontario’,
3. Full Business Address – Include this in a easy to use hCard microformat. hCard may help the search engines separate address information such as business name, street address, locality, and postal/zip codes.
4. Regional/Local Phone Number – Local phone numbers build trust – both from customers, and from search engines. Often, businesses such as plumbers only have one service location but multiple local phone numbers to gain trust from small town customers, which they then forward to a singular call centre. ALWAYS use a local phone number on each landing page in the format (123) 345-6789.
5. Services Offered& Business Hours – Services often differ from location to location based as do business hours. Save your customers time and add to your body content by adding this valuable information.
6. Embed Google Maps on your Landing Page – This is imperative to include on your landing page. Not only will it provide an interactive way for a customer to map their way to your location, it will also count towards a better ranking in the Google local ten-pack listings.
7. Include Driving Directions Anyways – Unless your customers are relatively savvy with the concept of using Google Maps to get driving directions to your location, you’re best off by providing a brief paragraph of directions from the NSEW (North, South, East, West) end of your city.
8. Single Line Business Address in Footer – Having your address in the format ‘Business Name + Service, Street Address, City, Province/State, Country’ can provide an easy format for search engines to pick up on your address.
   
9. Meta Tag Descriptions with Local Address + Phone Number – This one’s self-explanatory. If you’ve got an additional phone tracking number handy, you can include the spare phone number in your meta tags to see if customers would rather call you via seeing the search results, or prefer to click on the results and view your landing page. This tactic is also specially useful for folks that use Skype (which makes phone numbers clickable) and on the iPhone.
   
10. URL Naming Structure – Last but not least, it’s important to include keywords in your url. Separate keywords by using hyphen’s and only include your most important keywords minus your business name, unless you have a highly recognized brand: Eg: domain.com/toronto-rexdale-ontario-bakery.html

Another creative approach is the use CMS sites (blogs).  Don’t let blogs site fool you, its more than just a web log.  The platform is easy to use you can add content on the fly. CMS platform under the hood is totally SEO friendly and the major search engines like Bing, and Google loves the recency.

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Google has developed a local search service within its Google Maps feature that presents visitors with not only a map, but also a link to local businesses.  Most people are already familiar with Google Maps; you simply type in an address to see the location on a map.  You can switch the map to a satellite view or a street map, or a hybrid showing both views together.  Now, thanks to Google’s local search feature, there is a “Find businesses” link at the top of the page.  Clicking this link takes you to a text field where you can type in the name or type of business you’re looking for.  For example, you could type in “hair salon” or “pizza parlor” and click the Search button.  Advertisements matching your search terms will appear in the left column.

Google Local Search Preview

Using Google’s local search tool is simple, as long as you ensure that you use Google’s Local Business Center to register your business.  Sign up for a Google AdWords account to develop an advertising campaign that is targeted to your specific local area.  By setting up this type of campaign, your ad will appear on Google’s search results page whenever customers in your local geographic area search for businesses in your industry, but it won’t be displayed when anyone outside your area searches for the keywords you have bid on. Google’s geo-targeting strategy is quite good, and can help businesses ensure that local customers see their ads.

Yahoo also has a local search service that is integrated into several elements of the Yahoo network, including Yahoo maps, yellow-page listings, user reviews, and user-generated content.  According to Yahoo, they have the largest market share of all the online local search destinations on the Internet.  Yahoo’s search allows people to enter what they are looking for and where.  Yahoo also shows a default list of local content to help users start their searches-favorite restaurant reviews, ads for other local favorite businesses, and solicitations for users to add their own Yahoo Local reviews.  The local search experience on Yahoo also includes RSS feeds and links to a variety of local business categories.

Yahoo’s local search results are pretty much the exact opposite of Google’s, because the search results space is mostly devoted to business listings and the displayed map is quite small.  As a result, paid ads are more prominently displayed in Yahoo’s results than they are in Google Maps.

Yahoo Local Search

However, Yahoo is not as adept at ad targeting as Google is.  For instance, when a user searches for a business that is somewhat obscure, Yahoo continues to display paid listings that have nothing to do with the search term.  Google’s paid listings are more relevant to the search terms requested, but not always accurate in terms of the location, and the map takes center stage in the search results page.

Marketing using local search targeting is a new strategy that is quickly gaining steam, and the various approaches are still being tried and tested to improve accuracy and usability.  Local search tools are available on a number of high-profile sites including MSN, CitySearch, Yelp, Insider Pages, InfoUSA, and Merchant Circle.  For small business owners looking to get in on the ground floor of the Local Search market while it is still being developed, now is the time to begin investigating the options available.  No one knows yet which of these approaches will be the most successful in the long run, so savvy marketers will begin considering every opportunity and including them in their overall search marketing strategies.

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