Doing big ecommerce for years meant I didn’t get too much experience with local search.  You may not know, but (for example) the Toys R’ Us website and the brick and mortars aren’t really connected, which is (fortunately or unfortunately?) pretty common in enterprise ecommerce. Many big retailers who have an online presence only put a small amount of their funds and attention into the .com, typically resulting in silos.  

Now in my latest role as a B2B marketer for a regional business, I was excited to dive into some local work.  The problem is, I didn’t do a great job keeping up with this specialization.  I needed to ameliorate myself.  I didn’t totally understand the Venice update, and there were changes with the packs that I didn’t totally follow.  I was more experienced with optimizing local pages in Google’s general search, than for the more intuitive local packs.

At Mozcon 2012, Darren Shaw had one of the most useful presentations for me.  I asked him to go to dinner (yes, I wasn’t afraid to ask for a date apparently) to pick his brain.  He was meeting his family that night, but was kind enough to help me out following my Seattle visit via email.  I’m a regular user of Whitespark now.  There’s a great citation finder tool (with a positive SEObook review here), and they have services that dig way deeper than, say, Yext.  Whitespark also teamed up with Citation Labs to create the darling Link Prospector.  He’s humble about it, but Darren and Whitespark should be on your radar.

I asked him some questions and decided to share the answers – hopefully if you’re at the same level as I am with local search, this will be very useful to you to too.

What are some ways local search can help drive qualified traffic that sites without a brick or mortar counterpart haven’t considered?
There are plenty of local service based businesses without physical offices. Appearing in the local pack listings can often drive more clicks than an organic listing, especially if you’ve taken the time to set up Google Authorship to make make your listing stand out with a profile photo.

One major benefit to having a local listing are the reviews that potential customers can read to evaluate and select your business. A prominent local listing combined with plenty of positive reviews is a guaranteed business booster far beyond what you’d see with only a high organic ranking. People trust user reviews more than what you say about your services on your website.

Can you define the Venice update? Does Venice only affect Google’s local vertical (ie, the local packs), or does it also contribute to rankings in the regular results.

In a nutshell, Venice localized the organic results. Since Venice, if google detects local intent in the search query, they’ll try to return locally relevant organic results in addition to the local pack. For an excellent, in-depth, guide to the implications of Venice, check out this post from Mike Ramsey on SEOmoz’s blog.

What are some of vital local search tactics, maybe compared to life before the Venice update?

The blended algo was already in place prior to Venice, but the organic factors (onsite & links) gained more weight.

The local search tactics we employ didn’t change post Venice.  The core tactics remain:

• Local Google+ Page optimization (categories being the most important)
• Website optimization
• NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistency (audit and clean up of existing citations)
• Citation building
• Review acquisition and reputation management (responding to reviews).
• Content development and link building.

Does Google+ integration change tactics and strategies much?

Not much.  There are two things that changed:

1) We now encourage our clients to be more active in Google+. I’m not convinced that social signals are providing any permanent ranking benefits at the moment (although we are seeing temporary boosts), but I figure it’s going to be valuable in the long term to have some social authority built up.

2) Businesses can review other businesses AS the business rather than an individual, so this opens up new ways of acquiring reviews by asking your business partners to review you. You review them, they review you, win-win.

What are some of your favorite ways to optimize for local search inside and outside of the packs?

- Tracking down and cleaning up inconsistent NAP data in your citations is a time consuming and frustrating task, but it can have a very positive impact once all the issues have been sorted out. We’re going to be launching a service for this soon.

- Getting a few very high quality, locally relevant, links can give a great boost to your rankings. Sponsorship opportunities at the local colleges are good for this. (this tip courtesy of David Mihm)

- We love citations from locally relevant and industry specific sites. You can use the Local Citation Finder to find them (see the how-to at the bottom of this post), or you can just hire our citation building service to do the hunting and submitting for you.

- You have to get the reviews rolling in. Lot’s of great tips in this post from my friend Matthew Hunt, and be sure to watch this video.

- Using the Link Prospector to find local guest post opportunities, and getting a citation as well as a link in the post has been working well for us. We also use it to find those high value, local, sponsorship opportunities that I mentioned above.

Thanks to Darren for your patience with me and kindness.  Check out: