* If I Were Launching a New Small Biz Website Today – Matt McGee
* Why Local SEO Is Important to Non-Local SEO – Patrick Sexton
* Google Place Pages SEO = Yellow Pages SOS & SOL? – Local SEO Guide
* How to Launch That Small Business Website – Outspoken Media
* Do-It-Yourself SEO Advice For SMBs – David Mihm
* Twitter Buys Into Geolocation – ITNews
* Google Local Research Data – Released – Distiled

Strangely, the mobile handset arms race and growth of the mobile Internet this year have made the concept of local more accessible to people. It’s always been empirically clear that people use the Internet for research but mostly buy offline. I always say, “Local is where the money changes hands.” But mobile is now providing a more transparent connection between the digital and the real worlds that helps illustrate the power of place for people.

There’s a ton of great writing about local SEO and search marketing, as well as the future direction of the local market. Much of it happens on Mike’s blog. He brings a kind of passion and near-relentless attention to a host of practical issues that are critical for small businesses and local search marketers to understand.

Mike asked me to collect my favorite or “top posts” pertaining to local this year. That’s very hard to do. Instead, I’ve selected several articles and posts that capture what I think are important issues or developments in the local space from the past 12 months.

I don’t present them in order of importance; this is more like stream of consciousness:

Local Listing Ads: A New, Simplified Ad Unit For Local Business

Google has tried for a long time to find a way to sell directly into the small business market. In the recent past it has relied on a reseller strategy. Now it’s making a bigger direct push with Local Listing Ads and Place Pages. These flat-fee, no keyword ads could be a breakthrough product for Google with SMBs. We don’t know yet.

Link: Google creates a new simplified ad unit for local business

Local Results without a Geo-Modifier

In March, 2009 Google started showing local results (map + 10, then) in categories where there was no geographic modifier. This move was a reflection of what Google had been observing for several years: consumers often don’t include a geo-modifier in a query when they have a “local intent.” Yahoo later followed suit.

Link: Google Maps now showing local 10 pack on broad non geo phrase searches/

Location Everywhere: the Twitter GeoAPI

Twitter released deeper support for geo in August with an API that will enable developers to associate any Tweet with a lat-long. Twitter later bought MixerLabs, which had its own GeoAPI. Facebook has also been working on something more elaborate with location around status updates. It may also be preparing to release its own location API. The larger point is that most content and almost all user-generated content will soon be associated with location, unlocking many interesting possibilities for the PC and, more specifically, mobile users.

Link: Location Location Location

Local Search Ranking Factors Part II

I didn’t participate in this survey but many of the best local SEO folks did, including Mike. The David Mihm coordinated project is a must read guide for any practitioner trying to figure out how to get maximum exposure in Google local results.

Another important post from David Mihm, which led to an extensive debate on a couple of blogs was his Be Wary Of Call Tracking Numbers In Local Search

Link: Local search ranking factors

Link: Be wary of call tracking numbers in local search

TeleAtlas Gets the Boot; Google Goes It Alone

Deciding that mapping was so strategic that it wanted to own the entire value chain, Google fired its mapping data provider TeleAtlas and now uses its own internal resources for Maps data. This is a big, if obscure, story and Mike wrote a good post about it last year.

Link: Google replaces TeleAtlas data in US with Google data

RX for the Yellow Pages

Chris Silver Smith wrote two significant posts about the yellow pages. One discussed how yellow pages directories and other local publishers were getting squeezed off the first page of Google SERPs because of the greater frequency of the Map’s appearance. He also offered 10 prescriptions to “save the yellow pages.”

Link: Brave new world for Yellow Pages – Google nabs marketshare & strangles local directories

Link: What can save Yellow Pages industry

SMBs and the ‘New Local Product Suite’

Marchex unveiled a powerful reputation management tool for SMBs this year (the first of more to come), reflecting the growing importance of social media and the challenges of dealing with it at the local/SMB level. Related to reputation management is a broader portfolio of tools and services that address the cluster of local business needs in the local space. I called this the “new local product suite.”

Link: Marchex releases powerful SMB reputation management tool with search inside

Link: The local product suite now in focus

Mobile & Local

I end as I began with mobile. Any number of posts and articles could go in this category. Mobile is an absolutely huge story, only getting bigger. And local is central to the entire mobile user experience. Google has been remarkable is adapting to the changing marketplace and the advent of the smartphone camera as a search tool. Google Goggles and “augmented reality” are examples of new ways that “local search” on mobile devices is evolving away from the PC model.

Link: Google visual search – Augemented Reality 1.5 and beyond

Link: Augmented reality is also a form of search

Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker got everyone’s attention late last year when she proclaimed (as others had before her) that the mobile Internet would be at least 2X the PC Internet. Since that time Gartner has said that the mobile Internet will be larger than the PC Internet, on a global basis, by as soon as 2013.

Link: Morgan: Mobile Internet to Be 2X the PC Internet

No doubt there are omissions here, maybe even significant ones. Seb Provencher, for example, has written quite a bit about the convergence of local and social and I agree with him. The so-called real-time Web will also have its local angle.

Regardless, I think this year we saw a lot more people wake up to the importance of location and the connection between the Internet and the offline world.

In the Analytics category, Martijn Beijik’s excellant piece tracking the results of a 7-pack placement was nominated:

Tracking Local search Traffic with Analytics

In the Local Search category my article explaining one of Google’s patents was given the nod:

What is Location Prominence?

And in the Google Category, my article about Google’s approach to creating business listings was annointed:

Google Maps, Small Business & Society – who’s crazy?

Here are eight posts from 2009 that sum up the year and point toward where we are going in 2010.

1) Battlelle sums up a trend early in the year (March 2009) that made me think about the importance of social media as a traffic source, and there have been several other articles about this topic since, but this particular article captures the reality of the change taking place. I think the implications for local are still playing out, but it’s a trend that will impact local in 2010.

•The Conversation Is Shifting

2) Danny Sullivan has been all over the newspaper/Google conversation and back in April 2009 I ran across this article on his personal blog. Again, this isn’t exactly local and the authors opinions are his own and not necessarily mine or my company’s, but I think it’s interesting to see how newspapers are struggling to monetize their content and I think that concept will impact local more in 2010.

•Google’s Love For Newspapers & How Little They Appreciate It

3) Sebastien Provencher always has great thoughts, plus I am a huge Gladwell fan, so this is a natural for me. Social and local remind me of those 1980’s REESES PEANUT BUTTER CUPS COMMERCIAL’s Hey! you got peanut butter on my chocolate, Hey! you got chocolate on my peanut butter. Most of your social network is relevant to where you are, and where you are is your location or something like that. Anyway, Sebastien clearly frames the opportunity here in April 2009.

•Malcolm Gladwell: “Re-Framing” the Yellow Pages Industry

4) Greg Sterling, as always gives everyone in the industry a compass to follow. I found this recap of all the iPhone apps important not only because it was informative but sort of shocking to see just how many local apps already had some success by mid-year 2009.

•Survey of Local Apps for the iPhone

5) Mike you gave us this terrific illustration of the proliferation of locksmith spam in February 2009 and it has increased the profile of claiming your business listing, stunning at the time and has led to significant change in the industry.

Google Maps Proves More Locksmiths in NYC than Cabs

6) David Mihm’s – thoughts on categorizations – he touches on many of the interesting and difficult questions concerning business listings today.

•Thoughts On Categorization In Local Search

7) Of the things I wrote this year, this one summarizes the core concepts that the aforementioned trends, articles and posts led me to think about: Business Owners: Are You Sabotaging Your Own Local Listings? The key concept is that a business location’s information can be accessed, shared, researched, judged from so many different places, platforms and applications that a SMB needs to establish an anchor and from my perspective that anchor should be a well defined, consistent representation of your NAP (name, address phone).

Enjoy 2010. As a former boss Jeff Herzog from iCrossing used to say, “search will be everywhere”. I think that’s becoming more and more true and as Greg Sterling points out in his post: Location Will Be Everywhere, local search just might be everywhere by the end of 2010….

Gib Olander’s bio….

Gib Olander currently serves as Director of Business Development for Localeze, the leading provider of merchant content management services, which includes; collection, organization, validation and distribution of merchant content. Having a complete focus on making local search more relevant, while giving local businesses ownership of their local search findability. Localeze has over 100,000 merchant contributors, whose business content is stored in a merchant repository of more the 16 million business records and distributed to more than 50 Local Search Properties and Internet Yellow Pages Directories.

Prior to Localeze, Gib Olander was a Business Development Director with iCrossing (named search marketing agency of the year 2005), where he educated Fortune 500 companies on the positive results that can be achieved by creating smart content, strategic linking and a clean platform to improve organic and paid search visibility.

Living in Chicago, IL for the past 13 years, Mr. Olander was involved in the launch of Chicago.Citysearch.com when Citysearch began its push for nationwide coverage following the purchase of MSN’s Sidewalk property. Early in Gib’s career, he witnessed the power of the local advertising market and its impact on local and regional businesses when he developed advertising campaigns as well as direct mail marketing programs with The Ameritech Yellow Pages and Advo.

Looking back, I believe 2009 was a transition year in the local media space. Mobile finally came of age after many years of broken promises and put “geo” front and center. Social media became a hot topic in the local media circles, something that was almost unthinkable 3 years ago when I started blogging about the power of the geo-social intersection. Many traditional media firms (Yellow Pages and newspaper publishers) spent the year reorganizing or worrying about their debt level which slowed down innovative deployments. 2009 was also the birth of the Local Social Summit, an event dedicated to this brave new world.

Last year, I was truly inspired by the zeitgeist and wrote my “I Have Seen the Future of Local Media” blog post (it became an eleven-page .pdf document!) in which I explain why the real-time social media revolution is a game changer in the local media space. I also wrote about Why Social Media is Not Just About Merchant Reviews, prepared a list of KeySuccess Factors for User Reviews Deployment, presented a compendium of future user features of The Perfect Local Media Company of 2014 and published a guest post on LeWeb’s blog explaining Why FourSquare Is Not The Next Twitter.

I obviously don’t write in complete isolation and I want to also share with you a few blog posts that truly inspired me in 2009.

• Greg Sterling’s If I Were a Yellow Pages Publisher . . .
• MG Siegler’s The Great Location Land Rush Of 2010
• Erick Schonfeld’s We All Live In Public Now. Get Used To It
• Neg Norton’s Predictions For The Changing Local Search Landscape In 2010
• Pat Kitano’s Media Predictions for 2010

In 2010, expect the following:

1. It will be the year where “Local” becomes strategic for all media players, triggering the beginning of what I called in 2008 The Local Wide Web
2. The economy recovers and new disruptive technologies are born. As the Kelsey Group said at their ILM 09 conference, “Get Ready for the Post Recovery Digital Shift”.
3. Social media monetization will start happening on a serious scale through reputation management and online coupons/promotions
4. On mobile, 2009 was the year of the iPhone. 2010 will be the year of Android
5. In the second half to the year, venture capital will once again start flowing to fund innovative startups, ready to disrupt large industries. We will see a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the “local” space throughout the year.
6. Human resources will be an issue in large media organizations. Hiring and retaining talent that understand the shift to mobile and social will be strategic. Entrepreneurial profiles and rewarding risk-taking will have to become the norm.

For those of you that would like to know more about Sebastien Provencher, here is his bio…

Sebastien Provencher is a real-time web and social media aficionado, a local search, traditional media & Yellow Pages industry expert and the co-founder of Praized Media, a software company that helps local media companies embrace the social Web.

Google Shows Local/Map Results on Generic Queries — you wrote about this on your blog, I wrote about it on Search Engine Land, and many others wrote about it, too. I called it a game changer. It’s huge because all of a sudden you have local business listings showing up prominently for thousands of keywords/phrases that they never appeared on before. It excused lazy search behavior. More importantly, it opened up a whole spectrum of exposure opportunity for small businesses. All of a sudden it was possible to rank on generic terms like “insurance agent” and “italian restaurant.” Huge development, and no surprise that both Bing and Yahoo had followed suit by the end of the year.

Google Launches Place Pages — I was in the middle of a two-month travelogue when this hit, and didn’t really appreciate it until much later when I got home and had time to see what it was all about. I think this will become a game changer, too. This idea of a single URL for “every place in the world,” as Google said (with typical hubris), is really compelling. It’s Google doing what the Yelps and Citysearches and IYP sites have been doing, so it’s kinda of a catch-up move in one sense … but Google has so much traffic and so much interest from business owners who want to be found. This can’t help but be big. I mean, Google’s already using place pages to show real estate listings; what else can they use them for?

And I’m shocked that Google isn’t indexing these pages. I suspect they will at some point. The URLs are already fairly SEO-friendly and some of the pages have really good content. Why not index them? So what if they’re already available in the 7-pack listings; why would Google include business listings from Citysearch or Yelp that may have less content and offer a poorer user experience, when it could show a Google place page in the organic search results?

(The flip side of all this Google talk, of course, is the ongoing saga of Google’s terrible support for small/local business owners. Miriam Ellis wrote a marvelous article about that. And no one’s done a better job of writing about Google’s ongoing problems with spam, hijacked listings, and general technical incompetence than you. So Google’s local track record is far from perfect … still.)

Some other things that stand out for me from 2009:

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors remains the de facto standard for information about local SEO, and I could retire if I had a dollar for every time I’ve suggested a small biz owner read it.

I continue to love and be fascinated by the convergence of local search and social media. Small business owners were especially creative with Twitter last year, and I think that’s just the start of things. Twitter itself has made no secret of its plans to reach out to small businesses with formal services and tools, and they’ve said that local is an important part of their plans, so it should be interesting to see what develops in 2010.

And I think we collectively tend to under-report on Bing Maps and Local. I’ve always received a lot of traffic to my blog from people looking to learn how to get listed on MSN/Bing maps, how to optimize for it, etc. I documented some of that in this post, showing that eight of the top 50 keywords that send traffic to my blog are about Bing/MSN local, and only four of the top 50 are related to Google maps/local. I suspect that means something, though it might just be that you’re getting all the Google traffic.

Matt’s Bio:

Matt McGee is the Assignment Editor at Search Engine Land, and offers SEO consulting and training to small business owners (and sometimes big business owners, too). He blogs regularly at Small Business Search Marketing and Hyperlocal Blogger.

In early December, he reached out to me and I would like to welcome him to the Local Community (btw he seems to have a tough skin which should serve him well ).

******

Not sure any of it qualifies for your list–the local space is a bit new for me, so I’ll surely have a more targeted list next year! Anyway, here’s some stuff I liked from 2009:

WWW2009 Madrid Proceedings:
Computers and iPhones and Mobile Phones, oh my! (pdf) A logs-based comparison of search users on different devices

Greg Nudelman at UXMatters:
Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters

Cameras, Music, and Mattresses: Designing Query Disambiguation Solutions for the Real World

And a collection of free resources about faceted search and search user interfaces:
Free Chapter on Faceted Search User Interface Design

Daniel’s bio if you are interested in more nformation about him:

Daniel Tunkelang joined Google in November 2009 as a Tech Lead / Manager on the local search team. Before that, he was the Chief Scientist and a co-founder of Endeca, a leading provider of search applications for enterprises. He was one of the original developers of Endeca’s search and navigation technology and led Endeca’s efforts to develop capabilities that emphasized user interaction. Previous to that, he worked at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center and AT&T Labs.

Daniel is the leading industry advocate on interactive and exploratory approaches to supporting information seeking. He co-organizes annual Workshops on Human Computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) to combine the best ideas from information retrieval (IR) and human-computer interaction (HCI). He chaired the SIGIR 2009 Industry Track, an event that brought together highly recognized academic researchers in information retrieval with senior technologists from the leading search companies, and is similarly involved in the CIKM (information and knowledge management) and WSDM (web science and data mining) conferences.

Daniel recently published the first book on Faceted Search as part of the prestigious Morgan and Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services. His articles have been published in Technology Review, as well as in ACM, IEEE, and other scholarly publications. He also blogs at The Noisy Channel, a widely read and cited blog that focuses on how people interact with information.

Daniel holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a minor in psychology. He completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University for his work on information visualization.

There were a ton of great articles in the Local Search industry this year & the following list really does not do a number of noteworthy posts justice.  But here are my choices of articles I couldn’t do without from the past 12 months…

General Interest: Why SEO Still Matters for SMB’s (Lisa Barone / Outspoken Media)
Lisa takes Web 2.0 “thought leader” Robert Scoble to task for his short-sighted view of what SEO actually means in 2009, and highlights why it’s perhaps more important than ever for small business owners.  If there were a “rising star” award for Local Search blogging, Lisa would surely win it–although she’s been a regular blogging star for years already.

The State of the Internet Yellow Pages: Brave New World for IYPs (Chris Silver Smith / Search Engine Land)
Chris details the impact that Google’s Local Universal interface has had on IYP companies in 2009.

Tips and Advice: If I Were Launching a Small Business Website Today (Matt McGee / Small Business Trends)
Wow.  A FREE, detailed Internet marketing plan for small business owners just getting started on the web courtesy of one of the oldest-school gurus in our space.  Well-written and spot-on as usual from Mr. McGee.

Analytics (tie): Tracking Local Search Traffic with Analytics (Martijn Beijk / Blumenthals.com) and Tracking Analytics from the 10-pack (Mike Belasco & Mary Bowling / SEOverflow)
Similar to Liebnitz’ and Newton’s simultaneous yet independent discovery of Calculus, Martijn and the SEOverflow team both solve a long-time headache for Local SEOs by detailing an ingenious strategy to segment 10-pack clicks from organic clicks.

Research / Analysis: What Is Location Prominence? (Mike Blumenthal)
Yes, I could have nominated the Local Search Ranking Factors for this award but no one outside of Bill Slawski has ever dived into a Google patent as assiduously as Mike did on this one — and translated it into plain English for the rest of us.

Holding Google’s Feet to the Fire (tie): Is It Time to Send Google Maps Back to the Drawing Board? (Matt McGee / Search Engine Land) and Go-to-Client and Home-Based Businesses Out of Google’s Local Loop (Miriam Ellis / SEOigloo)
It seems a shame for Mike not to win the award in this category, but we’ll use the argument “he wins it every year” to justify his exclusion.  Matt calls Google out very publicly for its over-aggressive merging on Search Engine Land (an issue which was largely fixed within a week) and Miriam continues to agitate for, in her typically polite but insistent fashion, a solution to the service area problem (which has still not been solved despite a constant outcry from the Local SEO community since the very dawn of the 10-pack).

Excellence in Business Listing Data Exposition (tie): SMN Webcast Recap: Local Business Listings (Matt McGee / Small Business SEM) and Who Powers Whom? A Closer Look at the Local Search Data Providers (Yours Truly / GetListed.org)
Matt does a bang-up job of recapping the Search Marketing Now webinar featuring representatives from infoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze, and I take things one step further with the most up-to-date chart of which data providers feed which search engines.

Corporate Philanthropy: Google Maps Should Consider a Canonical Phone Number Tag (Chris Silver Smith / Natural Search Blog)
Chris proposes a solution to help clean up business listings for the local search engines and data companies.

Business Owner Philanthopy: The Complete List of Google Local Business Center Categories (Mike Blumenthal)
Mike came across the full taxonomy of Google’s LBC and published for business owners and SEOs everywhere.

1. Particular postions, points or places
2. Centers of activity, attention, or concentration

Each year, I invite folks whose opinion I respect to provide the readers of this blog with lists of the articles from 2009 that seemed most important to them. The people contributing come from a range of positions and job descriptions, some will be familiar to you and others not. All have one thing in common; they have something to say about local that is worth listening to.

Here is the charge that I gave them: Would you be willing to share the 3,5 or 10 articles/ideas/links that influenced your thinking or actions the most over the past year? The articles could be yours, or from others and could cover any topic that you think relates to Local ie local mobile, phones, mapping, Local VC, Local companies, Google, trends, marketing, best practices etc….but articles that you found of importance in one way or another throughout the year.

I will be running lists from Bill Slawski, David Mihm, Seb Provencher, Matt McGee, Martijn Beijk, Daniel Tunkelang, Mike Dobson, Gib Olander, Lisa Barone and more.

Stop back over the next 10 days to welcome their many voices.

To (in order of appearance): Matt Cutts, Matt McGee, David, Mihm, Greg Sterling, Will Scott, Andrew Shotland, Michael Jensen, Martijn Beijk, Jen Chin (aka Mapsguide Jen), Ahmed Farooq, Rand Fishkin & Miriam Ellis: Thanks!

I have really enjoyed the many contributions highlighting 2008 in local search. The process has been fun and informative. It has provided an incredible range and depth of articles from an incredible range and depth of people.

For those of you that have missed some of these articles you may read them here. For those of you that follow local closely, you will find some gems. For those of you that don’t and want an overview of an exciting year, it’s all there.

1. Particular postions, points or places
2. Centers of activity, attention, or concentration