While the practice of searching for local businesses used to stem from flipping through pages found in a several-pound book – now likely stashed away collecting dust somewhere – the consumer is still letting their fingers do the walking. Today, those fingers are both flipping and typing, not on paper, but rather on mobile phones and computers. While business listings in the traditional Yellow Pages and print publications do still exist, the consumer is going digital. For today’s SMB (Small and Medium-sized Business), local search in the online world has taken on even greater importance because shoppers, now more than ever, turn to the search engine and even social networking sites first to discover and buy products and services.

Local search marketing is in essence replacing the traditional Yellow Pages as a method of increasing awareness, while driving both online and foot traffic to the business. Yet, it can be easy to see how an organization may drown in a sea of millions upon millions of search result pages and competing advertisements worldwide. A local search strategy helps optimize these results adding a geographic context to products and services the consumer is actively seeking.

Nonetheless, local search marketing is more than just a business listing on Google Places, paid search advertising or a high ranking in Yahoo or Bing. This comprehensive strategy takes the Yellow Pages ad or listing to an entirely new level with social media marketing and the ability for consumers to connect and search via mobile. For example, social media sites such as YouTube extend local search reach through video, and Facebook Deals let consumers discover local businesses beyond the search engine. Link building through blogs and photo-sharing sites also help tap into the triggers that your customers are using to discover businesses online.

Local search marketing strategies can be an effective tool to attract consumers to your business. If you are unsure of how to get start implementing local search in with your marketing initiatives, Get Page One can help you find out more about this secret weapon.

Austin Pizza: Where are the major chains in Google SERPs?

“Austin Pizza“. It seems fairly logical that at some time in the last few years, someone, anyone, working for Pizza Hut, Dominos or Mr. Gatti’s would have said, “hey, what happens when someone searches for pizza in their city?” Because, frankly, nothing happens, and that amazes me.

I could understand, I guess, that pizza executives might not see the value of the interwebs. For that matter, they might not even use the internet to look for things like pizza. After all, isn’t the internet just something the “kids” play around on. You know, college kids killing time between classes or late at night instead of studying … and what is the target demographic of these pizza companies? Oh, wait …

Where are Pizza Company Ad Agencies?

What I don’t understand – what I can’t grasp – is where are their ad agencies? The main goal of an ad agency, if I’m not mistaken, is to sell more product. I realize they are working on brand awareness, etc. (I happily await your flames , but if I own a pizza company, I want my agency to sell more pizza. Speaking as someone who searches for everything from his BlackBerry, the first pizza company to show up in my SERPs is the one that gets my call.

It just boils down to, once again, advertising agencies not understanding search. (Just one more example of how little understanding they have of search: I can’t even Google up the current agency representing Pizza Hut. If one were representing Pizza Hut, seems one would want the whole world to know about it.)

Google Loves Pizza

Google loves pizza. In fact, Google loves anything that is relevant to keyphrases its users are looking for. Google wants these companies to show up in the SERPs. Dominos, Pizza Hut and Mr. Gatti’s are all really, really relevant results for someone looking for pizza in Austin. So, since Google loves pizza and relevant results, why is it so hard to Google up some pizza at 3 am?

Pizza Chains and Google Organic Ranking

Pizza hut achieves the amazing feat of hiding all its pizza stores from Google by having a store locator that requires you to type your address, city and state into a form and click “find”. They provide no crawlable means of discovering any of their zillion stores.Papa John’s, ditto. (Did someone have a fire sale on this interface?)

Mr. Gatti’s, smallest entity in our sample, has, believe it or not, a crawlable store locator, yet they still manage to thwart ol’ Googlebot. How? Well, they have bad URL’s, code, text, H tag selections, meta tags (for a unique location, meta name=”description” content=”Gatti’s Pizza” / and meta name=”keywords” content=”pizza, restaurant”), page content… etc.

In fact, the only thing these pizza chains aren’t doing to keep Google out is forbidding access in their robots.txt file. They aren’t, are they?

Submit Business Locations to Google Local

I’ll play my own devil’s advocate here for a minute. Maybe the user experience, design or GUI is more important that organic search. Maybe they don’t want to build a crawlable directory of store locations for fear that a user might actually find it on Google.

Maybe these things are important. Maybe arguments such as “that person would never have become a customer if they hadn’t been able to Google your less than ideal locator page” should just be put aside. What then?

Well, there’s an extremely simple solution to these arguments. Google Local.

It’s incredibly easy to submit your business to Google Local. I submitted ours in 10 minutes. I submitted an excel spreadsheet with a listing of a client’s 500 locations in less than an hour. In fact, I’m guessing an agency could have an intern submit every Pizza Hut location in the world in less than a day. So, in less than a day (and the month it takes for the submitted locations to show up in Google Local), Pizza Hut could begin showing up for every variation of “city”+pizza. This would tap into a HUGE long tail keyphrase list and translate directly into increased sales of pizza … for the cost of an intern’s day. There is no excuse.

What’s that? You’re not interested in long tail, only high-volume keyphrases? Don’t get me started on the lack of SEO for pizza coupons.