If you’re a business owner even slightly aware of your online local business presence, you have noticed some changes in the local world over these last few months. Not all of these changes are for the better (I’m squarely looking at you Google).  I want to talk briefly about what these changes could mean in the next few months.

Google – Let’s get the big one out of the way first. A few months ago Google made the change from its Google Places platform, a platform we all knew and …well we knew it. They started migrating thousands and thousands of businesses to the new Google Plus Local platform. To Google’s credit, most made the transition smoothly, with the accurate description, NAP (name, address, and phone number), and photos making the switch. Getting to the profile isn’t as easy as it used to be, however. It isn’t a matter of clicking on the teardrop and seeing all of the business info. Now, once you click on the teardrop, you are taken to the maps page. When you click on the listing on the map, and ask for more info, then you are taken to the new Google Plus Local page for the business.

That’s if your business made the cut. Since the transition, hundreds of business owners have flooded the forums and help blogs looking for a solution. The switch has left these businesses in the cold, with the dreaded message “We Currently Do Not Support This Location.” If you see this message, your options are limited, and response from Google’s “Help Team” has been vague at best. We have run into this issue a few times already, and after two months of trying different strategies, attempting to contact sources that could help, and just plain waiting; it seems that waiting is going to be the way to go.

The problem is that Google bit off a bit more than it could chew, trying to migrate every business with an established local listing to the new platform. We are hoping that the issue will be resolved soon, and we hope to be posting about how to claim and update your Google Plus local listing in no time.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and this lining comes courtesy of Yahoo and Bing. While combined, neither has the traffic that Google boasts. But both have revamped their local listing platforms to be more user friendly. It’s easier than ever for business owners to find and claim their listings, especially with Yahoo. While these offer little consolation to a company that has disappeared from Google’s local results, I encourage business owners to continue finding directories and submitting their business to them. There are plenty of sites like Yelp, Insider Pages, and Merchant Circle that will accept your business and send local signals to search engines when an inquiry is entered. In the meantime, while Google is figuring out a way to sort out all of its local issues, continue to find new ways to get your business out there.

Evolving Interactive offers local optimization services for small and medium businesses. Our analysts work closely with businesses to develop their online business across a range of local business directories and aggregaters. If you’re interested in learning more about local optimization for your business, call Evolving Interactive today.

In the last two posts of SEO You Should Know: Local Edition, we’ve discussed how you can begin to establish and manage your presence in the increasingly important world of local search. In just a few hours, you can locate, claim, build, and maintain your company’s profiles on Google, Yelp and Bing.

Those are only three of hundreds of online directories, search engines, and review sites that could have your company’s info. If you have the time (and patience), you can find these directories and complete the similar processes of getting your company listed. The more references and links to your site, the better. You could also hire an experienced SEO firm to focus on developing this local presence for you. And with the obligatory pitch out of the way, on to this week’s post.

A problem you will probably come across as you scour the web for these (mostly free) local directories is the issue of duplicate listings. It can happen on the lesser known directories and even on the heavy hitters like Google, Yelp, and Bing. You would think having more references and pages talking about and directing to your site would be a good thing right? It is, but not in this case.

Duplicate listings can occur when the search engine’s bots crawl the web after each query is submitted and they bring back all of the information they find to the searcher.  In the vastness of the internet, there are bound to be some discrepancies. These could occur when a customer cites the wrong address or phone number on a review site. Or maybe your company moved years ago, but some engines still have the old address and number. Possibly your URL or email address have changed. The reason we claim these business listings to remove discrepancies and manage your local profiles is the same reason we remove duplicate listings.

First, we don’t want incorrect information about your business feeding the search engine bots. In the last two posts, we talked about NAP. It is very important from a local standpoint that your NAP is accurate and matching the NAP that could be found at any corner of the internet in regards to your company.

Second, it is important that you leave the competition to your actual competition. You don’t want to be competing with yourself. Some of our clients have had duplicate Yelp or Google profiles with slight variations. Your potential customers won’t put too much thought into uncovering the correct listing or the incorrect one. Your gamble will be hoping they pick the one you’ve spent the time carefully selecting pictures, writing great descriptions, and developing your image. So we want to remove these duplicates to make sure when they click on your business name, they are getting the best first impression.

The tricky part is the actual removal of these listings. Some directories and engines are better than others. As we’ve mentioned before, Google has very little (if anything) in the way of customer service. If you come across multiple listings on Google for the same location, you will have to go through the claiming process again. Once you verify that you are the owner, update the information in the profile and then suspend the listing. (Note: Don’t delete it from your places, just the Google Results…you’ll still want to be able to manage it). Every once in a while, do a Google Places search for your company and make sure no other duplicates pop up. Popular or larger companies have this happen often.

Most of the other directories are easier, but are not uniform. For the most part, it is a matter of tracking down the customer support section of the directory, and sending an email to the support team to help you by manually removing the listing. Other times there will be an FAQ section, and in many cases you can find support there by selecting “Duplicate Listing Error” or something similar and submitting a request to have the duplicates removed. It helps if you know the URL’s of the duplicates, so have those ready or open in separate tabs.

Then it’s just a matter of time and patience. Keep up with your emails sent out to these support teams and check back every so often. There are a ton of directories out there, so your work is never completely done. Justify this with the knowledge that every little bit really does help. And again, if you’d rather leave it to the SEO pros, there’s always that option.

We’ve come to the end of our local advice for now. Stay tuned for the next edition of SEO You Should Know, and we’ll tackle another element of search engine optimization that will help you grow your online presence. As always, if you have any questions, email us at moc.evitcaretnignivlovenull@ofni, call us, or sound off in the comment section.

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According to the Associated Press, Google has tweaked their social hub, Buzz in response to privacy concerns.  Gmail users worried that Buzz made their email contacts visible to others.  It did so by turning these email contacts into followers (or in Facebook terms, “friends”), and making this list public.

Google rolled out Buzz earlier this week.  The Gmail service allows users to give status updates and share interests through their email account.  Sound familiar?  That’s because, according to Yahoo and Microsoft, they have been doing it for years.  “Busy people don’t want another social network, what they want is the convenience of aggregation,” Microsoft said in a statement. “We’ve done that. Hotmail customers have benefited from Microsoft working with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and 75 other partners since 2008.”  Yahoo makes a strong claim that they were the original.  In a recent tweet, Yahoo posted: “Two years after #Yahoo! launched #Buzz, Google follows suit. Check out the original: http://buzz.yahoo.com/”

You can’t argue with that.  In fact, it seems that Google didn’t even try to be creative by coming up with an original name.

Google has not enjoyed much success in the social networking arena.  Does anyone remember Orkut?  What about Google Wave?  You don’t hear much about them any more, do you?  Google Wave was supposed to kill email and was a trending topic on Twitter for weeks, maybe even months.

Since Google Buzz is fully integrated with Gmail, they have initially added 176 million users (according to com Score) to their new social network.  This is an amazing number for any new social site, even one with the name “Google”.  However, they haven’t had much social networking success in the past and they are already facing some serious concerns with this one.

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it was laying of 5000 people from its workforce.  Sure we can blame the failing economy, but many people are contributing this major layoff on the Window’s Vista operating system. While it has not been yet reported if any of the layoffs are going to affect the Microsoft Advertising division, it has been reported that they are looking to expand this division post-layoff.

Microsoft AdCenter has come a long way in the past couple years. One of the last major search engines to step up its advertising platform, I have to admit they are doing a great job of trying to keep up with Google’s advertising technologies. AdCenter has already surpassed Yahoo’s Panama system, which is often far more complicated and tedious to manage (try making bulk changes on the fly!!!).

Recently added to MSN’s arsenal is the desktop software (currently in Beta) that rivals Google’s Adwords Editor.  Microsoft Advertising has also expanded it’s program to offer a more CPA-focused capabilities.  While the advertising programs keep improving one thing that MSN should concentrate on is expanding its user-base.

eVolving Interactive uses MSN to bring in supplementary traffic for its clients. We have found that the inventory has consistently stayed low. I believe that MSN could be a leader in Search Engine Marketing if they did a better job trying to attract everyday people into using it’s search engine.

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