Marty of Aimclear sent this screen shot of what, at first glance, appeared to be a spammy onebox for the Google search SEO Duluth and perhaps foreshadowed the return of SEO to the 7 Pack after their banishment:

Neither is the case. Apparently there is a Physicians Assistant in Duluth by the name of Kengo Seo. As is often the case with Medical Practioners the listing sites that Google referenced had the last name first and it was added to the index that way…

Mathew Hunt of Small Business Online Coach, recently pointed out what appears to be a new bug in Google’s clustering algo that causes one business’s citations to show up on another business’s Places Page.

It appears that Google Maps, when scraping multiple citations for different businesses that appear on a single unstructured web page, not only conflates the citations for that specific page but brings along other citations not from that page, from one business to another…

The new Google Jazz interface has received another facelift and continues to evolve. Initially the new interface, which was rolled out on a very limited basis in November, was showing only a 5- Pack of local listings. Earlier this month it was modified once again to show the 7 Pack. The new tweak cleans up the interface by eliminating the color block and a number of menus along the left hand side…

Local Search Consultant Don Campbell of Expand2Web.com has compiled this very nice tutorial on why and how my Google LBC category tool can assist in your Google Maps Local Listing efforts. THANKS!

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Compete.com’s December US Mobile Subscriber Market Share report has been released. Of particular interest to me is the shifting sands of the Smartphone Platform Market Share. The numbers reflect the December release of the Droid by Verizon (and their heavy advertising) but not the release of the Nexus to T-Mobile which occurred in January.

I have made the point before, and this chart strongly reinforces it, that initially Android is going to take share from RIM, Palm and Microsoft and not so much from Apple…

Google Maps recently introduced a new feature on the Places Pages called Nearby Places You Might Like. It was rolled out early last Friday and while it generally adds value to the Places Page, there were a number criticisms of the results particularly as it relates to SMBs. The feature was announced on the Lat Long blog later that day noting that the results were still in testing and flux. The feature continued to receive “mixed reviews” particularly as it relates to showing direct competitors in the retail space…

We have put on line a simple, searchable interface to the Google Local Business Center (LBC) categories and synonym lists. The idea is to to assist in early planning and judicious picking of the most appropriate categories for your LBC listing. At this point, the categories included are for the US LBC only.

Late last year I published the Google LBC Category list as an HTML page of all the categories but I wanted to make the list more manageable so I have placed it in a database with a simple search interface…

Will Scott of Search Influence has pointed out a new “feature” on a business’s Places Page that is sure to infuriate more than one SMB. Right below the review section of the Places Page, Google has added a new section titled (with no little irony): Nearby Places You Might Like. This screen shot of the Places Page for a jeweler in Buffalo, Barbar Oliver & Co. Jewelry:

Since it was introduced, Google has promoted their Places Page as an alternative landing page for a business and it was highlighted as such during their Local Listing Ad test last year…

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Google’s upcoming Jazz interface, which was showing a 5 pack on local searches since it was introduced on a test basis last year is now showing the 7-Pack (Hat tip to PureSheer). Here is the current view:

Here is the view from early January:

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Yesterday, Greg Sterling reported on a Google test to allow for a new paid listing type, the “enhanced listings” for showing on Maps. According to Google, the “enhancement” will show wherever your listing is currently showing but will not affect rank or where the listing is shown. This test is distinct from the test for the Local Listing Ads that was run late last year.

Brett Burlson of Burlson Law Office in San Jose sent along the following screen shots, visible on the search san jose wrongful death attorney, from his participation in the program:

As Greg noted, the program charges a flat $25/mo…

The Google LatLong Blog has announced that they have added personalized suggestions to Google Maps.

Like personalized suggestions on Google.com, personalized suggestions on Google Maps are based on past searches from your Web History. If you see a personalized suggestion that you don’t like, you can get rid of that suggestion and any others by clicking the “Edit” link at the bottom of the suggestions box, which takes you directly to the Web History removals page…

With Martijn Beijk, we are closing out our Loci2009 series reflecting on important events, trends and developments in Local Search last year. It is a dynamic space and one where as many or more changes look to be on the horizon for 2010.

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2009 was a year of change. For me personally because I moved back to the Netherlands from Barcelona, Spain to work at the headquarters office of Onetomarket, the Netherlands as an SEO consultant…

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As I pointed out yesterday, the Nexus One is a great phone. Given its limited distribution and status of an iPhone-near-equal, it is not an iPhone killer. That being said, it certainly demonstrates Google’s path to the near future.

Google is, like Apple several years ago, trying to break into an exclusive club…the oligopoly of cell phone service providers that controls access to the mobile internet…

I have a had few days to play with the Nexus. Its an incredible phone, not so incredible that it will shake the iPhone from my grasp but incredible enough that it will have a huge impact on the cell phone industry.

Compared to the iPhone, my Nexus* has a beautiful screen, incredible speed, much better integration of online social networking tools and a better Maps experience.

By the same token it is more complicated to configure and operate and functions best in the cloud…

A common strategy amongst successful corporations is to “externalize” costs. By that I mean that companies will, when able, off load costs to maximize profits. This can be done for example by pushing environmental costs to offshore producers or using subcontractors to avoid labor regulations.

Google for example, often has forum participants provide support to other users in an effort to keep their support costs as low as possible…

In early January, Miriam Ellis of Solas Web Design asked the Local Chumps (an email salon whose members vary depending on the weather but that day included myself, Miriam, David Mihm, Matt McGee, Andrew Shotland & Will Scott) what smart phone should she buy. In doing her due diligence, she wanted to know which had the best features, the lowest price, the highest performance, the comparative benenfits etc etc……

What’s New in Reviews at Google Maps:

With their newly implemented sentiment analysis, Google Maps is apparently now reaching across hyperlocal blogs, local portals and news sites and retrieving blog entries, general editorial reporting and even blog comments for inclusion as reviews on their Places Pages.

This change portends a dramatically changed review landscape where both the volume of reviews for some types of businesses will rise and the dynamics of reputation management will change…

Google Maps has been active both on-line and off promoting the Local Business Center. I noted last week that Google was increasing their trade show presence as well.

This weekend while visiting Sebastien Provencher’s blog I happen to notice this Google Display Ad showing on his site:

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It would be interesting to know the increases in LBC uptake amongst SMB’s since the Places campaign was rolled out last July…

According to Comscore, in December 2009, Americans conducted 14.7 billion core searches, with Google Sites accounting for 65.7 percent search market share, virtually unchanged from 65.6 percent in November. Thus Google was searched 9.65 billions times in the US.

Google has noted in their official blog that “Proportion of Google result pages that show a map in search results: 1 in 13″ ( based on our U…

I’ve been watching what we now call the “local online market” or “local search market” for about a decade. And finally in the past year we’ve seen an explosion of interest in “local.”

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…

A nod to the Tenacious Frog for first spotting this one….Google Maps is now integrating events and the opportunity to display time sensitive information into your Places Page. Businesses can now add events, specials & time sensitive activities to their listing

The information immediately updates the business’s Places Page in real time:

Claerly Google has long had an interest in gathering additional and more granular information at a local level…

As you know, I think that all searches, like politics, are local. Knowledge should be as well.

There is a huge disconect between what is happening in “local” and many of the businesses on the street that really need to leverage the possibilities for marketing that come from that knowledge. We hope that Getlisted.org Local University can start to fill that gap.

Our first event is scheduled in Spokane, Wa…

Since early summer, Google Maps has been actively promoting the Local Business Center to SMBs. This is a positive development as the LBC needs relatively high adoption to truly succeed and provide the promised benefits. Until this summer, Google was all too quiet about its existence. There have been a number of relatively high profile activities that Google has embarqed upon to promote the LBC of late:

-The initial rollout of the Places campaign in large metro areas in July
-The Favorite Places posters to 190,000 businesses in December
-Their appearance at the National Retail Federation Big Show in NYC this week
-Their sponsorship of the newly announced Getlisted…

The Matt McGee’s annual Semmy Awards have been announced and 3 of my articles published this year have been nominated. My thanks go out to Matt (and his many minions) for all of his effort in recognizing the many great articles from throughout the year. It is a monumental task to track, collate and order the content. Its an honor & pleasure to have these articles included in the process…

So not all of these posts were explicitly about local but I think they all discuss leading trends and toward solving problems that local is dealing with or will be dealing with in the near future.

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…

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…

It seems to me that the two most important developments in local search during 2009 both came from Google. I suppose that’s not much of a surprise in the current local environment, is it? Here’s my top two:

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…

Yesterday, Bill Slawski and I were interviewed (minutes 15-45) by Jim Hedger about the recent Google Local Business Center snafu: Google Local Business Center Results Emailed to Random Business Leaders

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