The Comscore Search report for June has been released. Google had 10.29 billion searches. If roughly the same percentage of searches (20%) had local intent as Google has indicated then there were approximately 2,187,200,000 searches in the U.S. on Google’s main search site last month that were local in nature.

Across all of the search engines, again ssuming roughly the same % of local intent, there were 3,187,000,000…

Since their inception, Google Coupons have been invisible to most searchers and offered little value to the SMB. Buried deep with the local listings and no front page exposure, they seemed to be the poor step child of the Google Maps world. Google Coupons are now beginning to be exposed to the the light of day and Google seems to be taking them more seriously. Will they soon be given more prominence?

I just received the following email from Google Coupon Support (who new that there was actually a person or group that provided Google Coupon Support?):

Hello Mike Blumenthal,

This is to notify you that the following coupons in your Google Places account will expire in 6 days on 7/15/10…

It appears that Google has rolled out changes to the display of the Local Onebox showing on the main search engine results page. While I do not have a large enough sample to know if the change is permanent and shows everywhere, I have tested it on several ISPs and via a proxy server to know that it is very widespread and as such seems unlikely to be a test. The change mirrors some of the elements seen last week in the Google Maps 7-Pack test…

This evening Google has announced a plan to provide 30 days of Google Tags free (hat tip to Taylor Cimala of Digital Third Coast Internet Marketing & Jeffrey Magner of Trumpet Local Media ). The following is being sent to businesses with listings in Google Places (It is of interest that even Google still feels the need to note that it was formerly referred to as the Local Business Center):

© Google Inc…

I lived in Kenya for several years in the mid 70s. About every 6 weeks I would take the train from Nairobi to the funky seaport of Mombassa and upon arrival at the coast, would frequent a local bar where the beer was cheap, the ambiance authentic and “working” women would congregate. I would enter, they would buzz around me for a few minutes until they realized that I was just getting a beer and would soon return to their tables…

Google is always testing new layouts and changes to the main SERPs but these screens shot captured on July 3rd & 4th by Linda Buquet of Catalyst eMarketing indicate Google’s willingness to experiment with bold departures from past displays for Local results. I was unable to replicate Linda’s results although she saw them over several days on different searches:

Here are Linda’s notes from her emails:

Search term: Dentist Chicago (FYI I am using FF) Double checked and it’s not some weird caching error because other dentist/city searches come up the old way…

Local University Cleveland went off incredibly well despite some unexpected speaker changes. Mary Bowling was laid up with a health problem and Google was not able to attend at the last minute due to some confusion or another. But David Mihm, Matt McGee and I held down the presentation fort with the more than able bodied & insightful support of Anita Campbell of Small Biz Trends/BizSugar, the effervescence of Maryam Gholami of Bing and Geoff Karcher of the Karcher Group…

Today, I am presenting at the second GetListed.org Local University in the Cleveland. If you are coming PLEASE take a moment to introduce yourself as I would love to meet you.

For those of you that attended the presentation these links will provide background information and details for a pathway to dig deeper into the world of managing your listing on Google Maps. For those of you that are not in attendance, the slides provide a good overview of critical base line ideas and tactics that every local campaign should embrace…

Over the weekend Google added the remaining states (mostly in the Northeast) to the list of where Tags are now offered.

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Two weeks ago, Google announced that they would be rolling their new simple, fixed price advertising product out gradually to the whole of the U.S. Last night Google made good on the first phase of that rollout. Tags is now available in 29 states and the District of Columbia. From their Places Help Article:

Advertising options: Where are tags available?

Google Tags is currently available in the following U…

Yelp’s relationship with Google Maps has been off and on again. Their reviews have disappeared and reappeared on Google Maps over the past 3 years as Google’s and Yelp’s relationship has waxed and waned. But they now seem to be on. About 10 days ago Yelp’s reviews once again started showing up on Places Pages. I would posit that this reinclusion reflects Yelp’s need to buttress and improve their traffic short haul while they implement the changes necessary to fend off the location based startups…

Google has just announced at the LatLong Blog, the beginning of a nationwide rollout of Tags, their paid, local listing enhancement. The feature, first tested in early February and rolled out to 11 cities last month, will first be available in the states where they have already had Tags (California, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, and Colorado). Google will update this page as additional states go live…

David’s valuable survey of local search opinion is now available for 2010. As always its filled with nuggets and ideas and needs to be carefully read.

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Comscore has released their mobile market share numbers for April. Several points of interest: RIM is managing to gain market share against strong headwinds. Motorola continues to slide despite having released new Android phones during the period and Nokia continues to slide period:

Top Mobile OEMs

3 Month Avg. Ending Apr. 2010 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Jan. 2010

Total U…

Google Maps has rolled out a revised interface (thanks to Jim Giangolio of Lunametics, a Pittsburgh SEO, for the heads up) to the multiple business view of the Google places management area.

The changes are both aesthetic and practical. New are the ability to organize the list by business name or status, an active alert of issues, and miniature displays of the listing stats:

The welcome upgrade to the interface which solves some long standing problems with managing multiple listings still has a few quirks…

One of the nicest parts of working on Local University has been the opportunity to meet with great local search practitioners that have helped us put on the sessions in each market. In Spokane, it was Ed Reese of Sixth Man Marketing & in Minneapolis, it was Aaron Weiche of Five Technology. The two of them jumped in with both feet to help make Local University a success. It has been a pleasure seeing and learning from the tactics and techniques that they have put together, on the ground, to make it work…

Its tough being TomTom. They are in an industry that is being cannibalized on the hardware side by low end devices and their very expensive purchase of TeleAtlas is being quickly deprecated on the software and underlying data side. That being said does that give them permission to be low-lifes in promoting their geo products? They have done so before but still I think not. I received the following ad form them yesterday:

The word Lifetime was used 11 times in the ad and it caught my eye…

Ancient History
In 2004 Google Local was released as an independent entity on Google.com. In April of 2006, when Google merged Local into Maps, the competitive scene was much different than today. Google’s main competitors on the mapping and directions side were Mapquest and Yahoo and on the IYP side Superpages, Yellowpages and Yahoo.

Google Maps leveraged their local audience to augment their direction customers and vice versa on their way to develop a very high rate of consolidated growth in both arenas that buried all comers…

Barry at SEORountable has just posted that Google is changing their recommended practice for removing duplicate listings of your business from Maps.

Here are the new guidelines from the Google Places Help (bolds in body are mine):

Duplicate listings for my business

Duplicates listings for a single business are often issues in both Google Maps search results as well as within a user’s account…

It is the end of a Grand Experiment in user generated content. Google has just announced that user edits of unclaimed business listings will need to be reviewed by Google before showing in the Map index.

In March of 2008, Google Maps added the capacity to allow users to edit business listings. It caused a great deal of consternation at the time and shortly thereafter, as many (myself included) thought that allowing unverified user edits of business records would lead to a decline in listing quality and an increase in spam…

Late last summer, Google confirmed that having a listing in multiple languages was allowable. At the time Google noted:

Yes, users can do this. The thing is, there isn’t a feature currently available, but there is a workaround. What users can do is first create the listing in English. Then they can select the appropriate language from the drop-down menu in the upper right-hand corner of the Local Business Center and create the same exact listing in that language…

Google Maps has started providing webinars as a means to educate more SMBs about the benefits and features of Google Places. Not much new here but note Google’s clear cut answer about call tracking numbers. Here is a summary of the May 10th webinar:

From: Brianna Brekke <maps.guide9@google.com>

Date: May 17, 2010 4:50:51 PM EDT

To: Maps Guide Brianna <maps.guide9@google…

Last week we had another successful Local University in Twin Cities. Matt McGee has created a great recap of the event.

I had an incredible time and truly enjoyed myself as the Twin Cities audience was engaged and very savvy. While the event was targeted to SMBs there were more than the usual share of in-house marketers and SMBs in attendance. Many of them had read my blog and introduced themselves during the event…

Local Search folks don’t always agree on the factors that affect rank but there is one search relevance factor on which there is strong agreement: A local business listing must be in the city of search in order to even be considered on a given service + city query.

While there is a general idea about how Google determines the boundaries of the polygon that defines any given city used in a search, it is never easy to determine exactly where the boundaries for any given geography are…

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Here is a copy of my presentation given at the SES Local Search Summit in NYC in late March:

I have not annotated nor otherwise provided commentary, but if you have questions feel free to ask away.

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When you do a search for google.com in NYC or Chicago you predictably get results for…Google. But the search for Google.com in some cities returns very strange results. The result that I found particularly strange was the result when searching for Google.com Olean NY:

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One of the interesting tidbits that I discovered…..

after doing this search is that the Map image in the Local Universal result now scales down so that the Local Universal Result still shows at least one organic result on even an 800 pixel screen…

Many, many professional practices and clinics have multiple practitioners. Google Maps is all about the Place. In the past, Google has made it quite clear that there should be one listing for each business.

However, Google when assembling data about these professionals, often gathers both place and practitioner detail to create Places pages. Thus often there will be a clinic page as well as a number of individual professional places pages…

Google Maps has never been great at providing meaningful feedback in the Google Places management area (aka LBC) to businesses that encountered errors in entering their record or when being given a penalty. For a while this trend was improving as the messages were getting more specific and meaningful and at one point last fall, Google’s Joel Headly responded to my post complaining about the ever onerous “Flagged Waiting for Content Check” message, by saying publicly that “I take responsibility for this…

The Google Jazz upgrade is now rolling out and is available in most locations (although not all as I have it at home but not work). SInce its early testing, the interface has evolved through a number of changes as it relates to local, some of which pushed organic results further down the page than others. In the end though the final changes will not result in any significant difference when local results are shown…