Renegade Search

For most SEOs, the most important part of Local Search Optimization has typically been ensuring that a business has a lot of visibility in Google Maps. A few years ago, all you really had to do was make sure that your company had an accurate, claimed listing for that service, and you could bank on getting seen whenever a user was looking for your type of company in your city. But in the past few years, there have been plenty of developments in the search world that have complicated things immensely. Foremost among these is the continued blurring of maps results and organic search results in Google results.

Over the past six months or so, we have been noticing that it's been increasingly difficult to separate local search from organic search. This trend first started happening with blended results, which appear when Google Places results are mixed in with other links in a Google search page. Blended results presented some problems--it was difficult to predict when a Places listing would appear before an organic link, for one. Yet at their heart, these were still local search results.

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NASCAR. FEMA. NCAA. DARPA. UNICEF. NASDAQ.

What do all of these have in common? Not much, aside from being acronyms. And by virtue of that, they are pretty strictly verboten from Google Places profiles.

According to the guidelines from the market leader in local search, business owners are not allowed to use 'excessive capitalization' in any part of their profile. This means that a local listing simply won't be displayed if there are any strings of more than three capital letters in a row. And there's no method to request that Google reconsider profile inclusion.

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Bing has begun to roll out a long list of improvements and new features across the board. Importantly, these features will not only be available on the flagship Bing.com product, but also on Bing Mobile Apps. As of this writing, it looks like some of these new improvements have started rolling out, with the remainder to come later this month.

Below is a short list of the major updates to come:

Facebook "Like" Annotations - You will now see search results that have been "liked" by your Facebook friends.

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Google has a less-than-stellar history when it comes to entering into the social media space. While there has been plenty of speculation as to the cause of this historical incompetence, it's hard to accuse Google of not trying. From Wave to Buzz to Latitude to Orkut and beyond, the search giant has long tried to extend its reach beyond what has been published to the daily lives of users. At the same time, the company has been absolutely dominant in organic, paid, and local search for so long that it's hard not to imagine what could happen if they were able to really get something going in the social space.

Their latest push towards this goal is Google Hotpot, an unfortunately-named new product that aims to combine the functionality of Yelp, a recommendation engine (think Amazon or Netflix), and Google Places. Essentially, the system is designed to present recommendations for local businesses based on the ratings of the people in a user's social and geographical networks. Like all recommendation engines, the idea behind Hotpot is actually pretty elegant in its simplicity: you are more likely to be interested in the kinds of things that the people around you are interested.

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Yesterday, Google announced that it will be sending professional photographers to business in an effort to beef up the quality and quantity of content in listings on Google Places. Apparently, the company isn't satisfied with satellite photos, street views, a camera-equipped bicycle, and even a snowmobile for helping people find things in the real world. They are now interesting in actually going inside the businesses they list.
To feed this insatiable lust for information, Google has hired professional photographers in select cities in the United States, Australia and Japan. Businesses can apply for a photo shoot at the Google Business Photos site. Apparently, the shoots will take about an hour, and will be minimally disruptive for pretty much all types of businesses. And best of all, like most things Google, the photo shoots have the competitive price of $0.00 (which, regardless of the exchange rate, is also ¥0 in Tokyo and Kyoto).

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