Here’s the background info: at work, I wanted to see which sites would be best to tell our franchisees to use for their local marketing efforts. So, I took a random sample of 25 franchise locations across the USA, searched for them individually in Google (“BrandName of Phoenix”, “BrandName of San Francisco”, etc.).

I then tallied up which local business sites showed up on Google page 1, as well as how many times they showed up. Here’s what I came up with!

1. MerchantCircle: 16 times
2. Manta: 10 times
3. Yahoo Local Business: 9 times
4. Yelp: 8 times
5. YellowBot: 8 times
6. HotFrog: 7 times
7. B2BYellowPages.com: 7 times
8. Superpages: 7 times
9. Livestrong.com: 7 times
10. CitySearch: 7 times
11. UserInstinct: 6 times
12. Insider Pages: 5 times
13. YellowPages.com: 5 times
14. Kudzu: 5 times
15. Yellowbook: 4 times
16. GetFave: 4 times
17. Celinea.com: 3 times
18. DexKnows: 2 times
19. Lycos Yellowpages: 2 times
20. BizVotes: 1 time
21. AOL Yellowpages: 1 time
22. FindTarget: 1 time
23. CitySpur: 1 time
24. Local.com: 1 time
25. MojoPages: 1 time

Creating this list gave me a good idea about which local business sites are getting the most search engine visibility. The top 5 local sites in particular were of most interest, and were used as indicators where franchisees should be putting most of their efforts in practicing local marketing or asking customers for positive reviews.

While the list will most certainly change as time goes on (these local business sites come and go like the wind), there’s no doubt that the biggies like MerchantCircle and Yelp will be here for awhile. I personally love both sites for their sense of community.

Why the world needs so many “YellowPages” clones is beyond me, as is the reasoning behind a venture capital firm to even put a marginal amount down for any business listing start-up, but it’s evident that people use the high visibility ones. Therefore, we’ll continue to evolve with this niche industry as it does!

So far, I’ve heard back from someone in North Carolina (we’re ranking #10 in organic there), California (we’re #1 there) and an employee visiting our NYC-metro office from California (she’s seeing us as #6). To satisfy my curiosity, I typed in this one-word keyword in my Droid’s Google browser, and we’re coming up #2 there.

It’s no surprise that search engines display different results based on regional searches – if you’re searching for “roofing” in TX as opposed to NY, you’ll be seeing a different Google 7-pack map result and slightly different SERPs based on what’s more popular in that area…but for super generic terms, it also appears to fluctuate.

Try it out yourself: if you have family and friends scattered across the country, test out your favorite website’s biggest SERP accomplishment by asking them how far up you appear in organic search for that word (be sure to explain what the hell a SERP and “organic search” is if they’re not marketers, of course).

I was once tormented when one of my .us sites wasn’t ranking for its “Holy Grail” of keywords…yet, Google Analytics was showing hits from that keyword. However, I wasn’t even appearing on page fifty-bajilion of Google for it. It could only mean that I did have a #1 ranking for it elsewhere in the country.

The moral of this story is not to celebrate a SERP position without the knowledge of it not being the case elsewhere in the country – let alone the world…or, perhaps, the device that the search was performed on. The internet is shifting toward geo-targeting and localization; not only in pay-per-click, but in organic results, too.

Think about that before you post on a forum and brag about your new SERP ranking! You’ll probably have a whole bunch of people from other locations proving you wrong.

You may also want to think about it before bragging your accomplishments to a client who hired you for SEO. Or, if you are that customer yourself :)

1. The GPS technology is WAY off.

Why is it that when I open up Foursquare at home, I’m seeing storefronts 15 miles away in search results? It doesn’t make much sense to me when I can check in to a restaurant in downtown New York City from my bedroom in Jersey. That kind of defeats the purpose. Another thing that is really annoying is how a particular place is listed in Foursquare, but refuses to trigger when I log in…even when I press “refresh.” I’ll have to do a manual search in order for it to show up.

2. It’s the Wild West.

Foursquare is too easy to spam. It seems like everywhere I go, I check in by scanning the local area, and see tons of worthless results like “YO MAMMA’S BEDROOM” and “Home” and “Jen’s house.” This is an obvious problem of the general idea of letting the community discover and check in to locations – there will always be a select few who are total airheads, spammers or abusers. The concept worked well with sites like Wikipedia because there was such a strong moderation aspect involved, which isn’t truly the case with Foursquare. The problem is that these garbage entries seem to be permanent fixtures once you include them in the Foursquare system. There’s no “report for abuse” icon on your hand held device.

3. Duplicate entries.

There are way too many situations where I see the same place listed twice in Foursquare. Which one do I go with? The one that has the full title but without the contact information, or the one that has a partial title with a phone number and street address? Which one has been used more often by other Foursquare users? This information simply isn’t provided. I noticed this with my local highway’s rest stop. There are two versions up there, one has “Park & Ride” after the name of the stop (which is the correct title), and the other doesn’t. Both really don’t need to exist: they only do, because some people are too impatient to look for an establishment before adding it to the system.

4. Entries with poor grammar getting ‘established.’

One of the issues with allowing the community to “establish” new locations in Foursquare is that some of them have the grammar of a 3rd grader. For instance, “yankees stadium” (not case sensitive + an unnecessary plural) or “JOES RESTARANT” (all caps + misspelling). The big issue is that this entry tends to become “the” entry for that establishment once it has become the first, and people start checking in to it. From your hand held device, there is no way to edit and correct the entry, which is a grave mistake (at least, that’s how it is on an Android phone). It’s kind of like getting a misspelled tattoo.

5. Getting slapped on the wrist for too many consecutive check-ins.

Foursquare likes to “punish” you if you check into multiple locations within too short of a time interval by denying you badges, points and bonuses. It really doesn’t make much sense in some situations. What if you’re a salesperson on the road? You’ll want to check in a few times within the hour; however, you won’t get any credit due to the “slow down!” warning. I realize that the “power levelers” out there are cheating the system to get points by checking in over and over, but if Foursquare’s GPS technology were a little smarter, it should realize that you actually are at different locations, and not sitting around in the living room checking into 20 establishments within your local radius.

What I’d anticipate for Foursquare in the future:

There’s no doubt that Foursquare is in its infancy, and that a lot is going on to improve it. I’m looking forward to a future where you can walk outside of your local Best Buy, open up Foursquare, and see nothing but Best Buy, and possibly the other little franchise shop that’s 20 steps away from it. Nothing more. Then, you’ll see that the listing is verified, spelled correctly, and has the right information listed within it. Fifteen minutes later, you’ll visit that new hot dog joint that opened up a town away, and add it to the system. It will remain ‘ghosted out’ or ‘grayed’ until verified (by a Foursquare community leader or leaders). When you press a location, it takes you to a page with a thumbnail of the establishment, and map.

There will definitely come a time where we’ll look back many years on Foursquare, and talk about the time when it was unruly and relatively un-moderated…filled with junk entries, and struggling to pull your real location. Until that day, it’s really up to us as tech geeks to make sure our new entries are correct and not already in the system. Spelling and grammar count. Pick up a business card or brochure, and type in the correct street address and cross street, as well as the phone number, and categorize the place correctly. Take your time and put in the effort, and sit back for the day that Foursquare shows what it can really do!

What Is Foursquare?

If you hadn’t heard of Foursquare, it’s a GPS-based application that lets you “check in” to the network whenever you visit an establishment of any kind. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, or having a slice at the local hole-in-the-wall pizzeria: simply open your Foursquare app (or the website), tap “check in,” and find the name of the building you’re in on the list once it refreshes.

If it’s not there, you can add it, and it becomes a permanent inclusion. Then, “check in” to that building and get some points for doing so. Your points accumulate and give you serious e-cred (once again, if you’re a nerd) amongst the community, and you can be designated as the “mayor” of a building, location or establishment if you’ve checked in more than anyone else through time.

Beyond this, you can leave a comment. Much like using Twitter, these “Foursquare tweets” can be reviews, comments or anything else you’d like. You can view others’ comments, and they can view yours. This can either be great for business, or a real curse if your service, food or products suck. It’s a big score for humanity, since it adds another incentive (or threat) to those who do bad business anywhere.

The Foursquare Subculture

Foursquare, to a major degree, has a huge subculture that is best compared to Twitter users and their “Tweet-Ups.” Foursquare’s gimmick are “badges,” which are earned by doing various things: checking in X amount of times, being the first to check in to a place that hasn’t been noticed before, checking in to multiple locations across regions, etc. There’s even an online store where you can buy wearable pin or patch versions of the classic Foursquare badges and wear them on your backpack or jacket. Believe me, it’s big, and getting bigger by the week.

I still don’t see Foursquare as being a threat to Twitter, or even a competitor. They both serve different functions. Now that Twitter is jumping on the geo-location bandwagon, it’s possible that they might be going into a similar direction, but Foursquare has already established its roots in the local “check in and comment” market, much like the way Yelp has become the official place to rate any business. Speaking of which, Yelp already treads on Foursquare’s turf with its own “check in” feature. Oh, and there are also more “check in” competitors like GoWalla, BrightKite, Loopt, Rummble and others…hell, even Google stepped in the ring with Google Latitude. This will be an interesting battle, to say the least.

Foursquare’s Still In Its Infancy

It’s early 2010, and one thing is for sure: Foursquare is in an obvious “neanderthal” phase. More than half the time, the buildings I check in to don’t even exist in their database, and I have to add them. Other times, you’ll notice how multiple Foursquare users have inputted the name of a place (i.e., “Vince Lombardi service area,” “Vince Lombardi rest stop,” etc.) more than once, with different punctuation or wording, yet, they’ve all made it through the system. This is indeed a problem, and a sloppy one at that. For the future, Foursquare should clamp down on legitimate names of businesses or some sort of uniformity that will disallow “sloppiness.”

The service has huge implications for what’s to come. Will businesses notice and contact, hire or reward “mayors,” or run promotions for customers who check in to their stores? Most likely.

Personally, I can’t wait to see new CMSs or even Joomla or WordPress plugins that will let us create our own “check in” feature for our own local sites.

In case you haven’t heard of it before, Google Webmaster has an option that lets your domain name “target” a specific country. This feature may give your site some preferential treatment in the country you choose. Located in Site Configuration > Settings, you’ll be able to click a checkbox next to “Target users in:”, unlocking a massive drop-down of countries. Choosing one will geographically target your site to that country.

This won’t mean that you’re guaranteed anything, or that you’ll get boosted in that country’s SERPs, but it does help Google associate your site more specifically with that region. One thing it might do is put LESS importance on your site in other countries.

Benefits of Geographic Targeting for Domains

One of the most helpful cases where the geographic targeting feature makes sense is in affiliate marketing. Say, for instance, you’re running an eBay affiliate site within Canada. Knowing how eBay Publisher Network (eBay’s affiliate program) evaluates your performance in terms of clicks vs. earnings, you’ll want to keep your clicks as low as possible. That means being “unseen” in as many countries outside of Canada as possible, as any of those international clicks will never amount to a sale on eBay Canada. It’s especially beneficial to a Canadian webmaster running a .com site, instead of a .ca site.

I’ve done this myself: using a .us domain name (which is automatically geo-targeted to the USA, like it or not), my site only received occasional visits from Canada and the UK, with an overwhelming majority in the US. That’s exactly what I wanted, too, since all of my affiliate links were strictly going to eBay – not eBay Canada or eBay UK.

Note that if you’re using any other country specific domain extension, Google Webmaster will automatically bind your site to that country. There are a few exceptions, including .tv and .me, which can be geographically changed to any other country you want.

With the rise of localization this year, expect “being local” to be one of the biggest deals in internet marketing. Got plans to go international? Create subdomains like uk.mysite.com, fr.mysite.com, etc., and geo-target each one specifically to a separate country in Google Webmaster (remember, subdomains count as separate domain names!)

One final thing to note: this is Google Webmaster, so, it only works for Google. Your geographic targeted domain name won’t get the same treatment on other search engines, like Yahoo & crew.

As for your Google.com strategy: let the geographic targeting feature be an initial step toward getting the visitors you really want, and remaining a little more hidden to the rest.

If you didn’t already know, this is what the Google 7-pack looks like. It’s that map result with pin points that gets displayed at the very top of the page, usually above organic results:

This is perhaps one of the most wanted features at my job. When you log into Google Local  Business Center, check your list of businesses. You should be seeing a “New!” tag next to a “View Report” link within the Statistics category:

Click that “View Report” link, and you’ll be taken to this sexy page:

…which offers activity charts (impressions & actions), top search queries with the number of impressions for each, a driving directions request counter, and something that appears to be a virtual cork board of events that you can constantly update on a manual basis, which will display live on your Local Business SERP.

Why on earth Google never advertised this feature is news to me (could it be that it was rolled out in certain parts of the country or world, first?), but it was something I’ve wanted for a really long time. Finally, a feasible way to track analytics from the Google 7 and 10 pack: see how your individual franchises or offices are doing in terms of what people are searching for, what ZIP code or town they’re coming from, and how many of them are using the 7-Pack to “find driving directions” to that location.

Now, your franchisees can stop complaining about not knowing the level of activity they’re getting in local search ;)

It’s astounding to see not only how quickly Yelp gets spidered and indexed, but how strong of an authority site it is. Even the star listing and review showed up directly on the search result page. I only saw these results on Google, but not on Yahoo and Bing, where the business continues to remain un-listed.

How you can use it: if you’re an at-home entrepreneur, or if you at least own your own business with a post office box and phone number, why not create the first review for it on Yelp? Your account will forever remain the “First To Review” for your own business, which is something you’ll really want. When starting off, you’ll want to look credible by actually being able to rank for your own business name if someone searches for it – these local business directories, especially Yelp.com, are a big help.

Accorinding to a local search service I had spoken with recently, Yelp.com is ranked the #3 most visible local business services in organic search. I’m surprised that they’re only #3!