One of the biggest issues facing any webmaster or business owner is the dissemination of bad data on Local Searches. No business wants to have customers do a search on the business’ keywords and find their competitor’s listing appearing with jumbled in with their contact information. That is bad for customers and extraordinarily bad for business.

The problem for the smaller, do-it-yourself-SEO businesses is that they can literally spend hours a day trying to contact different search engines to correct and update their local listings. Not only does every incorrect listing potentially affect sales, in addition it negatively affects the company’s image. If they can’t be trusted to have the right information on the search engines, how they be trusted to do business professionally?

So you have the incorrect information out there, your employees are spending their high-priced salaries submitting clarifications to the search engines, and potential customers are turning away because of the bad company image this projects. All in all, that’s a recipe for very bad things.

A professional local online advertising company is well versed in the loopholes that search engines put people through, as well as the fastest and most efficient way to correct bad information. They will have the kind of experience and contacts that a do-it-yourself-er simply doesn’t know about, and they will get the job done without costing the business itself a lot of headaches.

Every local business should be firmly entered into the online advertising world, but the costs of trying to get the job done themselves often far outweigh the costs of hiring a professional.

There are many segments to local online advertising. There are Pay Per Click, SEO, Organic SEO, Display Ads and more all vying for their piece of consumer attention and, ultimately, their business. Now that advertising budgets are being tightened due to frugal consumer reaction to costs and economy, businesses are reviewing their online advertising strategies to focus on what works and cut back on what doesn’t.

One of the aspects of online advertising is feeling the budget pinch more than others, namely display ads. Display ads used to be an eye catching-click-through guarantee for businesses in the early days of online advertising. Over time, however, consumers began to tune out flashy ads like so much noise around the content of the pages that they want to see.

The slowdown on display advertising is also due to the fact that displays were generally used to improve a company’s image in the consumer’s eyes rather than generate direct sales.

For those news sources that are discussing the slow down on Display Advertising, the overwhelming agreement is that search engine optimization and correct website placement is key to generating sales online.

Consumers are looking for contextually relevant search engine results from SEO optimization that is rich with information, descriptions, and intelligible text. In addition, consumers are gravitating towards more geo-relevant results as can be seen with Yahoo Local. For a large piece of the consumer market, they know what they want and are looking to drill down to search in their area for it rather than take a chance on a flashy billboard.

Business Times wrote an article entitled “Investors Flock To Online Advertising Market” that caught my eye.

Burlingame-based Outsell Inc. predicted online advertising spending would best advertising spending for TV, radio and movies in 2008 for the first time. Companies are projected to spend $108 billion online and $98.5 billion on TV, radio and movie ads. Print media will still take in the lion’s share of advertising dollars, capturing a projected $147 billion.

Now if those numbers don’t get corporate attention, I don’t know what will. The billions spent each year on advertising in the entertainment industry, namely TV and Radio, have been a mainstay in the field for generations. That those traditional advertising outlets are projected to be surpassed this year is amazing.

“You really have dollars flowing from traditional media to online media,” said Jeffrey Glass, a partner at Bain Capital Partners in Boston. “So even though there’s generally a soft economy out there, you’re seeing a massive flow of dollars from offline to online.”

Online marketing experts, including us, have been saying exactly that for a while now. The reasons for the switch, according to the article, are the stand by explanations of “high speed internet adoption and migration of dollars away from print and broadcast media.” What I find surprising is that the business magazine didn’t mention one of the other big reasons for the switch, namely metrics. Companies are able to quantify the success or failure of their online ads at a level only dreamed of in print and TV ads.

Of course it’s always possible that the magazine did mention this, but I can’t read the rest of the article. Why? At the bottom of the site page, it reads:

This article is for Paid Print Subscribers ONLY.
If you are already a San Francisco Business Times subscriber please create or sign into your bizjournals.com account to link your valid print subscription and have access to the complete article.

Does anyone else find that ironic?

So now that we agree on the reasons why well written, relevant content is the key to Local SEO, we can talk about some of the fastest and simplest ways to get that content on your site. Most people agree that they draw a blank when coming up with relevant text for their site but that’s because they are looking too hard. Think simple, at first.Simple Relevant Local SEO Content Strategy 1:

If your local business site is anything like ours than your email is probably full of questions and requests for help from potential customers. That full inbox is the key to the first leg of your well written textual content expedition. Look closely at the questions that are asked most often. Are they the same basic questions asked over and over from many people? If it isn’t the same questions, are they questions about the same general idea? If your answers are “Yes” than you have the makings of a FAQ section right in your own hands.

Make a list of the questions that are asked most often, and create comprehensive answers to each. While you are doing this, liberally pepper your responses with your relative keywords.

Q.How do I know how many moving boxes I’ll need to move to my new apartment?

A. We have generous pre-planned moving kits that are listed by the square footage of your home, as well as the amount and types of rooms. Once you have entered in your square footage and room numbers, our automated moving kit manager will tell you exactly which moving kit is right for you.

You don’t need to write a dissertation on your company’s behalf. People want information, spiders want key words. A FAQ is a glorious combination of both.

There are a lot of quick SEO tips that are handed and bandied about by marketing companies, but one of the best tips is also one of the most ignored. Well written, text oriented content is a vital piece to any good website’s Local SEO advertising campaign.

Why should I care about Text Content for my website?

You should care about text content for your website because Spiders care about it. The words on your site are sifted through by software programs that send out their little army of virtual spiders. The spiders search through your site’s text for key words to find out what your site is all about. I cannot over estimate the importance of relevant textual content for a Local SEO advertising campaign.

Okay, so Keywords are important. Why can’t I use a keyword listing? Why do I need to worry about well written content?

It’s true that spiders are looking for text, but people are looking for information, descriptions, knowledge. Spiders index you, but people are the ones that read your site and purchase your products or services. You want your text to have real, usable content so that people visiting your site know that your business is professional, knowledgeable, and reliable. If a person only finds a list of keywords on your site without any relevant content, your site will come across as shady, unprofessional, and exactly the kind of business you do not want to be associated with.

When you are looking to increase traffic with some good Local SEO tactics, well written, relevant text is a great way to start.

The advertising budgets of businesses around the country having been in decline with the exception of online advertising budgets. In sharp response to the worsening economy, businesses are being forced to scale back on their advertising to attract new customers, but they have found new ground with the online advertising efforts.

This is great news for businesses with a tight advertising budget who need to have exact metrics on how many people their campaign is reaching, and how much sales or contacts have increased.

Because of this, just about every business is now incorporating local online advertising to increase sales and service. It has, though brought in a crop of businesses that have never been in the online market, and they are going after it with confused vengeance.

The problem that I’m seeing with a few businesses is a jaw dropping one. These (blessedly few) businesses are hiring online advertising firms based purely on whichever one low-balls the bid. When the online advertising campaign that follows inevitably fails to match the competitor’s online advertising campaign, the businesses are angry and confused.

ClickZ had a great article on just this issue, which can be summed up by the following blurb:

Choosing vendors based solely on management fees only makes sense if you believe you’re buying a pure commodity and the following factors have no role in success or failure:
• Technology
• Staff skill level and training
• Staff hours allocated for production and strategy

Hiring a firm for an online advertising campaign is essentially putting your company brand, reputation, and budget in their hands. The handling of your online reputation and business advertising is not a commodity. It is not a product that can be put on an assembly line if you want actual results.

So much of the search engine news focuses on Google, what they are doing, and the elusive “how” they are doing it. Yahoo is often looked at like the cute younger brother who just can’t measure up to Big Bro’s Captain of the Football team status, and yet today Yahoo made some changes to that.

While many users complain that Yahoo still allows payed placement on it’s supposedly organic search results instead of building better algorithms and spiders, some new partnerships are going to be bringing some disillusioned searches back into the fold.

Techcrunch posted today that Yahoo is make some partnering strides with Yelp and LinkedIn Searchmonkey apps.

is making a number of changes to its default search experience tonight to add more structured data to results. Yelp, Yahoo Local and LinkedIn SearchMonkey widgets are being added to search results automatically, eliminating the need for users to go into the search gallery and add them manually.
SearchMonkey is a key part of Yahoo’s attempts to embrace the semantic web and open standards in general.
With SearchMonkey, site owners create “applications” for Yahoo search that can be installed by users in the same sense that Facebook applications can be installed. Each application modifies results for a certain URL specification (for example, all reference pages on Wikipedia or product pages on Amazon). Modifications include both changes to the basic elements of a search result (the title and description) and additions such as an image, deep links, and key/value pairs.

The new search results that come from utilizing the new apps are crisp, useful and very interesting. Go check it out, and see how Yahoo is linking up even more with Local apps.