Why would there already be a listing for your business? Because Google sometimes creates listings for businesses that have not yet created their own, and it does this by pulling information from sources across the web, including human-powered directories. It’s common that these Google-gathered listings have errors—for example, you may have changed your phone number or relocated since Google gathered its information.

There is often much confusion on what the proper steps are when you discover more than one existing local listing for your business in the search engines. The thing to do is claim and edit the existing listing.

It’s important to remember: For each physical location of your business, you should have only one listing. Having more than one can negatively impact the position of all of your listings, decreasing your visibility among local prospects (bad).

What if there are multiple listings? Google has recommended some steps to take to properly handle multiple listings for their Local Business Center:

1. Choose the listing that you’d prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
2. For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and one phone number.
3. Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
4. Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks – just for good measure.
5. Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.

The key point to remember is that it’s crucial to have one optimized listing for your business. This entry should have all of the additional information and be as close to 100 percent complete as possible. Local search has a ton of potential for small business and creating this optimized listing can dramatically increase your visibility among your target market and create a steady stream of free inbound leads.

In the past, once you had set up your local search listing on Google there was not a whole lot of visibility into how exactly those local search listings were benefiting you, other than corollary data in Google Analytics and the perceived increase in web based inquiries coming via phone calls, emails, or inquiry for submissions.

About two months ago, Google opened up Local Business Center reports, which give local business owners a detailed look into what is going on with their local search listings. These listings not only show small businesses marketers what they have done well, but also can show areas for improvement in their local business listing.

Let’s take a look at what’s included in the Google Local Business Center reports.
Activity Report

Google Local Business Activity Report

In the Activity Report we can see a number of important data points:

• Impressions and Actions Graph – these graphs provide a good visual representation of the impressions and activity driven by your local business listing on Google.  This can serve as a good place to spot trends in your listing’s activity and look for areas to improve.
• Impressions – this shows the number of times people saw your listing as a part of the local business results.  Every impression really represents and opportunity for you to get a customer to click on your local listing.
• Actions – this section of the report shows you how many of your potential customer impressions turned into an action for you.  The report shows clicks for more information, which means they look at your full business listing.  The next number shows the number of people who clicked for driving directions, a good sign that you may get a walk in customer from your local business listing.  Finally you can see the number of people who clicked on your web site, showing that the visitor is looking for more information.

Top Search Queries Report

Google Local Business Top Search Queries Report

The top search queries report is a great way to see what keywords are triggering your listing in the Google local results.  This is extremely helpful as it will help you see if your local business listing is optimized for the right keywords.  If you see that you are showing up for terms that are not a good match for your business, or you are not showing up for big terms that you think you should, you might want to go back and change up the keywords in you business listing.

Driving Directions Report

Google Local Business Driving Directions Report

For small, medium and large local businesses that rely on walk-in business, the driving directions report gives you an idea of where people are located when they are looking for directions to your business.  Aside from being a neat way of finding out where your customers are coming from, this also give you an idea of which geographic regions are seeing your listings.

Based off of the data in the image above, you can see that the primary cities where this listing is being displayed are Denver, Englewood and Aurora, Colorado.  If this business wanted to get traffic from another location, such as Boulder, it might be a good idea to add the city name Boulder to the business’s listing.

Conclusion

Regularly looking at your Google local business statistics is a smart way to get detailed information on how much and what type of business you are getting from your local listing.  Scanning the reports can show you your successes and also point out areas for improvement in your local search marketing efforts.  If you haven’t done it already, place a reminder on your calendar to review your local business listings statistics at least once a month – doing so could help you boost your leads, prospects and sales without any direct marketing cost.

Here’s why small businesses care about local search:

Because it’s is a way for them to cheaply connect with the best kind of prospects: the kind already looking for their products or services.

These prospects aren’t passive tire-kickers. According to a 2008 study by comScore, 82 percent of local internet searches result in some kind of action—whether it’s a click, call, in-store visit or actual purchase.

What’s defines a ‘local search’?
Scenario one: A consumer adds a geographic modifier to their search engine query (e.g., Denver pet stores). Local pet stores are displayed prominently.

Scenario two: The search engine notices the consumer’s IP address and displays local results, geographic modifier or not. For example, when I Google ‘pet stores’ or ‘Denver pet stores,’ I get similar results.

Google killed the phonebook star
Google, Yahoo, MSN (now Bing) and a handful of smaller search engines have gradually turned the phone book, once a valuable place to find information, into a glorified door jam.

The phone book isn’t dead yet. But web-enabled smart phones will probably steal the last bit of oxygen available.

Consumers now turn to search engines to find information about local businesses—their products and services, contact information, store hours, location, driving directions, deals, and price listings. [Here’s a detailed breakdown from comScore.]

What local search means for SMBs
As search engines have improved at determining the physical location of their users, the little guy now has a chance to:

• Do an end-run around the Yellow Pages
• Compete with larger companies
• Generate leads cheaply

Note: This doesn’t happen automatically. Depending on the particular industry, small businesses may find it difficult to break into the top of the search listings. That said, it’s entirely worth the effort. (If it’s a smart effort.)

There are three ways to get your business into the local search listings, moving from easy to difficult:

• submit to local business directories (Google Maps, Yahoo Local, etc.)
• pay for placement (commonly known as pay-per-click advertising)
• build a site that people and search engines will love

The best approach? Use all three methods.

This month we’ll be exploring local search in greater detail, so be sure to stop by each Tuesday for the latest installment.

In the meantime, check out the archives for more information on how local search can help small businesses connect with active prospects.

Here’s what came up in the map results:

#1 result in Google Local - a local pizza joint

Look, the top result is a single-shop, local owned pizza place (they really do have good pizza, too). In the local results, its beating out Dominos, Papa Johns and BlackJack and other big wig pizza-pumping machines.

Local search continues to grow in importance, which just means to you – local or regional business owner – that you have better ways to harness your Internet marketing efforts more effectively. That you do have the opportunity to beat out that 900-lb gorilla in your business area, if you have the right tools to make it happen.

Google 10-Pack for Small Businesses

Getting your company into these local search results has been an effective way of generating website traffic and leads for small businesses in the past. In the last two weeks significant changes to how Google is displaying the 10-pack results has increased the potential traffic of these listings by more that 60 times.

What were the changes that are causing this boost in small businesses’ potential online visibility? What does this mean for you as a small or medium sized business person? Check out this blog post from Search Engine Land’s David Mihm’s to find out.