Local search is impatient.  It’s directional in nature.  It’s not exploratory.  It’s more about the physical facts, and less about qualitative information.

Therefore, for small business owners, local search is about being there and being found — wherever consumers might be looking.

Imagine yourself as a consumer and you’re late to a dinner party in Leesburg, Virginia.  You’re driving around an unfamiliar town looking for a wine store to pick up a nice bottle of French white wine.  At this moment, you simply don’t care about who’s content has position 1, 3, or 5 in organic search results.  You only care about what’s there in the real world, whether it’s close to you, and whether they’re open at 7:00 pm on Saturday.

Google, of course, understands this dynamic.  They know that search is not always about “ranking” and they understand that “relevance” itself is contextual to one’s circumstance.  For example, depending on your situation, you might be: 

• >relaxing on a lazy sunday afternoon searching for things that entertain you
• >shopping for a friend’s birthday gift and searching for a particular product
• >interested in learning more about the conflict in the Gaza and searching for the latest news
• >driving around an unfamiliar town desperately searching for a wine store

Therefore, to facilitate search experiences Google continues to refine their universal search algorithm by blending different types of content into search results. Depending upon the query, Google will present not only organic results based on page rank — but they will also blend in videos, images, news clips, product info and a variety of other content types.  For queries involving business service and locality, Google will blend in the so-called 10 pak – a list of 10 local businesses in town, plotted on a map, that might be relevant to your needs.  BTW, below is a screen shot of the 10 Pak results for wine stores in Leesburg, VA:

Consumers are constantly searching in Google,  in Yahoo, in MSN, in the phone book, in GPS navigational systems, over the phone with 411 operators, on their mobile phones via search-based apps.  In addition to practicing basic SEO hygiene, it is critical that SMBs take additional (different) steps so consumers will find them in the context of local search.

In the coming days I will be authoring a follow-up post that will cover (a) specific steps that SMBs can take on their own to get found, and (b) the emergence of business profiling platforms designed to help SMBs create, maintain, enhance and openly distribute their content to any and all services where consumers might be looking to find them.

Therefore, with regard to Google’s announcement that it is eliminating newspaper ads from it’s popular ad words product, i’d like you to imagine the following:

• The world’s advertisers are watching a real life game of Survivor
• The contestants are different types of media (Web PPC, TV, Radio, Newspaper, Outdoor, Mobile PPC, etc.)
• The contestants goal is to please the advertisers and stay on the island
• The island is slowly shrinking as fewer dollars are being spent by advertisers
• The name of the island is Adwordia
• The host of the show is Mr. Google (not Mr. Probst)
• The host has all the votes and unilaterally decides who stays and who goes

Unfortunately, for the newspaper industry, Mr. Google grew tired of selling remnants and splitting paltry fees.  Therefore, he decided the newspapers had to leave Adwordia.

Left to their own devices newspapers still sell $40 billion worth of advertising per year.  So, even though they have been booted off the Google island, you can still talk to their sales reps and buy their ads — at least for now.

Of course, if you happen to be a small business, then I would suggest that the key to your marketing future has nothing to do with buying expensive ads — not from newspapers or anyone else.  Instead, your future depends on your ability to get found for free in natural search.  To this end, you should seek simple to use tools that can help you create interesting and engaging content that is highly specific (topically and geographically) to the products and services you provide.

First, I received a tweet this morning from @TheKelseyGroup with a link to a case study about a local search portal called Weblocal.ca that has managed to generate large amounts of traffic after only a few months of being in market.  The company is actually a partnership between a software company called YellowBot and a Canadian print media company called Transcontinental with a collection of newspaper and magazine assets.  The portal itself is simple and clean.  Content is spotlighted for videos, pictures, users, and reviews.  Plus there is a tag cloud for popular topics and for popular places.

If you’re interested in local search, there is a lot to think about for sure.  However, in my opinion, the most intriguing part of the story is the 1 million UVs after just 60 days.  2.5% of Canada’s population visited the site in December 2008.  Transcon is pushing hard to promote the site through their 400 person sales channel and traditional media assets and it’ll be interesting to see how far they can go when taking on the leaders such as YPG and Canpages.

Second, in a sign that VC is not dead yet — or perhaps a sign that local search and generating inbound leads for SMBs remains a huge opportunity – Yodel announced that it closed a $10 million sercies C round.

I’ve said it before.  I’ll say it again.  In a down economy like this, SMBs are aggressively on the hunt for inbound leads.  Those that are positioned to help generate inbound sales leads for SMBs have an excellent opportunity for growth in the next few years.