Last year, Search Engine Strategies (SES) did a local search show in Denver. It was a one day show, and was far enough away that it didn’t make sense for me to attend. This year SES didn’t schedule one, must not have gone down too well I thought. Well, today Danny Sullivan’s new Search Marketing Expo announced SMX - local and mobile, which will run for 2 days - September 19th - 20th, in Denver, CO. Programmed by Chris Sherman and Greg Sterling, it should be interesting, and given that it’s 2 days may attract more people from this coast.

It’s well known that Google Maps gets data from InfoUSA and, more recently, from business owners going in and editing their information themselves, but are they also getting that data from crawling regular websites? The short answer is ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’.

The long answer is that I’ve seen listings for small businesses in Google Maps where the website displayed for the business is that of a ‘profile page’ on an IYP site. It’s highly unlikely that these small businesses that don’t have their own websites have located their profile pages on these IYP sites (in multiple states), and submitted them as their primary websites. I also know that the IYP site didn’t go in and change the data for these advertisers to point at the IYP pages as these are sites that I have primary SEM responsibility for, and I don’t have the resources to go and add the listing for each advertiser in each phone book to Google Maps. Now as to whether it grabs other data from the website, such as address and phone number, that’s more difficult to detect, as there has to be a known difference before-hand that you can observe for a change. The advertisers that are out there now with these IYP profile pages as the primary website have the same info as in the IYP, which may mean that they always did have, or that they did change unobserved. I don’t have data on this yet, but given that I do have sites out there with metered numbers I may one day be able to say that they do (of course, I would never be able to definitively say that they don’t).

For the majority of sites with the metered numbers I am using this tip from SearchEngineGuide, and having the name, address and phone number of the business listed on one line on the bottom of the pages. It’ll be interesting to follow those that have that, and those that don’t to see if it makes a difference in getting picked up in the local search results.

I’ve been looking at the difference between searching for a local company on the regular Google web search and on the Google Maps search to see if there is any kind of correlation between the two. For this test I decided to search on “Vasi’s Catering Haiku, HI“. Entering that as my first search, I was given a result page that had a local result at the top of the page (which points to their own website), and a nice list of iyp results, starting at city search, going through paradise pages, down into local.yahoo, before actually listing their website in the regular results.

Clicking on the ‘More information‘ link under the local result gives a different result set as the query has changed, it now includes a zip code, radius parameter, and lat and long parameters. The first result is their own website (to be expected since that was shown as the primary local result on the previous page), then it’s a New York cafe website, that lists nothing to do with Hawaii on the site, followed by the previously seen paradise pages result and new allpages and yellowbook listings.

Interestingly enough, clicking back on the ‘web’ results then displays a different set of results, as the new parameters added in in the last step are now passed back through to this search, which returns pretty much the same results as the first time, bar the paradise pages result which was showing in both of the other searches.

Staying in Hawaii (who wouldn’t?), the next search that I did was for “kihei plumbing kahului hi“. This gave me a local search result for Paradise Pages that was also the primary organic result. Following that came Switchboard, BuildingTradesDir, Superpages and CitySearch. Again, clicking the ‘more information‘ button changes the results. Paradise Pages retains pole position, but then Allpages and Kivanetext are the only other results associated with this search.

So what does this show? Basically that there’s not much of a relation between the regular organic web search and the local search on Google. Yes it’s a small sample shown here, but you can do the same searches with most businesses and you’ll see similar results. It’s also not as if the local results are somehow tied to the business in some special way, as in the first example there was a website with no relation to the business, and in the second example there was a listing to a competing plumber on Paradise Pages, as well as to the actual plumber.

One of the easiest places to get links to your site with a decent page rank is from your own profile pages on different sites. Maybe you signed up for MySpace to show your kids that you were hip, then never went back? Maybe you jumped on the recent MyBlogLog fad? Maybe as a professional you’re on LinkedIn? What about when you put those pictures up on Flickr? Maybe you’ve been a member of a forum or two that have profile pages? Maybe you signed up for an authentication service so you could post a comment on another persons blog? There are many different sites where you can have a profile page that allows you to have a link to your site / sites. Quite a few of these sites will generate a decent page rank, given the authority of the sites that they reside on. For instance, I had completely forgotten that I’d signed up for the TypeKey service, when I found my profile page it was at a PR of 4, not a bad little link to throw at myself. Of course, some of these sites either ‘no-follow‘ the profile pages or don’t allow links, making them just plain text, but in the case of the former you can still get traffic from a good site, and in the case of the latter, it can’t hurt.

So what should you do to take advantage of this? For those sites that you can remember signing up for, go out there and add the links to your site(s). For those that you can’t, do a search on your name or your nom de plume and see what you find, there may be some decent profile pages that you forgot all about that you can quickly and easily link to your site(s), and pass the ‘link love’ on to them.