Mary Bowling will be speaking about “Local Search” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’ve been working in SEO and Local Search for about 6 years and am currently at seOverflow, a Denver SEO company that specializes in doing outsourced work for web designers and other marketing agencies. We do web site optimization, link building and pay per click marketing for a variety of local and national clients. I blog at seOverflow and Optimized! , do trainings on Local Search for Planet Ocean and write on the topic for Search Engines News. Mike Belasco and I are currently busy conducting Local Search trainings for our clients and for other Search Marketing companies.

2) People still complain about bad information and hijacked listings in Google Local. How close is Google to “getting it right”?

Google Local can’t seem to quite “get it right”. Google wants to be THE source of local business information on the web, but their system currently has so many glitches that many small business owners and marketing agencies are totally frustrated with it. There have been a lot of advances and testing over the past year, which shows they want to improve it. However, as long as the listing and verification system is so flawed, Google needs to compensate with more responsive customer service.

3) What can a business do to help raise its Google local search ranking?

Just like the regular Google Search algorithm, the Maps algorithm is based on relevance and trust, so keep those 2 things foremost in your mind when optimizing for Local Search. Check out the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey to get all the details. Reviews are a huge factor in Local Search and getting more good reviews is a struggle for many small businesses. Instituting a system for regularly soliciting reviews and ratings from happy customers can really help to boost rankings in Google Maps.

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