I’ve seen store locator pages which list all the events happening at all of a company’s outlets, as well as smaller scope events such as custom wine tastings or special holiday meals at restaurants. Even otherwise staid companies often participate in charity events in their areas. When you think of optimizing for local events content, the concept can apply to many types of businesses in addition to obviously event-oriented businesses like theaters and sporting event centers.

The direct advantage of tagging this date-driven content with Microformatting is that it allows visitors to harvest that information, save it, and take it with them to other systems they already use for planning. Users who have browser toolbars like Operator can easily click on a button in their browser when they are visiting a page containing hCalendar data, and save the event to their Outlook Calendar, the Google Calendar, the Yahoo! Calendar, or elsewhere.

The indirect advantage of the hCalendar formatting is that it normalizes how events data is presented on your site, allowing that data to be easily harvested by humans and bots. People who harvest your events data either want to attend the event themselves, or may be linking to it from other news or events websites — and they typically may link back to your site when they list such content, improving your site’s PageRank.

Search engines and other events application developers might also prefer this, because it makes a standard for delivering event data - it can make it easier for them to absorb event data across many sites. In of itself, this would never really be used as a ranking signal, though it could allow search engines to easily identify sites which contain events content.

hCalendar Microformat is invisible — it’s semantic markup behind the scenes of the event information you’re presenting. If the event has a location, the address can be marked up in hCard Microformat and nested within the hCalendar formatting. If the grouping of the hCalendar info isn’t to your liking, you can use styles to suppress the display of the data that’s tagged for Microformat.

A good example of an events site which is using hCalendar in the real world is Zvents. On a current event listing for a Big Bad Voodoo Daddy concert coming up at the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth, you can view the source to see the following markup:

<div class=”vevent” style=”display:none;”>

<a class=”url” href=”http://www.zvents.com/fort-worth-tx/events/show/79634462″></a>
<span class=”summary”>Big Bad Voodoo Daddy</span>
<abbr class=”dtstart” title=”20080309T200000″ />
<abbr class=”dtend” title=”20080309T200000″ />
<span class=”description”>Musical Performance featuring Big Bad Voodoo Daddy</span>

<span class=”location vcard” style=”display:none;”>
<a href=”http://www.zvents.com/fort-worth-tx/venues/show/35132″ class=”url fn org” only_path=”false”>Bass Performance Hall</a>
<span class=”adr”>
<span class=”locality”>Fort Worth</span>
<span class=”region”>TX</span>

<span class=”street-address”>4th and Calhoun Streets</span>
</span>
</span>
</div>

As you can see, this entire section is within a DIV that has a STYLE applied of “display:none;”, since they apparently desired to have the visual presentation of the event’s name, description, date, address, and such arranged in different orders and placed around on the page separately from the arrangement of the same info within the hCalendar.

This is not rocket science! It’s not a hard thing to add to your site’s HTML coding, so there is very low barrier to entry in adopting this protocol.

As adoption of Microformats increases, it’s more and more valuable as a strategy for optimization. It improves user experience, increases participation with your site, and potentially can help in promoting your business by enabling easy distribution of your events.

There are a lot of local businesses out there that have no addresses. These are frequently independent contractors like plumbers, electricians, mobile auto repairmen, house painters, roofing contractors, building contractors, and so on. These guys may operate out of their vans and trucks, and are not set up for having the public show up on their doorstep.

A brick-and-mortar location for a business is not just its "home base.” A store with a sign out front typically serves as a kind of advertisement, too, allowing passers-by to spontaneously decide to drop in, or to file the biz away in their memory for any future needs. The address-less types of businesses don’t get to benefit from this type of in situ advertising, and so they’re even more dependent upon other advertising such as newspaper, yellow pages, television, and internet—as well as word-of-mouth.

So, here you have these traditional service providers flung abruptly into the modern world of rapidly-evolving local search. As printed phone book usage may be decreasing, these guys need internet presence and they know it. The savvier ones also know that people are increasingly searching for businesses via search engines, and particularly in local search engines.

For these guys who need biz directory placement, it really kills them if they can’t get into a service like Google Maps.

Just to get a feel for the scope of the issue, compare the results in Google Maps for a search for "Plumbers in Dallas, TX":

If you scroll through the listings, you’ll notice that only businesses with actual street addresses are listed in the first page of results.

By contrast, in yellow pages sites like Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, and Yellowbook.com, as well as in some of the other local search sites like Yahoo! Local and Live Search Maps, quite a number of plumbers who don’t have physical addresses displayed are also included in the results.

With Google’s local search popularity on the rise, these small businesses are getting more and more driven to get into the listings.

So, what was Michael Jones’s answer to Dick’s question—how are businesses with no addresses supposed to get into Google Maps results?

He essentially said that they should try to get an address in the city because Google did not display businesses that didn’t have addresses—after all, he quipped, one can’t pinpoint something without an address on the map. He suggested that those businesses could rent a post box to accomplish this.

I found this suggestion surprising and a bit disappointing. I’d rather expected him to declare that they expected to soon deploy a new version that would allow some method of displaying local businesses that didn’t have specific addresses.

I’d actually recommended that businesses might use rented mail boxes to get better Maps rankings as a sort of "extreme local search tactic" way back in January of 2007, but I did that while figuring that few businesses were likely to actually do that. The tactic is apparently not so "extreme" after all. Google Maps help provides similar advice.

Hearing this method recommended by Google was surprising to many of us, because it seems like something of a hack—it is a hack. The expected/needed functionality isn’t there, so you have to resort to doing something nonintuitive/unnatural to make it work.

There are rare cases where Google Maps does display a business without an address:

Maps personnel suggest this may have happened due to "incomplete" data from yellow pages providers. The data may be incomplete from Google’s perspective, but YP sites allow display without an address, as mentioned above.

This is not the only case where businesses might have to go through Google’s yellow pages partners to achieve presentation treatment they’ve grown to expect as a standard directory feature. Mike Blumenthal has outlined how Google’s sharply limited number of business categories has also caused some heartburn, and those wishing for a more granular category designation would likely also have to achieve it through their listings at a yellow pages site.

Google’s desire to use mailing addresses to verify businesses seems reasonable, but it shouldn’t be necessary to actually display the address. It’s also reasonable to say that a graphic map interface perhaps shouldn’t be pinpointing items without specific addresses—in the screen grab above, the address is defaulting to a city or ZIP code centroid, making the business location appear to be floating out in an area without roads. This aspect is a bit of a downer from a user-experience perspective.

Google Maps isn’t purely just the graphic map, though. The listings at the side of the map and the listings appearing in regular keyword search results for local queries provide a more traditional directory format. It could be possible to display the addressless businesses in these listings without pinpointing them on the map.

While Google’s decisions around this are founded on their usual, laudable pro-user-experience bias, this situation isn’t at all desirable from the user’s perspective, either. Most small, established businesses have expectation of being represented in directories and don’t know that they need to rent a post-box to appear here. So, these logic rules are reducing the degree of choice available among providers and reducing competition. Google factors ratings into their rankings, too, and one may assume that some of the best businesses in a local area may not be appearing in Google Maps search results.

If you are one of the small businesses who desires presence in Google Maps without listing your actual street address, I’d recommend that you get your mailbox service at a UPS Store, since it will allow you to use a full street address instead of just a PO box.

Most listings in yellow pages and local search engines may be comprised of just a basic name, address, and phone number. But businesses should take the trouble to add in as much of the other elements as they can since all the information provides differentiation and helpful information for consumers. In many local search and directory sites, most of the enhancement data can be added in for free, yet millions of businesses have never taken advantage of the full scope of free advertising available to them.

Here’s an annotated guide to a comprehensive business profile for local listings in the U.S.:

Business name. While this element may seem straightforward, it’s possible for you to adjust your company name or name usage convention in such a way as to derive more natural referral traffic online. While it’s easiest to trademark a unique/esoteric name, if it’s not combined with keyword terms that are most apropos to your business, you could miss out on some referrals over time. And, for a good many directories there is still alphabetic ordering going on, which can keep you ranking lower than if you could adjust your name to begin with earlier letters in the alphabet. “Xetera” might be distinctive as a gift shop name, but you might think of changing it to “And Xetera, Gifts” so that it might include your main keyword and rank high in alpha sorting.

Street address. A business’s street address is one of the most important parameters for appearing in local search results and enabling consumers to locate their stores, but many businesses seem to be careless in correcting or adjusting them to function well online. There’s lots of variation that can happen in how addresses are written, and the top online mapping systems don’t universally recognize the variations and pinpoint them identically. I see many business addresses like “80 US 40″ or something similarly user-unfriendly, which could potentially be interpreted a few ways, since roads might be cited in a few different formats: Rd, Road, Highway, Hwy, US, Interstate, F&M, Farm & Market Road, FM, H, I, etc.

In some areas, roads can be cited in multiple ways. Here in Dallas, Interstate Highway 35 is a major artery, but sections of it have been called different names, like: “North Stemmons Freeway,” “R.L Thornton Freeway,” I-35, I-35 North, and I-35 South.

Particularly sensitive are streets which have both a North & South or East and West version—there are cases where address on such streets can be incorrectly interpreted by search engines and mapping systems, resulting in bad maps/directions. For instance, “330 East Corporate Drive, Lewisville, TX” may not be interpreted the same as “330 Corporate Drive East, Lewisville, TX.” Human users and postmen may interpret both correctly, but one variation may not work as well in online mapping and search. I won’t regale you with the story of when I made up erroneous maps to my brother’s wedding rehearsal dinner due to this common issue!

While a human user might see and interpret your address correctly, you should check to see if major online mapping systems like Mapquest, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, and MSN Maps can pinpoint correctly as well. Mild correction or adjustment to how you write your address in each directory may ensure that maps and driving directions work.

Newer streets and addresses often causes businesses heartburn, as there is typically a one to two year time lag in getting the new streets to appear in online mapping systems. Nagging each of the top online map providers may help you get this fixed sooner in online maps.

Some local businesses simply do not have a fixed location and may operate out of their truck or something, such as in the cases of plumbers and contractors. In internet directories, local search engines, and online map sites, not having an address can be a big disadvantage. Local search engines often rank listings in order of proximity to a city center and only display businesses they can display on maps, and businesses with no address or post office box addresses end up being left out of results entirely.

If your business doesn’t have a street address, I recommend that you rent a mailbox from a mail store or a UPS Store, and consider choosing a store that’s close to the center of most of the online mapping services. Renting a box can give you a street address and will make you start appearing in many more online searches, nearly overnight!

Geocode. These are the hidden, numerical coordinate values which are frequently associated with address data in business directories. When directories, search engines, or mapping systems receive a new street address, they geocode the addresses, assigning the numerical longitude and latitude values to pinpoint the location. You don’t need to worry about these unless your address is persistently pinpointed incorrectly in various systems. If it is, you might want to research out the best geocode for your business location, and then supply it directly to the directories which are not displaying the location pinpoint properly.

Sometimes addresses which can’t be properly geocoded get defaulted to pinpoint to a city or zip code centroid, and there can be differences in geocodes which pinpoint to a spot in the middle of a street versus a rooftop accuracy pinpoint.

Some services may allow business owners to drag and drop map pinpoints to update geocodes behind the scenes.

Maps. Maps are an element cropping up alongside business listings, or listing pages often include maps pinpointing the listing locations. The address and geocode elements mentioned above most directly affect map accuracy. In some cases, maps and map features of an area don’t reflect a precise, one-to-one relationship with reality, so even correct geocodes can pinpoint less than optimally in some systems.

City & state. Name of the city and state where your business is located. Be sure to use standard nomenclature with the city name, as opposed to colloquial nicknames (e.g., “New York,” not “NYC” nor “The Big Apple”).

ZIP code. Postal code for the address — some have asked me before whether it helps to include the ZIP+4. ZIP code is necessary, but I suggest against adding the plus-four extension. I don’t believe it helps for precise pinpointing in local search and online maps, and it’s primarily for post office routing.

Main telephone number. The phone number is often the gateway between a consumer and your business, so these naturally must be correct. One big mistake that some make is the insistence upon having directories display their vanity numbers—instead of just displaying the area code, prefix, and suffix, they may want their vanity numbers (alphabetic letters which represent each number key on a phone pad) to be displayed. Vanity numbers have been used by businesses in many forms of advertising because they were considered to provide a mnemonic aid to remembering the phone number, and because they may improve brand awareness or conversions.

I believe most directories may not allow vanity numbers to be entered for businesses, and there may be compelling reasons not to use them in online. The classic letter keypads are not available on many mobile phones, and the letters may not work in a number of VoIP services.

Secondary telephone(s). Secondary phone lines really help if you have too many calls to route through a single number/line. Using a secondary phone number in listings where it’s allowed might be a good place to park the vanity version of your main phone number, if you have one and really want to use it. Otherwise, I suggest that you not alternate which number is your primary vs. secondary number in the various directories out there—keep the main number consistent so that aggregators and directories can easily keep the various data provider listings for you compiled into one main listing.

Fax number. Perhaps a feature growing less popular/necessary as internet communications continue to grow, but still useful in some particular business verticals.

Meta descriptions / Directory listing descriptions / Ad description text / Taglines. I’m grouping a number of these together because they’re quite similar—many online directories like DMOZ have only a link to your business site along with a brief text description. In all these cases, it’s important for you to be concise and accurate in describing what’s unique about your business and include one/two main keywords that consumers would be using to find you.

Categories. In many directories, millions of businesses have been automatically assigned to a category. Businesses should check to be sure they’re in the correct categories for their industry, and add on multiple other categories which are appropriate. This ensures that the listing will come up for business type searches as much as possible.

Keywords. Some services now allow one to associate keywords onto the profile. The way to make this work for you is to figure out what words users are using to type into yellow pages or search engines in order to find the type of business that you operate. For instance, if you are listed under an “attorneys” category, you might want to add a keyword for “lawyers.”

Services, products, & brands. For a service oriented business, listing out the specific services that are provided is a must. What are the top few services you offer? Don’t assume that just because you’re categorized in a particular industry, you don’t need to mention the obvious. For instance, a photographer listed under “Wedding Photographers” should state under Services that they “Provide wedding photos, formal bridal portraits, candid shots of wedding parties and rehearsals.” Listing Products & Brands with a business can also help it to come up as more relevant for users’ specific searches.

Specialties & amenities. The specialties & amenities are really important to provide attributes that can differentiate between you and your competitors. Specialties for a lawyer may bring in more clients who have cases for which they’re particularly skilled. Amenities in hotel listings like pools, exercise rooms, free breakfasts, and others can draw in more business than nearly anything and are vital details.

Photos. For accommodations or specialty products businesses, including clear, large enough photos really help consumers in choosing.

Website URL. URLs, of cours, are the vanity phone numbers of the internet space, and the obvious conventional wisdom is that they should be short, descriptive, easy to spell, and contain good keywords. When listing your URL in directories, I suggest that you leave the “WWW” off as long as you’ve made sure the WWW and non-WWW versions of your domain name are functional. Leaving the WWW off the URL makes it shorter and makes the keywords or brand name stand out better. (See also the No-WWW Initiative.)

If you have a URL that you think may not be optimal, did you know that you could register a new one that works better and just aim it at your existing site? If you do that, you’ll want to make one use a 301 redirect to the other so that search engines only index your pages on one main domain name.

Email address. Including an email address with a business listing can be as useful as a phone number, but there are caveats with it. There are apparently quite a lot of businesses which do not keep up with their email in a professional manner, and in these cases, having an email address can actually reduce referrals which might’ve otherwise come in via phone calls. If you list an email address, have it checked at least once per business day and respond to inquiries. If you can’t commit to checking it, just don’t display one.

Payment options. Showing payment options helps unless you’re extremely restrictive about payment types—in which case, it can cause consumers to avoid the business.

Hours of operation. Listing times is quite helpful to everyone who works 8 to 5, but hours of operation should be considered a commitment or a contract which you won’t ever break except on major holidays. There is nothing more irritating than showing up for a business only to find that they’ve closed early or they’re only randomly open.

Logos and icons. Logos or listing icons can be eye-candy for a listings page, and they can attract attention and make a listing seem more professional. Avoid low-quality graphics and vague/weak promotional messages.

Areas served. You’ve already listed your city, so this parameter is where you list alternative or regional names and neighborhoods. “Upper West Side,” “Nob Hill Neighborhood,” and “Serving the Mid-Cities” are some examples.

Year founded & years in business. If your business has been running for two or more years, adding this can enhance consumer trust.

Associations—Minority owned / Chamber member / Religion / Environmental / Professional associations. In most cases, I’d say that listing out various associations typically helps gain new customers and rarely turns them off.

Certifications. Few consumers may know what’s involved in obtaining various certifications, but listing out the ones you have is an indicator of your professionalism and expertise.

Languages. Listing out languages you can support is a no-brainer for getting some particular clientele who need alternate language support.

Professional endorsements & ratings. Few directories provide any option for listing endorsements, but for the ones which do, displaying quotes from major news media, well-known experts, and other recognizable companies can be effective. Quoting positive professional ratings you may have can help convince consumers of your worth and add the perception that your superlatives are not just hollow claims.

User ratings & reviews. While user ratings and reviews may get applied to your profile, you can still influence them to some degree. Rating values have become one of the most important factors for achieving rankings in various local search engines, so you shouldn’t ignore them. Ask your particularly pleased customers to rate your business online in each of the major directories and local search engines. Some rating services allow you to respond to specific complaints or negative statements—do so. If you suspect that a competitor has falsely stacked the deck against you, complain to the company hosting the reviews and request that they look into it. Also, take a very hard look at your own shop and see if there are areas where you need to improve customer service—take criticism from customers seriously and look upon it as an opportunity to learn and improve. A few negative ratings or reviews can eventually become buried by consistently applying fantastic service. Do not try to fraudulently influence ratings by having you or your employees submit reviews, or you could get found out.

Prices. Prices can either be externally applied in a fashion similar to ratings, or some business categories may allow you to enter typical pricing information for your services. Restaurant profiles and other category templates may allow pricing info to be shown as a single value, a range from low to high prices, or as a symbol like one-to-multiple dollar signs. Make sure your prices accurately reflect the typical costs of what most users pay for your services. If a price parameter is allowed for your profile, you should assess whether it is expected or vital to your type of business. I’ve been very frustrated a number of times when viewing Restaurant websites, only to discover online menus with no prices. In a Restaurants category where many of the top listings may have the Prices element present, failure to display the parameter with your listing could result in far fewer customers as people can become disgusted or distrustful at the lack of info.

Following these tips, you should update and expand the data in your business profiles in all the major yellow pages, directories, and local search engines in order to maximize your online presence. Take advantage of the free advertising through all the business profile directories out there, and you’ll start pulling your business ahead of the pack.

I did a search via Google Trends to compare the magnitude of searches for “yellow pages” and “white pages,” and here’s the chart of these searches from 2004 to present:

(Trends in searches for “White Pages” & “Yellow pages“)

Notice that keyword searches for “white pages” seems notably consistent year over year, while searches for “yellow pages” seem to be declining. There are a couple of ways we could interpret the dropping trend for YP searches. On one hand, we could assume that people aren’t looking for Yellow Pages sites as much because they’re able to find businesses through other types of sites and directly through the search engines themselves. An alternate interpretation could be that users might be going to the Yellow Pages sites directly, through typing in the URLs or bookmarking them. Are people searching in Google for “yellow pages” less because the IYP (Internet Yellow Pages) companies are making progress in improving their brand recognition?

Let’s compare to see whether users are searching more/less for specific IYP brand names:

(Comparing searches for Yellowpages.com, Yellow Book, Yelp, Superpages, and Dex Online.)

Quite a few of those online Yellow Pages sites are showing gains over the same period. “Superpages” searches are relatively flat, while searches for “YellowPages.com,” “Yellow Book,” “Yelp,” and “Dex Online” all show increasing trends. So, could we deduce that this rising brand-name recognition among most of the IYPs has caused fewer people to need to research “yellow pages” sites? I don’t believe so, at least based on keyword searches in Google. Far more users appear to be seeking “yellow pages” than are searching for particular IYP brand sites:

(Comparing searches for “Yellow Pages” vs. IYP brands)

At the very least it would appear that the increases in IYP brand-specific searches do not balance out the dropping trend in searches for “yellow pages”—the magnitude in searches for “yellow pages” far outpaces combined brand searches for IYPs.

Searches by types of local businesses or organizations seem highly consistent and stable in Google, year over year:

(Google searches for popular types of local business/organization listings)

Now, I realize it’s dangerous to base assumptions off such a limited fraction of total Internet statistics, and I’m making multiple suppositions here. Google Trends only shows relative amounts of total numbers of searches by keyword sequences, so the stats don’t necessarily have a direct correlation to total traffic. There are so many variables involved that there could be multiple, combined causes for what we’re seeing here. These trends could be specific to only Google users and not to everyone. And, actual usage of IYP sites may not be reflected by keyword searches for “yellow pages.” Yet, Google usage comprises such a large percentage of total online searches, and user search behavior there does often seem to reflect the contemporary zeitgeist. So, I think we could make some valid and intelligent assumptions based on these graphs.

It’s my opinion that Google’s (and the other top search engines) innovations in local search combined with increasing inclusion of business listing data in the search engine results pages (”SERPs”) is causing users’ behavior to change. Users are finding more and more of the information they’re seeking directly in SERPs, negating the need to find Internet Yellow Pages. Google Trends shows that users are increasingly seeking “Google Maps” just as they’re searching for “yellow pages” less:

(Comparing searches for “Google Maps” vs. “yellow pages”)

Is this an actual indicator for increasing usage of Google Maps, while YP usage could be decreasing? At least from some independent reporting, user visits to Google Maps do indeed appear to be fairly healthy and increasing over time. Consider this June report comparing one month’s usage of Google properties, provided by Hitwise (”Percentage U.S. Visits to Custom Category of Top Google Properties“:

Use of Google Maps appears to be increasing. Why would users perform searches for “Google Maps” when they could just click on the “Maps” tab/link? Well, most large sites share the experience of having their own domain names and features searched for in the search engines, and Google itself is apparently no exception.

Now, it would be better to be able to compare actual traffic figures from the top search engines and Internet Yellow Pages, but all of them keep pretty mum for strategic reasons. The best we can do is to project estimates and look to companies who report relative audience share and traffic based off of sample sets of the total population of Internet users. ComScore has also reported on relative IYP vs. Local Search vs. Search Engine usage over time, but as Greg Sterling observes, it’s been a bit hard of late to interpret their relative figures compared with past stats.

My gut feeling is that the Google Trends graph for searches for “yellow pages” is likely representative of a broad behavioral pattern of Internet users who are going to traditional Yellow Pages sites less and less. If we project the pattern out in time, we can see that searches for “yellow pages” might reduce down to nil by as soon as 2011:

(click to enlarge)

Am I predicting the demise of the Yellow Pages and other local directories based off these projections? Not really! There’s too much investment in these companies for them to sit idly by as their market share and business foundations erode to search engine competition. The savvy companies are evolving themselves to stay relevant in the new paradigms. Sites like Idearc’s Superpages.com have been moving away from the “yellow pages” moniker by incorporating local search style components, social media characteristics, personalization, and partnering to develop major distribution networks. Local info publisher Marchex has developed a plan of bypassing search engines to large degree through local domaining, and sites like Yelp, Citysearch, Judy’s Book, and Local Guides have developed loyal followings through social media and user-generated content like reviews and sharing utilities.

Sure, all these types of sites are dependent upon referral traffic from the major search engines, as a Hitwise report on local search indicates. But, the major search engines like Google are unlikely to de-index all the business directory sites anytime soon, particularly since Google Maps has steadily enhanced its data with content supplied by many of these same local information companies. (Incidentally, that Hitwise report also supports my notion that keyword searches in Google for “yellow pages” may have a close correlation with overall IYP traffic - notice that downward trend.)

I think that classic Yellow Pages sites are going to decline, but the companies behind those sites may evolve and merge with other players so that they will survive in new incarnations.