Pittbug:
It works on the web....but now we'll see if the process works with a sales spike. Researchers say that is the case w/local businesses....and I'll let you know if the spike occurs. I hope so. I need the money. I lost $10 to TG in the fantasy football competition!!!!! LOL
You are right on both accounts. Local businesses have less competition. Its not like 150 different low cost loan sites on the web. Of interest I went through the AOL data looking at my phrases and other types of similar localized searches. Visitors would zip through and hit a slew of logical alternatives. Maybe they contact all of them. Maybe they quickly review and drop the spammy or non relevant sites. But there is dramatically less competition.
On point 2, Pittbug my experience is right on target again. Over several years of review these targeted long tail phrases combining a geo term and business service are the ones that convert at the highest rate.
Mike: I think you have a great blog. As you note, and in my experience G maps and Y local provide very little geographical coverage. Additionally visitors don't use that type of advanced search very much (research suggests about 1% or less of SE traffic).
We called a little SE trick the
DD method (stands for DazzlingDonna) because she blogged about it at
seo-scoop. I've got a regional business/site and the major regional state names are Virginia/DC/Maryland (and VA, MD). But in the content I add a lot of town, county, regional names on top of that. The regional phrases include a fair number of searches for these smaller geographies. They add a significant amount of logical traffic. I haven't spammed the names but in the aspect of writing we can give examples of these services in the variety of towns.
Jake Baillie coined the phrase "spamming the SE's for local" at pubcon Las Vegas and
DD reported upon it at seroundtable. It is very powerful for a local business/site. Get a lot of related phrases for the business service and get a lot of appropriate local geo names within the content.
My phrases come from a combination of keyword tools like overture, wordtracker, google adword tools, etc. Customer suggestions and tests came up a w/ a lot of them. I reviewed competitor sites for some of them, experimentation, and understanding the key motivation for buying the service all contributed to the variety of terms.
My experience has shown to use as many keyword tools as possible and look for the phrases that show on all of them. It doesn't necessarily matter whether overture says term A is second best and wordtracker says term A is 7th best. Duplication of the phrase in multiple keyword tools suggests its used across the board.
the jake baillie reference, which i think is the best description of optimizing a site can be found here:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006710.html
I'd also add that you focus on link development with anchor text for some of those most critical geo/business terms. That is very critical. In my case I get #1 rankings in all the engines except for one darned phrase where one of the competitor has a url that is a combo of the state they are located in and the #1 industry phrase; ie the url is something like www . newyorkduilawyer . com.