With the recent release of Apple’s iOS 6, a rather serious shift has taken place online, specifically with how iPhone users will find businesses in their immediate area.

During its latest iteration of its mobile operating system, Apple has chosen to remove the Google Maps information in favor of its own. The reason this is significant is because Apple’s new maps (at least for the time being) will rely solely on Yelp.com’s database for finding businesses relevant to the user’s experience.

Restaurants, retailers, and anyone in the service industry not on Yelp will likely lose a few percentage points of potential business simply by not being indexed. For those on Yelp, they will increasingly find themselves at the mercy of their reviews. Both of these new paradigms are due to the sheer number of iPhone users.

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How to get a Yelp business listing.

Most readers of this post will not know what the schema.org is, and at no fault of their own. But that won’t be an excuse by the end of this article. So that being said, the schema project is a new school of thought in the search engine world. One that will have drastic effects in the grand “schema” of things. (Sorry – Ive been told wit will boost our readership)

What is The Schema Project

A collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.

What Does That Mean To Me?

Anytime you provide the engines with more detailed information about the content you wish to be found for, the more likely you will be ranked higher than your competition (all things being equal). This means that if granularity is the next evolution of search marketing – especially so for small businesses.

Engines are getting smarter. They are now serving results to you based on a myriad of underlying (often unknown to the end user) criteria. Your location, your social profiles, the time of day, are all examples of the new factors that go into a results page. These factors will swap results around from one person to the next, in their unending effort to provide the most appropriate result for the individual seeking it.

Organizing your data is becoming more relevant, and crucial in the war to be number one. On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results, and this is where engines intend to go. Richer search results means the ability to provide an end user with more relevant data. The more relevant your data, the more likely you are to rank.

Example : If a person is searching for a hair salon the engines will take into account that person’s location when serving a result. All things being equal you will rank in accordance to popularity and existing ranking data when that page is served. Allowing you the generic one slot result for your business (disregarding the places portion of the page – assuming you rank there). However when you submit your schema’d data to the engines they will take following meta information into account when geo locating the user.

• PostalAddress : Physical address of the item.
• AggregateRating : The overall rating, based on a collection of reviews or ratings, of the item.
• Place : The basic containment relation between places.
• Event : Upcoming or past events associated with this place or organization.
• GeoCoordinates : The geo coordinates of the place.
• Photograph or ImageObject : Photographs of this place.
• Review : Review of the item.
• Telephone: The telephone number.

These 8 factors will now be taken into account when being ranked. The potentially daunting fact about this is is that there are hundreds of other factors that will now be taken into account for a myriad of query terms. Staying on top of your events, employee rosters, blog postings, product listings, and much more will be a full time job for some companies. But don’t think that these factors wont matter to your business or industry, because they will. The hair salon that lists out their currently employed stylists along side their individual reviews and ratings will see more digital traffic in the long run, which will turn into foot traffic.

For a full list of what schema.org has to offer you can visit the website here.

Are there people out there searching online for your company? It’s incredibly likely. Sixty-three percent of consumers use the Internet to find information about local companies and services, according to a Nielsen report. Even if these folks aren’t searching for your company by name, they’re searching for your business category (whether that’s ‘dentists’ or ‘pizza’ or ‘men’s suits’ or ‘gardening supplies’)—so why let them find your competitors instead of you?

Be sure local customers can find your company online by doing local SEO right!

1. Control Your Profile on Local Listings Sites
Create profiles with sites such as Google Places, Merchant Circle and Yahoo Local so you can make sure they always have correct, up-to-date information about your business.

2. Upload Photos
Local listing sites like Google Places, et al. like to provide users with pictures of the places they list. Uploading your own pictures assures potential customers see your place in the best light! It also enables you to be found in image engines if tagged properly.

3. Collect Reviews
Encourage satisfied customers to review your company on local review sites. You can do this without being pushy—attach a line to the end of your company’s email signature, perhaps, or add a little note on the contact page of your company’s website. LocalLogic can help setting up creative ways for your customers to engage with your brand online and review your services.

4. Avoid Inclusive Graphics for Getting Across Vital Info
Be sure to publish contact info such as your telephone number and address as stand-alone text, not within an image; text in images can’t be picked up by search engines, and can not be read by the visually handicap.

5. Publish a Local Telephone Number
If you’ve only listed an 800 number (or a cell-phone number with a non-local area code), you could lose customers searching locally. Be sure to add your local telephone number to your website and any listings sites.

6. Put Your Address On Every Page
Publishing your address on every page of your website is a good way to re-encorce your geographic location. You can easily include it on a footer across all site pages.

7. Make a Video

8. Get Links
The big search engines look at links from other sites to your site as signs of validation from the community. Consider other websites that might reasonably link to yours, such as your local chamber of commerce or business association, local newspapers or vendors you work with.

9. Create Brand Pages On Social Sites.
Be sure to have your basic social profiles set up. While Facebook and Twitter are the two obvious examples, depending on your desired demographics other options are out there to help improve your rankings. Having these profiles set up give you the ability to blanket a search results page with uniform information about your business.

10. Update Your WHOIS Info
Though it’s not certain, many experts believe Google takes this information into account when considering which websites to rank for local searches. Check to make sure your domain name is registered with your current business address and information.

These are, of course, just some strategies you can employ — there are lots of other ways (some easy, some a bit more complicated) to up your chances of showing up near the top of local searches. If you’d like to find out more about how LocalLogic can help drop us a line.