Hidden in the middle of Will Scott’s excellent piece on Yelp last month was the following insight, which certainly rings true in my experience with small business owners:

“For me it all leads back to a central frustration I feel from small businesses: they understood the Yellow Pages. You pay more, you get a bigger ad, you get more calls. How hard is that?”

As skeptical as I am of the print Yellow Pages, Will is absolutely spot-on with that comment. It is an incredibly easy-to-understand business, and has been around long enough where pretty much everyone understands how it works.

Search engine optimization, even for the rare small business owner who has heard of it, is much more complicated and is inherently somewhat opaque.

Local is truly at the convergence of Search 3.0 and 4.0—the number of times we see Local results blended into Web SERPs is dramatically increasing. Google is straight up asking people to enter their Zip Code so they can show more Local results blended into the organic SERPs even when people don’t explicitly geo-target their queries. So ranking well in Local is not only going to be more important for Mobile search, but also for desktop search. This article looks at where Local Search, at least at Google, might be headed.

Local Search aficionados will of course immediately recognize the eerie similarity between the title of this post and the title of a famous series by Local Search guru Mike Blumenthal. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery so, Mike, I hope you approve.

At any rate, I’ve read a couple of exceptional posts in the last few weeks (in addition to my small business reputation management roundup) that I haven’t had a chance to highlight just yet. And I also wanted to make a few announcements of my own.

Having just returned from the SEOmoz Expert Seminar, it’s safe to say the conference offered an incredible value. I learned from Brian Carter’s Recap that SEOmoz would like to keep the bulk of the sessions confidential since they’ll be selling the content on an upcoming DVD, but I got the go-ahead from Rand to post just a few teasers.

25% of the questions Todd Mintz asked me in his excellent interview last month had to do with reputation management for small businesses. So, with this post, I thought I would try to make things a little easier for small businesses by compiling a list of truly exceptional posts related to this topic written in the last couple of months, and summarizing their findings.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a quick post about Best of the Web’s launch of BOTW Local, and my initial impressions of the site. The date of that post, and of the submission of my business to BOTW Local, was June 24th. On August 1st, less than six weeks after submitting my business to BOTW Local, my BOTW Local listing was already showing up as a citation in my Google Local profile.