If you're living in South Dakota and looking for a new restaurant to try, you can skip a trip to the Internet if you are interested in user reviews. Why? A 2008 local search advertising study by Palore ? a content provider for local search sites ? reveals that in the Restaurant Yellow Pages category (the most reviewed type of business online), less than 5% of restaurants in South Dakota receive reviews.

Now if this dynamic were limited to South Dakota, perhaps we could bemoan our lack of travel planning options when we visit Mount Rushmore. But the data shows something else. With the exception of the few West Coast states and Massachusetts, the rest of the country has less than 20% review coverage. Essentially, less than one out of five restaurants has a single revi More...

Small business owners and even marketing executives for large enterprises may have a broad understanding of local search, and some are already using Search Engine Optimization or paid search but many have yet to take advantage of their own content being distributed on local search engines. Given that local search is the fastest growing form of online activity, according to comScore, and consumers will soon conduct two billion local searches each month, businesses should take action to manage their online local listings.

Because most online local business content comes from outdated offline sources, there are a large number of business listings being distributed across multiple local search engines, which are inaccurate. Equally as unsettli More...