• Google Trends: Allows you to tap into Google’s database of searches, to determine which keywords are most popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on. Compare multiple terms, as well. Offers a list of what is trending now in Hot Searches.
• Google Insights for Search Beta: Shows search volume patterns since 2004 by geographic, time frames, categories, and in Google properties such as image or product search. The category feature can be powerful for marketers because it offers insight into how searches are put into popular category classifications.
• Yahoo Buzz Log: Shows top overall keyword searches by Yahoo users with rank, buzz score, and how the search volume has moved in rank. There are additional options to narrow the buzz log by categories such as actors, movies, music, etc.

• Yahoo Clues Beta: Explore trends in search on Yahoo. Top Trends shows most popular search queries by parameters such as time frame, gender, age, location, and category. With the popular queries, you will find news related to the keyword. In the trend analysis tab, you can analyze a specific keyword terms and see demographics related to it.
• Bing Trends: More of a report, the Bing Community Search Blog breaks down billions of search queries from the previous year and offers insights by popular interests.
• AOL Search Trends: Lists the top 50 search trends both hourly and daily on AOL. Data in AOL contains web and image searches (powered by Google), video (powered by Blinkx), News, Shopping, Maps, and Yellow Pages (powered by various providers).

• Twitter Search: Allows you to see what people are talking about on Twitter by keyword, hashtag, or user name. Advanced search has many features, notable is the use of emoticons to find tweets with specific attitude, for example, sad emoticon represents negative attitude.
• YouTube Keyword Tool: Keyword suggestions for terms you enter with monthly search volume on YouTube. As one of the largest search engines, this keyword list will reveal valuable insights as to how people search when they are looking for video media specifically, rather than general search engine queries.
• YouTube Trends: Provides insights into popular videos based on keywords and video views. Trending Topics are algorithmically-generated topics from keywords in the title, tags, and description of the video within sets of videos that are currently rising in popularity. Trending videos are based on embedded video views and views on YouTube.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool Enter a term or terms, to see search volume and keyword competition. Advanced options and filters allow you to refine by locations and languages and by desktop or mobile.

Top Searches, Questions, Topics, Memes & More

The major search engines and social networks also put out yearly recaps of the top trends of the year. Check out these past articles to get a glimpse of the top keywords, questions, topics, and trends people searched for each year:

2011

• Google Zeitgeist: Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn Top Searches
• Top Bing Searches: Bieber, Kardashian & Royal Wedding
• iPhone Tops Web and Mobile Searches on Yahoo
• Ask’s Top Question: Was Kim Kardashian’s Wedding Fake?
• AOL Hottest Searches: Charlie Sheen, Casey Anthony & Harry Potter
• Facebook Memology: Megan Fox, Rihanna, lms
• Twitter’s Year in Review: Egypt, Rebecca Black, Social Good
• Top 20 Global Social Video Ads of 2011 From Unruly
• What were we watching this year? Let’s rewind 2011. – YouTube Blog

2010

• Google Zeitgeist: The Year’s Top Searches
• Bing’s Top Searches: Kim Kardashian Dashes to Top Spot
• Yahoo Search Year in Review: BP, World Cup, Miley Cyrus
• Ask.com’s Top Questions: Users Prefer Dunkin’ Coffee
• AOL’s Hottest Searches: Bedbugs, Tiger Woods, BP
• 10 Top 10s: Search Year in Review
• Top 10 Twitter Trends
• YouTube Rewind: Top Searches, Videos

I took a gander at his website and immediately knew what the problem was. It took me a good 5 minutes of browsing and searching his website before I found what is probably the most critical piece of information for any local business’ website. WHERE HE WAS LOCATED!

How can you expect to get more business from your website if visitors can’t even find out where your business is? The answer is simple…you can’t! Here are three tips I gave my friend that are relevant for every local business with a website.

Include Your Location in the Header and Make It BIG!

As I said before, a businesses location is probably the single most important piece of information you can include on your website. For this reason, it should be one of the first things a visitor sees when he comes to your site. If I have to go on a treasure hunt to find your address then you’re doing something wrong! Humans are impatient by nature and the longer you make them search for how to contact you to more likely they are to simply visit one of your competitor’s sites and buy their product or service.

Put the City and State in the Title Tag and Meta Tag

Search engines are becoming better and better at returning location relevant results to searchers. Putting your city and state in the title tag and meta tag help the search engines determine where you are located. It is also a great way to stand out from the competition. If your website has your city and state in the page title, someone searching for your service in that same city and state is much more likely to click on your page when it shows up on the search engine results page.

Include Your Location in the Footer of EVERY PAGE

It’s not enough to have your business’ address on the home page of your website. Not everyone comes through the front door, and it is very likely that someone lands on one of your website’s inner-pages without ever having seen the home page. If this is the case you want to make sure that they can still easily figure out where you are located. The easiest way to do this is to put your address in the footer so that it shows up on every page.

If you already had these taken care of great! If not, making these changes should take you an hour at most. Hopefully you found these tips useful. If you have any suggestions for local businesses out there trying to get found please leave them in the comments below.

Just two days ago the New York Times published an article in which it scolded Google for failing to list accurate information about local businesses. A small mistake on Google’s part could end up costing a small business thousands of dollars. As if in response to the criticism it was receiving, Google is showing that it is ready and willing to increase the quality of it’s local search results.

It is accepted that reviews play a part in the ranking of results on Google. On the surface this seems like an obvious factor that must be considered. However, with how easy it is to create fake reviews of a business, reviews can easily be manipulated to produce desired results (whether negative or positive). The Zagat brand brings a sense of legitimacy and professionalism to local search.

This move by Google will undoubtedly help the quality of their review system, but will it have any effect on the accuracy of other information such as phone number and address? Zagat was founded before the internet was commonly used, and it is unlikely that they will be much help in decreasing the amount of time a business must wait to update its listing information.

One thing is apparent: Reviews are a huge factor in determining ranking and driving traffic to websites found on local search results. How do you think this recent combination will affect local search marketing? Let us know in the comments below.