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After writing and researching on the subject for about a year, I'm surprised that the notion of local search still hasn't popped up in more interactive marketing discussions. When will interactive markets will stop splitting off the notion of search marketing from local marketing? If the one billion local searches a month consumers are already doing haven't done the trick, I'm not sure what will.

Local search, as you may know, is the act of using a search engine to look for something in a specific city or neighborhood (for example, a search for "Nikes in Cambridge, MA" or "Nikes in Havard Square"). When you execute such a search, you get a list of businesses that fit your request, typically in a special box on top of the results page that sets local search data off from the "standard" search results. The results are delivered as a series of business listings which, among other things, are close to the center of the area you've listed.

Today, the major search engines are quietly competing to win at the local search game, with Google (GOOG), MSN and Yahoo (YHOO) all hard at work to build killer local search tools and features. (MSN execs told one conference session, in fact, that 30 percent of their search volume is local.) But much of this is blowing past interactive marketers.

Right now, it's my sense that if an advertiser considers promoting local businesses at all, it's an afterthought--or that they assume that consumers will find their stores/locations through such omnibus sites as DexOnline. But that gives marketers very little ability to shape a customer's overall experience and lead them to a purchase decision or lead.

Now, bear in mind that one of my anchor clients is a local search services provider, so I'm a bit prejudiced here, but I've come to believe that it's high time local search be seen as simply "search" and accounted for in every interactive marketing plan. The Web just isn't a big, blunt instrument anymore; it's a tool for daily living, too, and that's what local search offers.

If you're ready to take on local search, I recommend you start by taking the following steps:

* Assess your current position:
Particularly if you market for, say, a national retailer, it's crucial that your business listings rank high in local search. Otherwise, you'll miss out on the chance to benefit from the consumer's impulse to buy. So check out your position on a few of the major search engines, a few second-tier engines and perhaps a few vertical engines too. If you haven't worked to improve your local search position as of yet, don't be surprised if you don't like what you see.

* Evaluate whether your brand is consistent:
Get a sense of whether your individual business locations have presented themselves consistently. It may not sound like a big deal, but if your brand is "The Plumbing People," you don't want your locations or franchisees to be calling themselves "Plumbing Inc." in one listing, "We're Your Plumbing People" in another and "Plumbers R Us" in a third. Believe it or not, when some marketers do a local search, the individual business listings vary that much.

* Determine whether your listings are accurate:
In many cases, the business listings delivered by local search come from Yellow Pages directories, which in reality means that they could be several months or even a couple of years old. That can mean that addresses, phone numbers and Web site listings aren't accurate any more.
* In-house or outsource: Make the call
If you're ready to boost your local search presence, there's a bunch of different ways to go about it. You can wrestle with the individual engines' rules for updating business listings yourself, you can go to sources like DexOnline or YellowBook, you can work with an outside vendor to cleanse your basic business data, or you can work with vendors (like my client) who offer enhanced listings. Anything that improves the accuracy and visibility of your listings is worth a try.

I'll admit, local search optimization may not seem like it's worth the effort at first, given that the results are not as quantifiable as, say, paid search advertising. But if you're marketing a business with multiple brick and mortar locations, it's a channel you can't afford to ignore. Over time, as tools improve, it will prove to be as important to your mix as traditional SEO.