Local businesses have a new method of getting displayed prominently in Yahoo’s search rankings: Yahoo has made Searchmonkey’s listings of Citysearch and Zagat automatic rather than opt in.

This is in addition to the three other Searchmonkey services Yahoo has activated: Yahoo Local, Yelp, and LinkedIn are already activated.

Getting listed through these services is very helpful since local services will get their addresses, phone numbers, business hours, and reviews posted right on Yahoo’s search results page, with no more searching necessary.

Restaurants would be well served to do two things: make sure they fully fill out the business details in each of these services, and ask customers to add reviews to the sites to drive up the rating and the number of ratings. I always find that I’m way more interested in a 3.5 star with 100 reviews than a 4.5 star with three reviews.

Story via Matt McGee at Search Engine Land

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 7:17 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.