There are a few questions that many companies are not asking, but should be:

- Are my offline locations easy to find online?

- How are my customers, and more importantly, potential customers finding my locations?

- Do I even know where to start?

Here are a couple of factoids you might be interested in:

One out of five searches on Google are related to location - Google

About 20 percent of online searches have a local intent, where users are looking for businesses, organizations, events, and other information in a specific geographic area. - Yahoo!

Forrester estimates that $917 billion worth of retail sales last year were "Web-influenced." It also estimates that online and Web-influenced offline sales combined accounted for 42 percent of total retail sales and that percentage will grow to 53 percent by 2014, when the Web will be influencing $1.4 billion worth of in-store sales. - TechCrunch

Organic rankings are important because it gives you the opportunity to be an answer for customers if or when they are looking to find something online. If someone searching online has the intention of purchasing something in the flesh, are they finding your store, branch, restaurant or location?

If you don't know how people find information about you and your locations, don't worry because it is evolving and changing more and more each day. So if you would have said yes to this 12 months ago, it is probably different now and your competitors might have the same answer.

The data agrees, people are increasingly using online sources on their desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones to find information they are looking for. The web has quickly become the source for information about stores replacing print directories as the first place to look for store information. So, the question you need to answer is where are people looking for information about your locations?

It is reasonable to concede that people will be using well known online portals such as Google Places, MapQuest, Bing Maps, Yahoo! Local, Citysearch and Yelp, but what about all of the other online directory and map services that are out there? How do you ensure your location details are accurate and consistent everywhere?

There are a number of ways to try to address this common occurrence if you have a few locations, you can go directly to these websites and add, change or append your information. But what about those retailers with 50, 100 locations or even more? There are few organizations that really have a good solution for distributing your store locations to the mass amount of the web without requiring a significant investment. Talk to your agency, if you don't have one, reach out to someone that knows how to approach this type of challenge and more importantly, measure the impact.

We will explore the local search conundrum in more detail in 2011, right here on SEOpittfall.com.

I am really looking forward to monitoring the evolution of local search online in 2011 and would appreciate your input. Send me your questions or just post them in the comments below.