Google’s local efforts have grown tremendously under the direction of Marissa Mayer, and now encompass a wide range of products, including Google Maps; Google Places; Zagat; Google Offers; and Get Online, a new SMB initiative.

At ILM West this week in San Francisco, Head of Local Consumer Marketing Jeff Aguero provided a rich portrait of Google’s thinking on local. “We are 10 percent of where we are and where we need to be,” said Aguero. “There is so much that needs to be done.” He added that Google is eager to work “closely with partners to create a rich opportunity” for all.

“The local experience is mostly disconnected,” said Aguero. “It is not consistent across user experience,” whether people are engaged in researching, finding, experiencing, reviewing or sharing. Google’s goals are ultimately to “get more local searches, more customers, more reviews, better content, higher engagement and more businesses online.”

Local is obviously an important part of Google’s core search business — 20 percent of desktop search is now local-oriented. But local is “fundamentally about places. Any type of action; how does it get there; how do you share what I am doing about my experience (i.e., photos, check-in); how do I save money on a deal?”

Within Places, Place Pages is a major effort. Currently, there are 50 million dynamically generated Place Pages worldwide. Of these, 8 million have been claimed by the businesses themselves. “It is the greatest catalog of place data on the Web,” noted Aguero.

The big trend is the convergence of Place Pages and Host Pages. “They have the same type of audiences in different ways, ” he said. “The functionality of both entities are likely to converge.”

Expanding ratings and reviews is also clearly a major initiative. Google Places is now getting more than a million ratings per month.

Mobile, meanwhile, is in the middle of it all. “Fifty percent of maps usage is mobile,” Aguero pointed out. “Mobile search usage has surpasses desktop usage on holidays. “People are using mobile phones as guides to the real world on an ongoing basis. Recently, the company introduced TalkBin, which leverages mobile to provide real-time customer feedback.

Google Latitudes, a check-in product, is also is getting a lot of attention, and already has 10 million users. “It is not just how many people are enjoying and sharing products,” said Aguero, noting that Latitudes has been greatly enhanced by the introduction of Google Plus social circles.

And then there is Google’s Get Online initiative, a partnership with Intuit that lets SMBs claim a place, update information and provides a free website. Get Online started in Michigan and is now in 14 states. New tools will continue to be added, said Aguero. “We need better toolkits for businesses.” Recently, the company introduced Adwords Express, which lets businesses set up an AdWords program in 10 minutes.

Moh Ok, Chief Scientist at PayPal, and Bo Fishback, CEO and Founder of Zaarly, talked about the integration of social, local and mobile to close the loop on driving consumer purchases during a morning dedicated to SoLoMo here at ILM Asia.

Ok and moderator Mike Boland talked extensively about mobile payments, and whether the market will drive toward a common standard. Ok said PayPal and its parent eBays are currently “laser focused” on commerce. The PayPal mantra is anywhere, anytime, anyway.

Rather than talking about various forms of commerce (mobile, social, etc.), “It really should just be commerce,” Ok said. “You should be able to make it in a seamless way.”

In discussing all the different mobile payment methods out there — Google Wallet, Square and the looming NFC — Ok said the key is to be able to “pay however you want.” He describes PayPal as “Switzerland in terms of how people pay.”

Fishback followed Ok and described Zaarly, which is one of those companies that builds a compelling and original business off of an old and simple idea: putting local buyers and sellers together. “I don’t believe in companies that require behavioral change,” Fishback says.

On Zaarly, users post a need and others respond with offers to fulfill that need. Small businesses are essentially being built off of Zaarly, Fishback says. 

Zaarly has fewer than 100,000 users and has had roughly 40,000 posts in the past quarter. The company has roughly 4,000 businesses on its system. 

Fishback says it takes 300 people to create a liquid market.

Boland called it a “reverse Craigslist” and Fishback accepted that as an apt description. Peer to peer hyperlocal is another description.

“The more local you get, the less people want to rip each other off,” Fishback said. “There are no Nigerian scam artists on Zaarly.”

Advancing mobile payments is a key issue for Zaarly. Fishback says there is an imbalance in the market now. “It is easy to pay, harder to get money.” He is looking to partner with innovators in the payment space.

Google has experienced five times growth in mobile search during the past two years, according to Google Mobile’s Surojit Chatterjee, who was keynoting our SoLoMo Morning at ILM West in San Francisco.

Mobile usage generally complements the desktop, with huge spikes on the weekend and in the evening and at lunch, said Chatterjee. “When people go out for lunch, people are searching more on their mobile than on the desktop.”

Chatterjee said vertical segments have been especially high with mobile. Almost 17 percent of auto related queries are mobile, 17 percent of travel and car rental, and 32 percent of restaurants.

Mobile also is very strong for converting searchers. Seventy-seven percent of mobile searchers contacted a business; 44 percent led to a purchase and 59 percent led to a merchant.

Proximity and location, in fact, have become important criteria for Google search ranking. Make your ads location aware and help users make a decision quickly,” said Chatterjee.

Gillian Heltai, comScore’s senior director, presented new search data showing that while local search is still growing, its trajectory is slowing down. She broke search into online and mobile.

Year over year, online search grew 9 percent online to 19.3 billion searches in Sepatember 2011. Of these searches, 2.8 billion are local. 10 percent of U.S. online display ads are locally targeted. IYP/local searches declined 20 percent while local Web searches increased 9 percent. Only 3 percent to 4 percent of searches are paid clicks; the rest are organic searches.

Heltai said there’s a perfect storm for local based services in mobile media of search, GPS-capable devices and smartphone penetration. Seventy-five percent of mobile subscribers have a GPS-capable device, an annual increase of 11 percent. More people are doing more mobile searches. Mobile search grew 26 percent with 39 percent doing at least one mobile search per month.

Overall, 88 million mobile subscribers accessed local content on mobile device in September 2011, up 28 percent. More than 88 million (up from 69 million) accessed local content. Forty percent of all mobile users access local content; 75 percent of smartphone users do.

As smartphone/GPS-cable devices increase their penetration,the growth of local mobile search will stimulate mobile advertising growth. One-third of mobile media users recalled seeing ad.

Heltai concluded by observing that while consumers clearly are moving into mobile search in a big way, small and medium businesses are becoming overwhelmed by their range of advertising choices. They need to understand not just that mobile search is where their consumers are; they also need to be shown how to engage with their consumers on this high-growth platform.

Moderator Peter Krasilovsky led a session Monday afternoon on how several leading vertical sites are successfully leveraging social media. As sites that are focused on a specific business, profession or user need, verticals will typically contain a directory, specialized editorial content, expert Q&A, advertising, etc. Panelists were:

-Mark Britton, CEO and President, Avvo
-Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com
-Matt Maloney, Cofounder and CEO, GrubHub
-Carey Ransom, CEO, Real Practice

Collectively, these four have raised the princely sum of about $140 million in private funding.

The first panelist was Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com. Trulia, of course, is a major real estate vertical. (Trulia added rentals to its real estate listings about 18 months ago.) It claims the largest user-generated community in the real estate industry.

Trulia has attempted to push the envelope on leveraging social services. It runs a large real estate Q&A on its site, covering the real estate transaction process, information and commentary on neighborhoods, etc.). Flint said the crash in the housing market has actually helped the business, because it has made brokers more interested in consumer preferences and consumer-generated commentary.

Next was Matt Maloney, cofounder and CEO, GrubHub. GrubHub is where the consumer goes for dine out, either take-out or delivery. So GrubHub quite a bit different from other restaurant/food sites that focus on reservations.

GrubHub handles almost 15,000 restaurants nationally. Restaurants pay GrubHub a commission in the vicinity of 15 percent of each order. About 40 percent of its traffic is from mobile users. Maloney pointed out that the pay-for-performance model worked with its restaurant clients, whereas paid advertising did not.

The third panelist was Mark Britton, CEO and president of Avvo, the legal and professional services directory website. Avvo became the largest consumer-oriented legal website in just three years, and Britton attributes a lot of that success to the ways it has harnessed social media. (Britton pointed out that Avvo is now four times the size of Martindale-Hubbell online.)

Avvo’s Q&A forum handles 50,000 questions and answers monthly. Although its business model includes a subscription-based pro model, advertising is a big (primary?) source of its revenues. Britten said Avvo wanted to use a CPC revenue model, but its lawyer clients said it had a strong preference for a fixed-cost pricing model.

Carey Ransom, CEO of Real Practice, talked about how his company aggregates responses and leads from a variety of ad campaigns, to Real Practice’s centralized platform. The platform supports centralized lead management, real-time lead notifications and cross-campaign performance comparisons. Real Practice started by serving only lawyers, but has since expanded to other professions. They key to its success is its ability to tailor its mechanisms (such as the lead processing pipeline) to specific professions and verticals, unlike more generic lead gen sites.

To complete the arc of this session, Ransom mentioned that Real Practice is also integrated in with Avvo profiles, in a classic example of symbiosis between players who could otherwise be, arguably, competitors.

Our audience might be upset that Jed’s Burgers, a fictitious business set up for the Yext PowerListings demo isn’t real. What may be more upsetting is the fact that 20 percent of local searches will return the wrong information. Lerman is passionate about preventing this problem and his enthusiasm for Yext’s new PowerListings was clear at the final afternoon session, “Yext: PowerListings Across Platforms.”

So what’s the best way to get accurate and timely SMB info out there for end users? Go to the business itself. That’s the central idea behind PowerListings, which enables businesses to update their info against 24 partner sites.

“This system is about speed and control,” Lerman said.

SMB marketing companies have forgotten that local businesses still see calls as a key driver of new business. That’s the opinion expressed by Marchex Executive VP Matthew Berk during today’s session on “Converting Calls to Local Sales.” To succeed in the calls space, Berk emphasized the need to “go deep” and focus on quality. He defines quality calls as those that represent a proxy to conversion.

Key takeaways on emerging industry trends include:

–The explosion of mobile is about being call-ready

–Mobile search and discovery coincides with smartphone penetration, growing 5x in the past two years

–Computers are becoming more and more like telephones (i.e., Skype and Gtalk)

–Lower cost per lead + better outcomes = lower churn.

–Better outcomes means better calls

When it comes to Local Yokel Media’s business focus, it’s all about 15 miles. That’s because 80 percent of consumer spending is done within 15 miles of home. CEO and Founder Dick O’Hare shared that fact at this afternoon’s session on “Local Targeting: Getting the Bull’s Eye.” O’Hare added that geo-contextual relevance is the key to optimal ad performance. “With the right targeting on display, the traditional marketing funnel can collapse and go from awareness to purchase in one step,” O’Hare said.

Co-Panelist Jeff Minich, senior product marketing manager for Yahoo, agreed. But he also zoomed in on the importance of addressability by targeting the right users and measuring the full impact of every impression. “It’s all about finding the optimal radius around brick and mortar locations for achieving offline performance objectives.”