Here is the March 2013 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

• Google spent the past year aggressively pushing to get everyone to set up mobile-only campaigns in addition to their regular campaigns on AdWords. It told us we needed different keyword research, different ads and different bidding strategies. Now, Google announces that mobile-only campaigns are going away. As of June, advertisers are being forced to advertise across all devices whether they want to or not.

  This will help some businesses that have not yet made any effort to use mobile advertising, but will really hurt those who listened to Google's advice and dialed in their mobile-only campaigns to a decent level of profitability. Those folks now have to spend a great deal of time re-aligning their accounts for the new Google AdWords. It's clear that the Enhanced AdWords campaigns (an upgrade in Google-speak) will bring a lot more money into the Google coffers.

  How much better or worse it might be for advertisers is yet to be seen, but those who want to run mobile-only campaigns can no longer do so. The complexity of the new system may also drive more SMBs out of regular AdWords and into AdWords Express, a platform clearly designed to allow Google the leeway to make the most money possible from SMB advertising.

  Read our complete featured article on the how to handle this HUGE change here:
  How to Shift to the New ‘Enhanced Campaigns’ AdWords Interface Without Losing Your Shirt

• Foursquare publishes it's Best of Foursquare guide with the commentary:

  Here at Foursquare, our approach to figuring out the best places is a little different: we've analyzed our billions of check-ins and put together lists of places that people love most, based on where they've actually been.

  The where they've actually been comment shows that Foursquare knows there's an advantage to leveraging it's somewhat unique position as a site where you can find reviews by people who have at least visited a business. These pass as "real" reviews, as least as far as they can be policed at this moment in internet time.

  Read our tips on how to Foursquare's new Merchant app for business owners so you can get more data on customers that check in:/> Foursquare Now Providing Checkin Data to Local Businesses

• Apple's i-Phone sales overtake Samsung's Android phones in the US. If you're not yet thinking about ranking in Apple Maps, I predict serious trouble ahead.

• Google gains a new patent for improving location targeting even more. We can only hope it uses that knowledge for good instead of evil.

• Trip Advisor unveils a way for business representatives to report blackmail reviews - a new term for your Local Search vocabulary. In other words, if someone threatens to leave you a bad review on Trip Advisor unless you do something they want you to do, it may be considered it a blackmail review and you can alert Trip Advisor about it.

  It may not keep the review from being posted or get it taken down if it already has been published. However, Trip Advisor has always been on top of working to publish only trusted reviews, so perhaps they will label those flagged as blackmail by the business in some way and/or make an owner response very prominent.

• Greg Sterling analyzes Constant Contact's survey of how SMBs view and interact with their online local business listings. Read this to better understand how much help they need with Local Search!

• Facebook unveils Lookalike profiles, allowing advertisers to target audiences with a set of common traits that mirror the Custom Audiencesthey have previously set-up. It can be combined with the targeting capabilities already available. Having the ability to quickly and easily expand your targeting on Facebook is certainly going to expand the advertising on that platform.

• Google's Product Listing Ads expand as 11 more countries say goodbye to free shopping traffic - UK, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, and Japan.

• Google revises its recommended procedure for dealing with business listings when a business changes its address via a post in the Help Forum:

  Verified business owner of a page, and is your business moving locations? Here's what you do.
  
  Edit your address in Google Places for Business or in the Google+ page admin area, whichever you are using to manage the page. This will either make a new page or edit the address on the existing page. It may take a week or two after editing your address before you see an update. At this point, you may need to go through a verification process again. Don't worry -- this is normal.
  
  If you see a page that's still got the old address, click on Report a problem and mark that location as closed. Provide the link to the new address or information about the new location if possible. You can find more instructions on closing a location here: http://goo.gl/YZIjq

  This doesn't exactly jibe with what's in the official help section, but since it's the newest info we've been given, it's what I'd try first.

• Take a look at the big picture of review filters in this post by David Mihm to clarify your understanding of why they exist, how they work and why they are likely here to stay.

• Google Offers extensions can now be added to AdWords ads. Early adopters should gain increased click through rates from searchers shopping online. The advantage will diminish when everyone has an offer on their ads. Be careful of falling into the trap of positioning yourself as cheap instead of good. Winning the race the bottom by offering increasingly large discounts is no way to prosper. Think about offering value-added services instead of discounts to attract new customers.

• YP.com claims to have the second largest mobile ad network after Google. Some argue this, but even if you don't, it's absolutely critical to make sure you know what you're getting into when you deal with any of the Internet Yellow Pages. In attempts to try to prove their worth, they have a nasty history of using call tracking numbers and/or sending prospects to web pages not ìownedî by the business, like profiles on their own sites. While IYPs have surely learned over time that this hurts local business rankings, it unfortunately doesn't seem to affect their sales strategies.

• Optify releases its research on B2B Marketing Benchmarks. There are some meaty stats and compelling graphs that you'll find enlightening and useful when dealing with the marketing decision-makers in your world. The messaging that I found most valuable is that Google organic search is still the prime driver of traffic to B2B websites.

• Mike Blumenthal reveals that his experience indicates:

  "...that Google is generating (by my estimate) about 80% of local leads in the US and more in Europe..."

  WOW! Ranking on Google really does matter, doesn't it? See the full interview at Stargazer digital.

• Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive are rebranding as HERE in an effort to make Nokia's mapping and navigation product a stand-alone alternative. It's adding some cool features, is already partnered up with Windows phones, offers an API for developers and may have some influence at Apple Maps.

• Yelp says it's competing with print media for advertising dollars, not with Google. It is amazing how many SMBs are still devoting the lion's sharing of their marketing budgets to newspapers, phone books and direct mailers, so Yelp may have this right.

• You can now report local business listing problems directly at Google Mapmaker. However, I'm unsure why anyone would, since you can do the same thing as a community edit directly at a listing and it will get fed to Mapmaker for review and approval or rejection. IMO, you're better off using the Troubleshooter tool at the help forum. There, your problems will go directly to Google support instead of being subjected to the determinations of volunteers and aggressive bots and edit reviewers at Mapmaker.

• Richard Kirk gives us ideas for local marketing you may not have thought of including event markup, geofencing, local landing pages and more. See all 18 of them here if you're in a slump. Google Maps is now THE top travel site on the internet for those in the United States, according to recent research by eMarketer and Experian Hitwise With about 16% of the market, it leaves Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz choking in its dust.

- Mary Bowling, Writer & Lead Local Search Trainer, SearchEngineNews.com