• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 9, 2009

Localeze plans to unveil Wednesday at the BIA/Kelsey ILM 09 conference in Los Angeles a weekly service that feeds verified local business listings to search engines, such as Google, Microsoft Bing, Yahoo and YellowPages.com.

The move shortens the update cycle by three weeks. Historically, listings have been published monthly. The decision to improve the content in local businesses weekly, instead of monthly, could lead Localeze toward daily updates, or perhaps in real-time. Cutting the amount of time required to process and verify data, Localeze's platform has been undergoing an overhaul in investments and engineering during the past several months. National brands and local companies with listings on the site have been given rights to update and manage information as a way to speed the process. David Dague, vice president of marketing at Localeze, insists that transitioning from monthly to weekly feeds has been a significant step. But if the company wants to compete, eventually it will need to follow Google's lead and move toward a real-time update. "Since we are a data provider to the folks like Google, providing them information weekly is a significant leap forward in supporting Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Bing," he says.

When asked why Google's bots don't simply crawl and index the 14 million listings from the Localeze site, Dague says at some point when the time collapses and feeds are provided in less time than weekly, alternatives will need careful consideration.

Localeze's confidence score gives a score to each business listing. Localeze submits the listing to search engines. Along with a high confidence score, business listings that have the most information in the profile tend to rank higher in search engine queries.

Dague declined to name the engine using the feed, except to say it's one of the "top six," and "three others" are in "the deployment process." It's also available on about four niche sites, he says.

As Localeze and others begin to provide data more frequently, it will become more important for companies to keep up with refreshing content more often. Don't set the profile and forget it.

Businesses change their status. They can close up shop, move location or change hours of operation, especially during the holidays. And as search engine queries get longer, marketers will want to include more details about their business to rank higher so they will be found in queries more easily.