According to Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting, one of the greatest challenges with local search is the data. The reason for this issue is due to the fact that there are many errors and inconsistencies. For example, people fail to update their data after mergers, acquisitions, change of brand name, and more, which results in duplicate and bad data.

Fortunately, Enge shares tips for cleaning up the data. First of all, he suggests going to the search engines. Companies should get listed with the engines and go through a validation process. Once users are validated, the engines are more confident that they have the right data.

Secondly, he suggests going to major data aggregators such as InfoUSA, Acxiom, and Localeze. These aggregators provide data to many sites, which the search engines crawl. As a result, it is very important that they have correct and updated data.

Lastly, Enge advises users to go to major portals such as SuperPages, Yelp, YellowPages. Once your business is correctly listed in all these places, your data problem will likely be solved.

Incidentally, Eric Enge co-authored a book entitled, The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization. He says he delves deeply into topics surrounding local search in the book. For more information on the book, visit here.