It may not be that noticeable, but local search and search engine marketing are undergoing rapid change. What was once a one-dimensional, text-only environment is now full of other forms of media, including, most significantly, video.

According to RealSEO.com, a lot of search engines and directory publishers are currently paying close attention to video and seem to offer higher rankings to video search results. This new mixed approach to search engine results allows local businesses to use it to their advantage to generate leads, as well as increase brand awareness, market virally, and market socially. Search engine marketers that do take the plunge into video are reaping their efforts at the moment.

Superpages.com and YellowPages.com are already offering video-based advertising on their sites. This in essence could allow you to reach your local shoppers with a media-rich ad which may end up having a higher ROI than a simple entry in their directory, wrote Mark Robertson of RealSEO.com. YellowPages.com is already running television commercials in some states promoting this new service wherein some old ladies are looking for knitting needles and accessories and end up in a tattoo place with needles in the name. They then go on to state that a video-based ad would have prevented such a mix up. (Clever and funny!)

But there are also issues that need to be resolved. Robertson says IYPs need some help when it comes to online video strategy, specifically with regard to video search: For example the yellow pages sites haven’t properly made their video content discoverable in their own space and search results, let alone bothered to create a way to get it listed in the other major search engines. Additionally the video ad content is not even submitted to the large video-only sites like YouTube. So how exactly are conversions happening if at all?

According to the sites, advertisers with video elements in their ads will receive better placement, but early reports show that there has been no increase in advertisers search-based traffic. The higher placement in the yellow page sites themselves seems to have had little effect, however it seems that self-promotion of the video in other sectors has accounted for some of the success, he says.

Advertisers have been turning more to places like Facebook and Myspace to virally market and distribute their videos. These types of social networking sites, whether posted by the advertisers themselves, or through other friends or accounts seems to have a faster ROI clearly due to the mass exposure.

The solution? In order for IYP to become viable outlets for video advertising they need to make them search engine friendly so that the search engines that go out looking for video content can readily find it on their sites and identify it, Roberts says. This might be done by including all video ad content in a video sitemap with basic details of each video. They could promote the content via MRSS feeds and/or sitemaps and they themselves should have some system in place that submits the content to search engines when the client uploads the video. They should also make video a searchable option in their directories. This would then allow people to search for ads specifically with video attached to them.

If such issues are not solved, Roberts says, video-based advertising in the yellow page sites will run second to self-promotion via social networking, video search engines and other outlets.