LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Jonah Stein forwarded me this missive from Josh Vickers, founder of TaskSquid, who seems to be in cahoots with Adam Harris of Calacles.com. Apparently Google has misplaced La Jolla:

It is Official. The Jewel of San Diego, La Jolla, once nestled on a prime stretch of Pacific, has taken root in a new exciting? location. With the help of Google and its location-based search, La Jolla, rated by the Robb Report as the Best Place to Live in America, has uprooted itself from its San Diego base and found itself in Fullerton, California….A major concern of the move has been the effective decrease in property value as La Jolla’s new location under the 57 overpass in Fullerton has found La Jolla’s housing market stifled to say the least. At its coastal location, the median home price sat around $964,000. In its new location near Fullerton, La Jolla’s average home price is teetering around $380,000”

Note to La Jolla - maybe it’s time to claim your Google Place Page.

And for more on La Jolla and the Little Mermaid I recommend checking out the Greatest Phone Message in the World.

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The Kelsey Group surveyed “Plus Spenders”, SMBs that spend at least $25K/yr in marketing v. the average of about $2500. According to Kelsey:

· 90 percent of SMB Plus Spenders have a Web site, versus 62 percent for average SMBs.
· Plus Spenders use more types of online media, and spend more for online advertising (well duh): In the past 12 months, Plus Spenders spent 26 percent of their total ad budget on online media, versus 21.8 percent for average SMBs, a difference of 4.2 points.
· Plus Spenders spend an appreciable amount of their total budget on broadcast media: 16.1 percent of their budget is allocated to broadcast media compared with 1.3 percent for all SMBs.

Interesting to see that SMBs are pushing more budget into online v. broadcast. I would have thought that online was growing faster but would still be a smaller % of the budget. Also interesting to see how much more Plus Spenders rely on broadcast v. their el cheapo SMB brethren.
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Another triumphant #1 image ranking for the blog.  It’s the little things that count right?

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So it’s finally here. Predictions:

1. Facebook Places will (and probably already has) become the Twitter of location check-ins.  Anyone creating an application that relies on check-ins will need to use Facebook Places as its foundation.  And anyone who didn’t know what a check-in was two days ago probably knows what it is now.
2. This is actually awesome news for everyone, maybe even Foursquare, GoWalla, MyTown and the rest of the location-based-service crowd.  [Read more →]

I am as tired as anyone else about the political bullshit that is going on in this country and there’s only so much that Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and So You Think You Can Lose Weight While You Dance, Cook & Remodel Kitchens can do to distract us. I am particularly cranky about all of this deficit stuff so it irks me when I see news like the fact that the US Postal Service lost $2.5 billion in June of this year while being the 51st most visited site on the planet (thanks to @compete for bringing this out into the light).

Dear Uber Secretary of US Government Efficiency:

Please note the following:

1. .gov sites seem to do pretty well SEO-wise
2. seems to me that USPS.gov, and any other .gov site, could add some pretty great content to the site and optimize it so that it can get a lot of traffic for high value keywords
3. Pop some Adsense on the pages (or some affiliate deals - I bet you can get a great CPA from FedEx)
4. Deficit solved

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Google announced a number of upgrades to its voice search application today.  One of them looks like it could be particularly troublesome to local search directory players.  From TechCrunch:

Another feature is the ability to call any business in Google Search. This does not have to be a company in your local contacts app — it can be any business.

I haven’t seen this in action yet, but if it acts the way I think it does then there will be one less reason to do a mobile Web query for a business.   [Read more →]

Since this blog’s readers are mainly from the search marketing & local search industries, I’ve often thought I should add a job board for local search jobs.  I regularly get requests from readers to promote their job openings so maybe one of these days I’ll get around to doing one.

As a little test I’ve posted a job Microsoft pinged me about yesterday.  Here’s a summary of the position.  If you are into SMB marketing (and acronyms) this could be the job for you:

Senior Marketing Manager, Global Trade Marketing
Microsoft Mobile Advertising (MoAd)

Microsoft Advertising (MSA) is looking for a star Senior Marketing Manager with an outstanding track record in local/online/digital marketing and a strong passion for emerging/mobile media to lead the global mobile advertising trade marketing team’s efforts around Small & Medium Sized Business (SMB), local and commerce. This is a high-impact, high-visibility opportunity for an experienced marketing manager looking to help build and scale a significant new business for Microsoft. The role is based in Redmond and will report to the Global Director of Trade Marketing, Microsoft Mobile Advertising Solutions.

Here’s the Full description.

If you are interested, please ping me at localseo @ localseoguide.com or on Twitter at @localseoguide and I’ll hook you up.  If you get the job, your first paycheck buys beers for anyone subscribing to my RSS feed.

And on a totally unrelated note, I fixed some duplication issues this blog has had for about a year and once again I rank #1 for “soup nazi“.  There is a God after all, and he serves damn good soup.

Readers of this collection of hypertext may recall my tale of woe in dealing with a San Jose Auto Repair shop who done me wrong last year.  The subtitle of that little missive was “A lesson in reputation management” and the subsequent flames that sprung up on various local reviews sites showed how rubbing someone the wrong way, particularly someone with a rudimentary understanding of how social media works, is probably not a good way to get the good word out about your business.  (BTW, thanks to FrankOB for coining my new moniker, the “Flat Tire Guy”.)

Anyhow, I just came across a similar story from Jonah Stein about a Berkeley Toyota dealer that did his wife wrong.  In this case it sounds like the Steins were treated shabbily by the dealer and the dealer ultimately decided not to do business with them because he was afraid the Steins would trash him in their customer satisfaction survey.

Maybe search marketers should have to disclose what they do when they enter into a customer service situation.  Then again, maybe businesses shouldn’t treat customers poorly and then provide disincentives to make it right.

Just found an article on Angieslist about an outfit called Medical Justice that helped a doctor contractually obligate patients from talking about them online with a gag order. It certainly sucks to have someone talk smack about your business online, but suing a patient seems like an absolutely boneheaded way to deal with it.

Hey doc, here are some alternative ideas:

The Online Reputation Management Guide (OutSpoken Media)

Managing and Improving Your Business’ Reputation Online (GetListed.org)

8 Simple Reputation Management Emergency Measures (Tad Chef)

How To Use The Web To Build a Powerful Reputation in Any Industry (doshdosh)

Why Reputation Management Matters for Small Businesses (Matt McGee)

50+ Sites To Help Bury Negative Posts About Your Company! (Jeff Quipp)

Free Online Reputation Management Beginners Guide (Marketing Pilgrim)

And if you are a patient of the above doctor and want to see how to far you can push that gag order down his throat check out this post by Ann Smarty on how to spread a negative reputation online.

Executive Summary: Who knows?

But here’s a data point of one:

The Main Street Meat N Fish Market recently opened in Pleasanton.  My wife asked me to find their hours so I went to Google and queried “pleasanton meat n fish market“.  At the top of the SERP was this result from Patch.com (congrats to them!) but no Google Place Page for the business.  The Patch article pointed to their website, but it’s serving GoDaddy ads right now.  I clicked on the Maps link to see if there was a local listing for this new biz but again there was nothing there.

I went back to the Web SERPs, scanned the results and found Main Street Meat N Fish Market’s Facebook Page, which, lo and behold, had their phone number and store hours, not to mention 151 fans (152 now).  And check out how the Wall aspect of this page makes it so much more interesting than a Google Place Page that has a bunch of scraped data from all over the place:

This made me wonder if more new SMBs weren’t claiming/creating a Facebook page v. a Google Place Page.  Inevitably many will do both, but Facebook may have the edge, particularly with new businesses.

A from-the-gut reasons why that could be happening - Many SMBs may already be on Facebook participating socially, so it’s not a big stretch to think that they would try to use their FB network to promote their biz.  And it’s certainly easier than building your own website.

While probably 100% are “on” Google too, the relatively “dead” feeling of Google Place Pages and the lack of the social net on GOOG doesn’t provide the same community feel as these Facebook Pages.  And a Google Place Page seems more like a “set it and forget it” kind of thing, while the SMB will likely visit its Facebook Page daily, and participate in the conversation there (if there is one of course).

A while ago I wondered aloud if Facebook was the new local Borg.  It’s still too early to tell, but I know one purveyor of dead animals that was just assimilated.

Resistance doth indeed seem futile.

UPDATE: Just got a call from a friend in town.  At the end of the conversation she said, “So you like the new meat market?”  I said “huh?”  She said “I saw you on their Facebook Page.”

We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us…We are the Borg.

Today the Yellow Pages Association released a new study based on Comscore data that shows an increase in local mobile usage, particularly as it affects the use of local directories.  Here are some of the highlights:

1. The number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in March 2010
   
2. the number of people accessing business directories on a mobile device at least once per week increased more than 16 percent year-over-year to nearly five million in March 2010.
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