LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Today Greg Sterling asked What’s Going On At CityGrid?: “Here’s my paraphrase of some of the things I was told: CityGrid and Citysearch are struggling (to retain and deliver value to advertisers) Citysearch was characterized to me as having lost so much momentum that it was effectively “dead” CityGrid and associated properties (InsiderPages, Citysearch, Urbanspoon) [...]

[Read more →]

Listening to Neil Salvage, EVP of CityGrid Media, speaking at the Local Search Association Conference on selling marketing services to SMBs. The advantages of the closed loop model (OpenTable, Groupon, etc.) – The advertiser knows it’s working. QED.

[Read more →]

Just spotted in the wild: (hat tip to Vik at Chitika) Tweet

[Read more →]

In general you should know who your competition is in the SERPs, but Google just made it easier (unless I have totally missed this feature for months which is possible). I just noticed a “Pages similar to ” widget at the bottom of the results. Here’s what I got when I queried “localseoguide” It appears [...]

[Read more →]

National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic.  The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings.  Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword [...]

[Read more →]

IAC/Citysearch just announced a contest for third party developers to come up with “the next hot local guide app for the Web and mobile devices” on their Sidewalk.com domain.  It’s called the “Sidewalk: Right Here Right Now Contest”. BTW – banana peel, fire hydrant & pigeon?  Subliminal messages? Greg Sterling thinks this is interesting because [...]

[Read more →]

My bud Ahmed has put together a list of the top IYPs in the US based on reach derived from Google’s stats.  Nothing too surprising except that Citysearch is #1.  I also think there are a number of sites missing from the list – 50states for example.  But still good info for all you local [...]

[Read more →]

The guys over at Palore have been sending me some interesting info on the local search sites they have been crawling.  Recently they looked at how many sites a particular business appeared on as an advertiser.  According to their data it looks like a high percentage of SMBs advertise on only one site.   Check [...]

[Read more →]

Hey gang, While on vacation in Mexico I published a post about Citysearch perhaps having some issues with Google by providing links to advertisers without adding a nofollow tag. Matt McGee rightly pointed out that Citysearch is linking to advertisers via a redirect that will not provide any SEO value and therefore is not in [...]

[Read more →]

Miriam Ellis just put together a fantastic post on all of the sites that Google Maps is using as sources for review information for the hospitality industry. Here’s the list: 10best.com Aol.com ChefMoz.org Citysearch.com Dine.com DiningGuide.com Dinnerbroker.com Frommers.com Gayot.com Giatamedia.com Greenopia.com Insiderpages.com Menupages.com Mytravelguide.com Priceline.com RestaurantRow.com Travelocity.com Travelpost.com Tripadvisor.com Virtualtourist.com Yahoo.com Yelp.com Zagat.com I recommend [...]

[Read more →]