LOC@L SEO GUIDE

So it’s finally here. Predictions:

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.
This is actually [...]

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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 [...]

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Cari McGee pens a New Yorker-worthy piece on how Facebook can create incredible social-local experiences as seen through the lens of a woman who was downsizing and needed help moving:
But another friend of hers, (we’ll call her Mary), said, “No, you won’t. I’ll get others to help. No biggie.” And Mary rallied [...]

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Methinks Greg Sterling has been spending too much time with SEO types as of late because his latest post on how Facebook’s Like Buttons could put Facebook on a collision course with the big players in local search sounds like a paranoid screed that I might have penned.  In other words, I dig what he [...]

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I haven’t seen them live on Yelp yet because years ago Jeremy Stoppleman banned my email address, but that’s another story.
The big question - are Facebook’s Like buttons complementary to reviews or do they cannibalize them?

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Last week I was on a panel at the Local Search Summit with Sarah Smith of Facebook.  I asked her about their platform strategy for small business and she responded that besides advertising they weren’t really focused on SMB Apps.  The FB Platform has been a big magnet for developers writing consumer apps, and while [...]

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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 [...]

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There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over Twitter’s local search implications.  Over the past few months several Twitter services have launched with a local angle.  I thought it would be interesting to get them all in one place and provide some details:

Launched by the Praized Media guys, TwitArea is an add-on to [...]

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Just saw this on the front door of a kid’s clothing store in Rye, NY.
The number of online “friends” your business has may be a good indication of its health. The storefronts next to Sasha’s were empty. Must have been using Yahoo 360.

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Dan Goodman of Loladex, a recently launched local search service on Facebook, tells me that the company has launched an update today improving the UI and adding a bunch of local search filters (category, distance, etc.).  The service is focused on the Washington, DC area for now but clearly has national intentions. The new UI [...]

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In a previous post I stated that Facebook Local could end up being a very important marketing opportunity for you business. Since then, thousands of businesses have created Facebook Pages - simple templates to create a page about your service that can be promoted via Facebook’s social network.
In principle the more networked your business’ page [...]

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Way back when I met Laurence Hooper who at the time was head product guy on AOL’s local search. He left AOL last year and I stumbled upon his blog one day where he was talking about a new local search service he was working on called Loladex. For whatever reason I checked it out [...]

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I just heard a presentation from Facebook on its social ads system where you can use referrals from a customer as part of your ad to promote your business across a social network.  I am no attorney but I am pretty sure that there are several companies who have applied for patents on this concept [...]

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Here’s what I am getting from the ILM presentation by Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing & Operations, Facebook:
Facebook = big:
55 million active users
250,000 new users per day
One year from now 200 million people
Greater than entire sum of paid and unpaid usage of newspapers in 2006

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