LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Ok I know Facebook is a big-ass brand that doesn’t need your stinking organic traffic, but if you’re going to have a big press conference about your amazing new mobile strategy, don’t you think the in-house SEO person would at least do the minimum to make sure that someone searching Google would be able to [...]

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For those in the know, Dittmer’s Gourmet Meats & Wurst Haus was the best place in Silicon Valley to get a smoked pork chop, a pickled pigs foot or a tub of duck fat. Unfortunately, last year a faulty smoker caused a fire and Dittmers had to shut down while it moved locations and rebuilt. [...]

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Leena Rao tries to make sense of Ebay’s recent acquisitions: t’s no secret that eBay has been heavily investing in a local commerce strategy. The central core of this is trying to capitalize on the $917 million online-to-offline buying market, which Forrester estimates will eventually reach $1.3 trillion (although this number seems low) and account [...]

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Liveblogging: Emily White, formerly of Google Local and now running Facebook Local, starting out with “it’s all about people”. How far we come – My Facebook profile is my true identity v. my original AIM screen name 10 years ago. If you’re not interacting online with your true identity, what are you trying to do? [...]

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According to the BIA Kelsey’s 2010 Local Commerce Monitor, the use of social media by small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who spend at least $25K in online marketing/year has risen dramatically over the past year. As I mentioned in my post on The Local Reviews Ecosystem, the focus on customer engagement via reviews and social [...]

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I was telling Greg Sterling about how the new meat market in Pleasanton is killing it on their Facebook Page, which was created by a customer, and on Yelp despite the fact that they don’t have a Google Place Page and the business itself isn’t even participating in any of this. From Greg’s The Curious [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 the troops. [...]

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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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