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. [...]

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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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With all of the brouhaha going on about Google’s test of a new local SERP for category searches that will make it much harder for local directories to get traffic, I became almost willfully blind to the more subtle change that had occurred to the SERP for business name queries.  Thanks to Patrick Altoft for [...]

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Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing:
…you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea [...]

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David Mihm has done it once again and published another edition of Local Search Ranking Factors.  This year David surveyed 32 local search geeks to get their takes on the top factors for ranking high in Google Maps.  The entire set of results is well worth the time for any business that wants to do [...]

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Sometimes I am embarrassed to be in the local search biz…

via BIrthday Ideas

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and other great local seo tips from Dev Basu. See Page 16 for the GOOG Maps thing.

via @davidmihm

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Last week saw the launch of Google Place Pages which Google described as “a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it.” Nothing like a modest goal to scare the crap out of everybody else in local search.
According to Greg Sterling Google was not going to be indexing Place [...]

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Update: MyMapInfo, the SEO who was working on Artie’s site, commented on Will’s post that I had mistaken him for a spammer when he has been trying to get his client to rank well after the client was the victim of map spammers.  I’ll take him at his word and apologize for impugning his reputation [...]

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In the previous post, where I stumbled on to ads on a Google Map on Merchant Circle, “Mappin’” Mike Blumenthal took me to the local search woodshed with the following comment:
In mid March, Google announced that they have changed the API to allow the hosting site show ads along with searches for local businesses performed [...]

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I was just looking at this page on Merchant Circle and noticed ads showing up on their Google Map!

I am sensing a trend.

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Well not quite every search, but as Mike Blumenthal just told me, the 10 Pack is now appearing in a number of broad, non-geo phrase searches.
Some observations of the 10 pack’s behavior in Web results (the “Web Pack” anyone?):

In every query I have tried the 10 pack appears in position #4.  It still gets pushed [...]

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thanks to Matt McGee for tipping me off to this one.  Here’s a particularly useful example:

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When Best of the Web Local launched in August, I thought it was yet another wakeup call to Yellow Pages companies (both print and IYPs) that their business was under attack.  There are already thousands of IYP type sites out there, but when an established domain like BOTW.org launches one and combines that with the [...]

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