LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Liveblogging Carter Maslan’s talk at BIA Kelsey’s ILM 2010: The long tail of local is extremely long The launch of Places search increased the clicks to third party sites by 400% Places is trying to increase the “surface area” of local information There is a local dimension to almost everything (critics, tribes, events, news, credentials, [...]

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Google Places has updated its Quality (read “Anti MapSPAM”) Guidelines – see below. It’s unclear whether these updates reflect additions to the AntiSPAM algorithm or if they are just suggestions, but GOOG does seem to be clearly addressing some of the most obvious MapSPAM strategies – particularly around business names, locations and categorization. To me [...]

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Even though it appears that GOOG has a database of Jamaican and other nearby island businesses, you can’t add new ones.

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I noticed “Hotpot” was trending on Twitter and discovered that tonight Google launched it’s response to Yelp and all of the other local social recommendation thingies.  Don’t have time for a pseudo-thoughtful post on the subject so I thought a few screenshots would do.  More later:

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Ionadas Local and Sentient Services just published the results of an eye-tracking study on the (old as of 10/27/10) Google Local SERPs that is certainly worth a look. Here’s a summary of the results and some screenshots: 1. People seem to be ignoring the maps 2. This is probably one of the reasons why GOOG [...]

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While putting together the Top 10 Reviews Sites In Google Place Search report, we noticed what we thought were testimonials from a business’ website showing up in the reviews section of the result. See the below screenshot from a SERP for “Los Angeles Car Dealers“: In its FAQ on Rich Snippets, Google states that testimonials [...]

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Given the increased prominence of reviews sites in new Google Place Search SERPs, I thought it might be interesting to see which ones were showing up most often. The following is sort of 2010 version of my 2009 IYP SEO Rankings Report. This data is hardly thorough – I only looked at the top 10 [...]

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One component of the new Google Place Search is the merging of local and organic results in a more blended layout. While local marketers around the world are scrambling to figure out any new algorithm changes that have resulted from this release, a battle royale has broken out amongst otherwise civil-toned SEO bloggers to lay [...]

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It’s still too early to tell, but I track the traffic on a number of local directory sites around the world and thus far I have not seen a significant change in Google referrals. Could it be that rumors of the Yellow Pages death have been greatly exaggerated by bloggers seeking page views? Tweet

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Tweet At first glance, the new Google Local SERPs appear to be a potentially big problem for local directories that rely on SEO for traffic. But with change always comes opportunity. As you can see in the screenshot above, when a city does not have many businesses in a service category, there is still an [...]

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