LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Just caught Greg’s piece on Facebook’s new mobile local search feature: Facebook Gets Into Local Search with Facebook Nearby for iOS & Android. While I don’t expect Facebook Nearby to stay ad-free forever, with the entry of Facebook Nearby and Apple Maps, both ad-free, I’d say 2012 has been the most interesting year in the Local [...]

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This just left on How To Add a Business To Internet Yellow Pages Listings For Free: My name is Carol and my ex-boyfriend dumped me 4 months ago after I caught him of having an affair with someone else and insulting him. I want him back in my life but he refuse to have any contact [...]

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Jade Wang of Google just announced that your old Google+ Business Page can now be merged with your new Google+ Local page which used to be your Google Places Page. As usual Mike Blumenthal has got the goods to help you make sense of the whole thing. Here’s Jade’s post:  For those of you that [...]

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This past February, in  The Non-Place-Place Use Case I posted about how Google was delisting businesses that did not service customers at their locations but had not requested their addresses be hidden on Google Maps.  Mike, Miriam and others chimed in on how lame this was.   Today, I got this email about this “recent” update: Guess [...]

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My post on Bizible’s new local search ranking factors study is now up at SearchEngineLand. You can also get more detail on the study and the results on Bizible’s blog. As mentioned in my SEL post, Bizible claims the study is scientifically valid and while in general I liked their approach, I can think of [...]

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 On Monday, my SearchEngineLand column will preview the results of a new Google Places Ranking Factors study conducted by Bizible.  Aaron Bird, CEO & Night Janitor of Bizible, approached me a month or two ago about the study and I was intrigued by his approach. The study is a scientific complement to David Mihm’s well-known [...]

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Linda Buquet has an interesting read on the recent Google Venice Update, which among other things appears to have boosted local businesses’ ability to rank in the organic, non-Places results: “If my research is right and 75% of searches are for “cityless keywords” then this is a huge opportunity that didn’t exist before – to [...]

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As some of you may know, a few days ago my Google Place Page was sleeping with the fishes. My initial suspicion was that SEOs who work out of residential addresses had been targeted for a Google Places hit job. I guess I should have taken my own advice, because boy was I ever wrong. [...]

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The caller-ID said “Google, Inc.” I was intrigued. The voice on the other line asked if I “serviced clients at this address”. I was busy servicing a client with the other hand (on the phone – get your mind out of the gutter) so I said that my clients were all over the world, which [...]

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And while I’m on the subject, Stever has a great post up on some tips for Encouraging Google +1 Votes for Local Business Websites. Key point for unsuspecting SMBs to take note of: “Forget the new schemes popping up to buy hundreds of plus 1 votes. Those will be meaningless to a local business as [...]

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