LOC@L SEO GUIDE

VCs from Canaan Partners (Warren Lee), Trinity Ventures (Patricia Nakache) & Comcast Ventures (Michael Yang):
Patricia Nakache:
no one has cracked local impulse purchases - mentions Groupon
Warren Lee:
Skeptical that growth will happen as fast as Kelsey predicts because access to venture capital is not as easy. Venture capital is going to contract by 20-30% and fragmented nature [...]

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I am supposed to be up there but given my lack of voice I thought it not such a good idea.  Here’s the presentation I would have given
ILM 09 Local Media SEO Presentation (it definitely needs narration so feel free to ping me with questions)

it’s pretty much a rehash of my SEL post: Don’t Give [...]

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Sivan Metzger, GM of the just announced Kenshoo Local, is up and talking about the local search marketing challenges:

Massive programs/thousands of listings
Cumbersome on-boarding process
Resource intensive ongoing management process
Cross channel geo-targeting/tracking conversions
Manual keyword & bid optimization

Huge surge in demand for SEM services from SMBs, however:

30-40 accounts per account manager
40 accounts x $500/mth @20% margin
= no profit [...]

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DirectoryM is a huge local search network that most people in the local search biz don’t know anything about.  Here’s waht Panos had to say:
It looks like DirectoryM takes in a lot of third party data to provide relevant content. They either crawl and suck it in or they have a deal with the partner [...]

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Lost my voice at SES Chicago yesterday.  Thankful I made it out of O’Hare.  Since I am effectively mute I will probably be doing a bit of blogging at the Kelsey ILM 09 show.
Just came in to the pre-conference at the tail-end of a talk by Jeff Ferguson of Local.com on the different local marketing [...]

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I’ll be speaking at the BIA Kelsey ILM ‘09 Local Search “Preconference” - sort of akin to sitting at the kiddie table at Thanksgiving - along with Mr. David Mihm, Chris Spanos of AOL/Going.com and BIA Kelsey’s Mike Boland.  We’ll be doing a site clinic as part of the session so if you have a [...]

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I’m back after a day of schmoozing to liveblog David Krantz’s (CEO of AT&T Interactive) presentation.
1.8B searches on their network
20M unique visitors/mnth to Yellowpages.com
250% Mobile Search Growth 2008-2009
74% brand awareness for Yellowpages.com
$89B U.S. Local Ad Spend - Local Interactive = 14% ($12B)
38% of all online search traffic is “local”
27M businesses listed on yellowpages.com
He’s been talking [...]

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Mike Boland of BIA Kelsey is overseeing the mobile local search panel.
Danny Francis of Cellcity walks through an implementation of GoOrlando which appears to be a simple IYP put on an iPhone.  Per Danny’s comment below this was just a demo app to show what a basic local mobile search app could be.  I am [...]

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Steve Marshall of BIA Kelsey Group is going over some consumer research re local search.  Some of the key points:

16% of consumers use Social Networking Sites as a Source for Local Shopping Info
47% think ratings or testimonials from users of a product or service is very important, up from 40% two years ago
18% of those [...]

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Charles Laughlin and Neal Polachek of BIA Kelsey talking about their survey of Yellow Pages CEOs:
Some quotes from CEOs on where we are today:

“Conserving cash has replaced growth.  Advertisers have reduced spending at a rate we’ve never seen before”
“Print usage has dropped significantly.  Nobody talked about usage in the past because sales were based on [...]

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Panelists:
Taylor Treese - MediaTraks, Dean Hodges - American Directory Systems, Eitan Ackerman - Amdocs
The panel started out talking about the growing interest in selling digital products.  There are a number of bottlenecks - sales has a hard time adjusting to selling digital and it’s a challenge to upgrade backend technologies to deliver these new products.

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Let’s start out the conference with a little liveblogging:
Michael Taylor of BIA Kelsey started out the Kelsey DMS ‘09 conference with a “preconference” presentation on the landscape of selling marketing services to SMBs.
The number of local media choices is increasing - TV, Yellow Pages, Newspaper, Radio, IPTV, Mobile, PayPerCall, etc.
Questions SMB’s ask:

How do local media [...]

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Ok I am hung up on Twitter today.  Here’s another thing I learned at the Kelsey Conference about Twitter - It’s an amazing marketing tool at conferences.
During the conference the moderators periodically mentioned that people should tweet conference-related stuff using #marketplaces2009 so that all of the conference tweets would be easy to find in Twitter [...]

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Sorry for the radio silence.  It has been a busy conference and I haven’t had a chance to summarize my thoughts and conversations.
Will do so later this week.

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Just sat through the Jeff Berman of MySpace’s keynote at the Kelsey Group’s Marketplaces 2009 conference.  There was a lot of talk about personalization and how huge the audience is, but I only heard lip service paid to local.  Berman gave an example of how a roofer got a $30K deal via a $100 self-serve [...]

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