LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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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Just wanted to let my loyal readers know I will be hanging out at the Kelsey Group’s Marketplaces 2009 conference next week in Los Angeles at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza.
I am guessing the unofficial theme of the conference is going to be “and what’s your company’s exposure to derivatives?”
Some of the people I think [...]

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I don’t have enough brain power to give you the blow-by-blow on the Out Of Home session, but listening to Aileen Lee of Danoo, John McMenemin of RippleTV and Rocky Gunderson of SeeSaw Networks, I am hearing some impressive stats about the power of place-based marketing (e.g. those tv screens in your local coffee shops).

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According to the Kelsey video panel - 30-50% of those who have websites will use online video in the next three years.

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Per my previous post on CitySquare’s success with online coupons, it seems like offering deals on your site is the way to go in this meltdown.  I had lunch today with Loren Bendele, CEO of Savings.com, a deal aggregator.  According to Loren they had a record month last month in what would normally be a [...]

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While everyone at the ILM conference is acknowledging that the economy generally blows, I am having a surprising number of conversations with local-oriented companies that are saying business is good.  Case in point, Ben Saren, CEO of CitySquares.com, a Northeast-based IYP with reviews, just told me that he has seen a dramatic increase in inbound [...]

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The big difference between Angie and everyone else is…they charge consumers to see the ratings & reviews.  The cost of taking the time to read everything and meet a number of contractors is much greater than paying Angies List $6/mnth to get a single trusted recommendation.
Businesses don’t pay to be listed but they pay to [...]

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Virutal Paper is a SEO play that repurposes print materials and publish it to help with SEO.  I guess it’s also helpful for users, but that’s besides the point right?
For example they can take a menu and scan it and publish it to your website or for directories to its profile pages, so [...]

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Got to the “Leveraging Traditional Media Online” panel a bit late.  Meredith is talking about the trend toward accountability in advertising and explaning Google Adwords for TV, which has been flying under the radar a bit.
GoogleTV has a partnership with DISHTV where they analyze how many viewers were watching your ad when it ran on [...]

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Listening to Matt Booth at the Kelsey ILM 08 conference.  I’ll have more detail later but basically he’s talking about how you can take advantage of this strange market to grab market share.

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If you are going to be at the Kelsey ILM conference in Santa Clara this week I hope you plan to stop by the “pre-conference” sessions on Wednesday the 19th.  At 9:15 I’ll be putting on the “Local Seo: Ultimate Search Workshop” with a couple of SEO rock stars.  Joining me will be Jonah Stein [...]

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Congratulations to John, Neal, Matt, Pam, Mike, Bobbi, Charles, Peter, Steve & all of the other gurus over there. These guys are a key component of the yellow pages/local search biz. Good move BIA.

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SMBs don’t want to buy web, mobile, print, etc. - they want to buy leads (although for many it’s hard to define what a lead is or how much they are willing to pay for one)
While the big print yellow pages are aggressively growing their digital assets it seems like squeezing efficiencies out of the [...]

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