LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Mike Blumenthal has some nice LocalSEOGuide bait today on print yellow pages usage trends by advertisers entitled “Annual Print YP Death Watch”: “In many categories the ads are for national players. In florists for example there are 2.5 pages and only 1/8 of one page covers truly local florists….The print YP are no longer a [...]

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Inspired by John Battele’s scoring of his 2010 predictions I figured I’d see how I did with my 2010 Local SEO Predictions: The Open Source Yellow Pages Will Emerge Let’s see – Citysearch turned into CityGrid and is now supplying yellow pages data/ads to anyone who wants it.  YPG launched its Yellow API strategy.  A [...]

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Just saw this in the wild Tweet

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I am not at SMX East today, but I thought it might be helpful to grab some interesting local tweets bubbling up from #SMX and record them here. I’ll be updating this from time to time over the next couple of days: Hot from #SMX: The Search Crossover: Local, Mobile Social http://outspokenmedia.com/4wbfless than a minute [...]

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I have access to a new ad unit that may improve eCPMs on local pages. If you have a site with local traffic – big or small – ping me and I’ll hook you up.

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The wifi at the show has finally been fixed so here’s a summary of my notes from Steve Marshall’s presentation on SMB advertising behavior from their survey of SMB advertisers from the end of 2009. Print Yellow Pages Took a Big Hit: In 2008, 32% of SMBs advertised in the print book v. only 25% [...]

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The Kelsey Group surveyed “Plus Spenders”, SMBs that spend at least $25K/yr in marketing v. the average of about $2500. According to Kelsey: · 90 percent of SMB Plus Spenders have a Web site, versus 62 percent for average SMBs. · Plus Spenders use more types of online media, and spend more for online advertising [...]

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Merchant Circle just launched a City “Mayor” program designed to promote the most connected SMBs in a service area on the site.  As Greg Sterling, he of the newly redesigned Screenwerk blog, put it: Because MerchantCircle gets so much traffic from SEO in search results this will also be a major SEO play for the [...]

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SmallBusinessShift ponders the challenges of scaling an ambitious SMB SEM play: It’s not that Yext is a scam, although they do have some problems. The bigger issue is that there’s a communication and expectations gap when it comes to these big marketing companies and the businesses they’re serving. Yext, Yodle, etc. all have lots of [...]

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Court Cunningham, CEO of Yodle, recently published “Local Online Advertising for Dummies”, a book to help SMBs “plan and launch an effective local online advertising campaign”, “set up a Web site that draws local traffic” & “maximize your presence on top search engines”. I haven’t read the book yet, and I am sure it has [...]

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