LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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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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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Sitting in on a Yellow Pages webinar organized by the YP Commando himself, Dick Larkin.  Thought it might be interesting to post some of the data the presenters are discussing.  I’ll keep updating this post as I see more interesting stuff.
Borrell Associates predicts a 39% decline for annual print YP usage by 2013.
It’s not all doom [...]

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Perhaps you recall my epic post - Spitzer, Emperors Club VIP & Local SEO - where I uncovered that the notorious escort service was still running a ppc campaign despite the fact that their site was down?  Well today I uncovered another gem. And sometimes it’s worth repeating something over and over just to make [...]

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Has anyone else noticed that there are almost no ads on Google search results for local “weather”-related searches?  For most “city”+”weather” searches I am seeing no or almost no advertising except for Google Mobile.  Seems very strange.

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Just when you were thinking that the world needed one more online yellow pages with customer reviews, Best of the Web beat you to the punch and launched BOTW Local.
So what makes this different from all of the other local search guys out there?  On its face, not much.  However, in SEO circles BOTW is [...]

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The #1 indicator that a local business is likely to buy online marketing services is that he is already an advertiser.  (In other words if you are an advertiser you are more likely to be an advertiser - mind blowing as usual Hanan)

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From the NYT - Turn your head and cough for the camera please.  Apparently doctors in the “luxury” category (lasik, botox, boob jobs, etc.) are getting pretty aggressive at getting patients to post videos of their procedures on YouTube. Docs are offering nice discounts, and in one case a lasik doc is paying patients $1 [...]

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The guys over at Palore have been sending me some interesting info on the local search sites they have been crawling.  Recently they looked at how many sites a particular business appeared on as an advertiser.  According to their data it looks like a high percentage of SMBs advertise on only one site.   Check [...]

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Just got off the phone with Robert Silverman of Statepoint Media, a service that distributes advertorial to local newspapers, who claims that while the big dailies are busy falling off a cliff, local newspapers are thriving.  He’s talking about the kind of local papers you pick up in the hotel lobby or in a box [...]

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Just walked in on the tail end of Paul Levine’s presentation at the Kelsey Conference on Adbrite and its local targeting capabilities.  Apparently Adbrite has a lot more local inventory than the last time I checked, which was about a year or so ago.  And they have a lot more media options and there are [...]

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TurnHere has already made a name for itself in the industry as the purveyors of online video for small businesses.  Something must be in the air because I just got pinged by Steve Espinosa about Buzzspot.net a new service that provides affordable TV advertising to small and medium-sized businesses.  Buzzspot is basically a reseller of [...]

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Hey readers, Webvisible just raised a bunch of money and Spotrunner just bought Weblistic.  I am curious if any of you out there have used any of the local search engine advertising solutions like ReachLocal, Webvisible, OrangeSoda, etc. and what your experiences have been.   If you have some thoughts please email them to me at [...]

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Last week my post How to Find Vicki Iseman’s Bio - The SEO Way got a lot of traffic not only from Google blogsearch but also from Mahalo.com. I had submitted a link to the post on Mahalo’s Vicki Iseman page in the user-submitted links section. Mahalo is a SEO machine and its Vicki Iseman [...]

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It’s always nice to see a wacky idea you throw out there take wing.
Last month I wrote about how local businesses could market themselves on their local Freecycle group. Today I was talking to Matt McGee, Mr. Small Business Marketing himself, who relayed a story about how his wife, a realtor, took my advice and [...]

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