LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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.
· [...]

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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 SMB [...]

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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 venture dollars [...]

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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 plenty [...]

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Supermedia just announced that they will be licensing their Superguarantee shield logo to advertisers.  From the press release:
SuperMedia LLC recently launched ShieldPower, a new licensing program for SuperGuarantee businesses, making it even easier for consumers to spot the ‘Good Guys.’ Qualified businesses can now leverage the power of the SuperGuarantee Shield and use it on their [...]

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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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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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