LOC@L SEO GUIDE

You may have seen the news earlier this week that Greg Sterling and I have determined that bad business listing data may be costing US businesses $10 billion. To provide more context for that number, Yext has just published the first issue of the Yext Quarterly (aka “YQ”), subtitled “The State of Location”.  The report was [...]

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Greg Sterling & I were asked by Yext to figure out how the cost of erroneous business listings data.  The answer: $10 Billion, maybe more.  Greg has the full story. Yext internal data indicate that 14% of business listings are missing from online databases and sites and as much as 43% of listings contain errors [...]

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I am sitting in the SMX West exhibit hall where Gregg Stewart of 15miles is presenting some of the findings of the latest Local Search Usage study conducted in conjunction with Localeze. The survey study consists of a targeted sample of over 4,000 users of local business Internet searchers, broken into 3 search categories – [...]

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Greg reports on AT&T Interactive finally listening to me AT&T Interactive has opened up all the content on YP.com to third party developers. That means app developers will have access to YP.com’s 17 million local listings, maps, reviews/ratings and deals for free: Great list from Greg on free local data set providers. From Perry Evans [...]

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The paucity of posts over the past few months is directly proportional to how screwed up Google Places can be and the commensurate demand for help with said wackiness.  As a result I have been incredibly poor about putting up to posts that I have been planning.  They always seem to be 99% done and [...]

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Google, Bing & Yahoo have just announced support of a standardized set of microformats at Schema.org. Here’s the full list of supported schema types. This means that you format your templates once and “rich snippets” of your data can show up on all of the major search engines. If you haven’t already added microformats to [...]

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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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If you have been following the saga of the newly opened Main Street Meat and Fish Market in Pleasanton, Greg Sterling and I were having a discussion last week about the fact that since they are a new business, they are not yet showing up in the local search databases like InfoUSA, Acxiom & Localeze, [...]

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I was telling Greg Sterling about how the new meat market in Pleasanton is killing it on their Facebook Page, which was created by a customer, and on Yelp despite the fact that they don’t have a Google Place Page and the business itself isn’t even participating in any of this. From Greg’s The Curious [...]

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Jonah Stein forwarded me this missive from Josh Vickers, founder of TaskSquid, who seems to be in cahoots with Adam Harris of Calacles.com. Apparently Google has misplaced La Jolla: It is Official. The Jewel of San Diego, La Jolla, once nestled on a prime stretch of Pacific, has taken root in a new exciting? location. [...]

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