LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Google announced a number of upgrades to its voice search application today.  One of them looks like it could be particularly troublesome to local search directory players.  From TechCrunch:
Another feature is the ability to call any business in Google Search. This does not have to be a company in your local contacts app — it [...]

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Executive Summary: Who knows?
But here’s a data point of one:
The Main Street Meat N Fish Market recently opened in Pleasanton.  My wife asked me to find their hours so I went to Google and queried “pleasanton meat n fish market“.  At the top of the SERP was this result from Patch.com (congrats to them!) but [...]

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Today the Yellow Pages Association released a new study based on Comscore data that shows an increase in local mobile usage, particularly as it affects the use of local directories.  Here are some of the highlights:

The number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in [...]

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David Vogelpohl has posted a great list of local seo meetups from all over the U.S on Marketing Pilgrim.  If you are interested in getting together with other search engine geeks in your area, check it out.

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With all of the brouhaha going on about Google’s test of a new local SERP for category searches that will make it much harder for local directories to get traffic, I became almost willfully blind to the more subtle change that had occurred to the SERP for business name queries.  Thanks to Patrick Altoft for [...]

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Chris Silver Smith brings up a great point in today’s Local’s Only column about Google’s new local SERP design they are testing:
…you might think that the newer, larger listing treatment might be beneficial for the visibility of these businesses. But, think again—for any of them which have been doing significant search marketing activities, this sea [...]

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I’ll be at HostingCon in Austin on Monday July 19th where I’ll be speaking on the Local Search Ranking Tactics panel along with Curtis R. Curtis (no relation to Sirhan B. Sirhan) of UBL.org and Lisa Maier of Local Directive.
If you are going to be there please stop by the panel and say hello.  We [...]

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To: Local Directory Sites
From: Google
Subject: A Little Head’s Up
As you may have heard, we’ve been testing a new design for the SERPs we display when we detect a query with local intent.  In the past these results have typically been a mix of local businesses, local directories and other random sites that figured [...]

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My latest Locals Only article for SearchEngineLand is Franchisee SEO - Can You Trust Corporate’s Recommendations?
I often get called by franchises and by franchisees to help with SEO and too often I see the two working against each other.  If you don’t feel like reading the piece here are key takeways:

Franchises need to educate their [...]

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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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Just saw this release that Chris Winfield, Dave Snyder, Brent Csutoras, Jordan Kasteler, Loren Baker, Tony Wang and Danielle Winfield along with their colleagues at their various companies have joined forces to form Blueglass, a full service Internet Marketing agency.
This may not mean much to my readers in the local search world, but [...]

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David Mihm has done it once again and published another edition of Local Search Ranking Factors.  This year David surveyed 32 local search geeks to get their takes on the top factors for ranking high in Google Maps.  The entire set of results is well worth the time for any business that wants to do [...]

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image liberally appropriated from Roger Hollander
Thanks to Vanessa Fox as always for eliciting grains of truth from Google.  At last week’s Google I/O conference Matt Cutts confirmed that there was an algo change at the beginning of May that will likely be affecting sites that generate a lot of long-tail traffic: 
”this is an algorithmic change [...]

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Last year I published the first IYP SEO Rankings Report which looked at which yellow pages/general local search sites ranked the best in Google for popular queries in the top U.S. markets.  That post has spawned a few other SEOs to try a similar approach for specific verticals.  Here are a few worth checking out:
U.S. [...]

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One of the things I love about local and the Web in general are the crazy niches you can go after like Find a Mohel.  I was checking out the profile of one of my Twitter followers @jwegener and found this great service he created with his sister, ExitStrategyNYC.  The concept behind it is pretty [...]

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