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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Liveblogging Laura Rich’s (CEO of StreetFight) keynote kicking off Street Fight Summit West 2012 Conference. The old guard forgot something really important: understanding consumers. Laura saw a Foursquare sticker on the window of a coffee shop in Boulder. Foursquare has hundreds of thousands of businesses using their platform, displaying their stickers, but no salesforce. Local [...]

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My post on Bizible’s new local search ranking factors study is now up at SearchEngineLand. You can also get more detail on the study and the results on Bizible’s blog. As mentioned in my SEL post, Bizible claims the study is scientifically valid and while in general I liked their approach, I can think of [...]

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 On Monday, my SearchEngineLand column will preview the results of a new Google Places Ranking Factors study conducted by Bizible.  Aaron Bird, CEO & Night Janitor of Bizible, approached me a month or two ago about the study and I was intrigued by his approach. The study is a scientific complement to David Mihm’s well-known [...]

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Linda Buquet has an interesting read on the recent Google Venice Update, which among other things appears to have boosted local businesses’ ability to rank in the organic, non-Places results: “If my research is right and 75% of searches are for “cityless keywords” then this is a huge opportunity that didn’t exist before – to [...]

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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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WhitePages.com gets into the infographic/linkbait game:

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Great post from Muckerlab on the agony and the ecstasy of Local: “By my count, around 100 startups focused on local were launched between Q2 and Q3 of 2011. there are mobile apps, deals/offers companies, social relationship management dashboards, ad networks, merchant acquiring/ processing solutions and more. (Although the slow down in the last 30-60 [...]

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I know I should put my phone number on the Do Not Call List, but I actually find it interesting to see who ends up calling.  My wife of course finds it incredibly annoying. But it blows my mind that by far the majority of sales calls are from people trying to sell me SEO [...]

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I am currently in Prague at the EIDQ conference and have been feeling a bit lame re my lack of blogging as of late so I thought I would offer a link to this Patch article I found that offers up some upbeat economic news – so tired of the downer stuff: Pleasanton Economy: Downtown [...]

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