LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Recently we hired a great bay area child photographer to do some shots of our children.  While I loved the photos, I was even more impressed with the follow up email I just received from the photographer.  Check out this excerpt: I was wondering if you would be able to write some reviews for me [...]

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When Best of the Web Local launched in August, I thought it was yet another wakeup call to Yellow Pages companies (both print and IYPs) that their business was under attack.  There are already thousands of IYP type sites out there, but when an established domain like BOTW.org launches one and combines that with the [...]

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When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people. Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews.  [...]

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Some notes from Peter Krasilovsky’s interview with Sonia McFarland, head of business development of Yelp.  Not much new here but a couple of interesting data points. – Yelp’s demo is older than you think – In order to be an advertiser on the site you need to “qualify” by having a minimum number of reviews [...]

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I have been using an iPhone for the past two weeks and it’s pretty clear to me that the only thing that is going to stop me from using it more and more to find things is a fatal car crash.  That’s why my loved ones and I are glad to hear about a number [...]

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Steve “McStud” Espinosa has another very useful local search post that shows why you should be subscribing to his blog’s feed.  Here’s the gist of it: He tested how to get more calls from your Yahoo Local listing.  This technique resulted in “1.8x more calls”: Insert Keyword into Business Name Upgrade to a Yahoo Local [...]

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Just stumbled upon the reincarnation of Judysbook.  For you youngsters in the local search space, JB, along with Insiderpages and Yelp, was one of the original social-local-search poster children.  I believe they even trademarked that term at one point.  Whomever is running the show over there has smoked the local search crack pipe and decided [...]

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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 [...]

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Online reviews can impact rankings, particularly in less competitive markets Ratings can also influence click-through rate from local SERPs (you’re more likely to notice and click on a five star rating v. a one star). Ratings are the new rankings. make it easy for your customers to write a review (they aren’t going to do [...]

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This just in from Palore:

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