LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Readers of this collection of hypertext may recall my tale of woe in dealing with a San Jose Auto Repair shop who done me wrong last year.  The subtitle of that little missive was “A lesson in reputation management” and the subsequent flames that sprung up on various local reviews sites showed how rubbing someone [...]

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While I was on vacation over the past week, the guys over at Praized Media had the audacity to both coin some new business lingo (social media is now the “need” medium) and launch a new reputation monitoring/social lead-gen tool called Needium. I haven’t used it yet but it sounds like a pretty good idea.  [...]

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Howard Lerman of Yext pinged me today to discuss the launch of Yext Rep, their new reputation management platform for SMBs. I thought it was pretty cool.
The service allows businesses to get “a real-time feed that shows the constant flow of reviews, tweets, Facebook wall posts, alerts and other information, allowing business owners to [...]

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Gib Olander offers some handy tips for SMBs to make sure their social media presence is in sync with everything else they are doing:
Research shows that many consumers that view an online business listing then visit a brick and mortar location. By linking the real-time conversations taking place about your location with your local search [...]

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Business.com just released the results of a study on social media usage by business professionals. The big data points that stuck out for me:

The average company in this study was planning, developing or running seven(!!!!) different social media initiatives

Facebook is the social media [...]

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David Mihm puts out an excellent piece of linkbait on Google advertising against his name and goes for the “king of local seo” title.  Although the great GOOG has opted not to run PPC ads against my name, I take solace in the fact that at least Intelius deems me worthy.

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Was having a conversation with my sister about funny business names (we had exhausted all other civil topics) and it reminded me of this inspirational tale.
For those interested in more family-oriented fare, might I recommend the Hallmark Visitors Center?

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These guys helped me out when I was in a jam and didn’t charge me a dime.  For the full story of how I found Dynamic Audio on 599 S. Market St. San Jose CA 95110 see my previous post on why Tate Family Complete Auto Care has some ’splainin to do.
So if you are [...]

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A lesson in reputation management:
Last night I was driving away from the Local Search Summit Conference with Mr. David Mihm, local search whiz, when I noticed that I had a flat tire.  As luck would have it I stopped the car right in front of Tate Family Complete Auto Care at 477 Market St. in [...]

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I am not the first blogger to claim that the NYT has some questionable editorial practices, but the use of links in a recent article by Claire Cain Miller on the how Lifestyle Lift got busted for faking online reviews caught my eye.

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Just caught this article in the NYTimes about how Attorney General Andrew Cuomo had fined Lifestyle Lift, a cosmetic surgery company, $300,000 for ordering its employees to write fake reviews of its face-lift procedure on sites like RealSelf.
Let’s put aside the ethics of faking reviews for a minute and reflect on how effective a strategy [...]

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There’s a great discussion going on over on Mike Blumenthal’s What Is Merchant Circle Up To Now? post.  Mike had heard about Merchant Circle owning a lot of small business domains, did some research and suggested that MC could be squatting on a large number of SMB-branded domains and that many of these SMBs would [...]

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If you read Reputation Management Jujitsu you know that saying nice things about not-so-nice companies can be a powerful linkbuilding tactic.  Of course it’s also true that saying nice things about nice companies can also work.
For example, last week I posted Mixpo is Pretty Cool after seeing a demo at the Kelsey DMS show.  Today [...]

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Many companies have online reputation management issues.  When you search for them, the top results are often full of criticisms of the company.  Getting negative messages off the first ten results of Google can be critical to a business.  Hence the rapid rise of the reputation management consultants.
So how does this help you?  Check this [...]

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