LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Mike Blumenthal’s instant classic Google Local: Train Wreck at the Junction has spawned a lively Google Plus thread where various Localistas have been wringing their hands as to why oh why can’t Google stop screwing SMBs. While I am in agreement that Google Plus Place Local Multi Merge for Business Dashboardgate has been absolutely no [...]

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This was my favorite piece of data that came out of the BIAKelsey ILMWest show:   (For the bots) Only 13% have a local phone number on their homepage #insane Only 24% have an email address on the site #alsoinsane 36% of these sites are single page #couldbeofficial

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Leena Rao tries to make sense of Ebay’s recent acquisitions: t’s no secret that eBay has been heavily investing in a local commerce strategy. The central core of this is trying to capitalize on the $917 million online-to-offline buying market, which Forrester estimates will eventually reach $1.3 trillion (although this number seems low) and account [...]

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Listening to Neil Salvage, EVP of CityGrid Media, speaking at the Local Search Association Conference on selling marketing services to SMBs. The advantages of the closed loop model (OpenTable, Groupon, etc.) – The advertiser knows it’s working. QED.

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I logged into Gmail today and saw the following message: Ironically a second later I got the following email from a client: So you probably already know this, but thought I would share.  I am working on an email to past customers, and in the process of testing it, I send a copy to my [...]

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UPDATE 11.25.12: Since I wrote this over a year ago, a lot has changed.  Yext has pivoted its business away from pay-per-call to business listings management to help you manage your yellow pages listings from a single dashboard.  The service is called Yext PowerListings. Yext Powerlistings can automatically update your business’ information across 50+ of [...]

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BreakThrough Radio, an enterprising music site in New York, sent over this woman-on-the-street video interviewing consumers and businesses about how social media impacts their decisions on where to eat, shop, etc.

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Just got a demo of Txtio from my bud Eugene Belenky. Eugene bills Txtio as “SMS marketing done right” and he may be onto something. Txtio is launching next week. The service is basically a SMS marketing platform for local businesses. They provide you with a local phone number instead of the short codes that [...]

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Was reading this piece over at Greg’s blog about how Google is going to spend $100MM to get SMBs to use Adwords and the wording on this image kind of made me think of Groupon: 50% off (spend $100 and get $200 of value) Limited time only First one million businesses only Ok, maybe it’s [...]

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Closely, Perry Evans new “live social marketing” start-up, just launched GroupGro, a blog that provides SMBs with guides for navigating the daily deal space. Should be interesting to see how GroupGro and Closely relate to each other over time. When Perry mentioned GroupGro to me a couple of months ago, I thought it was a [...]

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