LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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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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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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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Dick Larkin (aka The YP Commando) is kind of like the Paul Harvey of local search. I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter which comes out sporadically, but is usually worth the wait.
In his latest installment entitled, “Hooters, My Daughter and Mayor Daley”, Dick spins a folksy tale about how Lee Lumber has managed [...]

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Liveblogging Matt Booth’s & Neal Polachek’s forecast for SMB/Local media spending.  Enjoy:
Total U.S. Local Ad Spend should grow from $136B in 2010 to $144B in 2013.  Scary looking drop from $155B in 2008 to $141B in 2009.  A result of the economy and shift to digital.
Local Ad Spend by Medium: All mediums losing share except [...]

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Charles Laughlin and Neal Polachek of BIA Kelsey talking about their survey of Yellow Pages CEOs:
Some quotes from CEOs on where we are today:

“Conserving cash has replaced growth.  Advertisers have reduced spending at a rate we’ve never seen before”
“Print usage has dropped significantly.  Nobody talked about usage in the past because sales were based on [...]

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Panelists:
Taylor Treese - MediaTraks, Dean Hodges - American Directory Systems, Eitan Ackerman - Amdocs
The panel started out talking about the growing interest in selling digital products.  There are a number of bottlenecks - sales has a hard time adjusting to selling digital and it’s a challenge to upgrade backend technologies to deliver these new products.

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Let’s start out the conference with a little liveblogging:
Michael Taylor of BIA Kelsey started out the Kelsey DMS ‘09 conference with a “preconference” presentation on the landscape of selling marketing services to SMBs.
The number of local media choices is increasing - TV, Yellow Pages, Newspaper, Radio, IPTV, Mobile, PayPerCall, etc.
Questions SMB’s ask:

How do local media [...]

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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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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 on [...]

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Many moons ago in my Yellow Pages 3.0 post, I started preaching to the local search industry that owning the SMB website was going to be the best way to insure viability in search.  After all if you are Google where would you rather send someone, to a plumber’s website or to an IYP’s list [...]

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My friend Scott is a local boat dealer in Livermore, CA.  One of the big annual events for his business is the Pleasanton Boat Show which usually takes place in early January.  Unfortunately the show has been cancelled this year so Scott is now going to try some other nearby shows.  Of course the SEO-obsessed [...]

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Back in January I posted about how small businesses could use Meetup to market themselves.  Today I got a reminder in my email via my East Bay SEO Meetup about how creative marketers are using Meetup to get the word out about their businesses.  Check this out:

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According to my buds at Silicon Alley Insider MS just released some survey that shows that most small businesses with websites don’t buy search ads.
Some highlights from their analysis:

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Noa Gertin at Palore just pinged me with some real happy talk kind of news.  According to their data, which they get from crawling local search sites, the search engine advertising spend for SMBs took a 50%+ hit in Sept/Oct 2008.  Noa, if you’re reading this, how do you know this is SMB spend and [...]

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