LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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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I am sitting on the floor near a power outlet with Howard Lerman of Yext who just walked me through the self-serve UI for Yext Tags. Howard claims that since the service launched on Jan 1, 2011 they have signed up over 1,000 self-service advertisers for Yext Tags. While we were talking he showed me [...]

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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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The wifi at the show has finally been fixed so here’s a summary of my notes from Steve Marshall’s presentation on SMB advertising behavior from their survey of SMB advertisers from the end of 2009. Print Yellow Pages Took a Big Hit: In 2008, 32% of SMBs advertised in the print book v. only 25% [...]

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