LOC@L SEO GUIDE

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% [...]

[Read more →]

I was telling Greg Sterling about how the new meat market in Pleasanton is killing it on their Facebook Page, which was created by a customer, and on Yelp despite the fact that they don’t have a Google Place Page and the business itself isn’t even participating in any of this. From Greg’s The Curious [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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.  [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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: [...]

[Read more →]