LOC@L SEO GUIDE

Today the Yellow Pages Association released a new study based on Comscore data that shows an increase in local mobile usage, particularly as it affects the use of local directories.  Here are some of the highlights:

The number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in [...]

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With all of the brouhaha going on about Google’s test of a new local SERP for category searches that will make it much harder for local directories to get traffic, I became almost willfully blind to the more subtle change that had occurred to the SERP for business name queries.  Thanks to Patrick Altoft for [...]

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To: Local Directory Sites
From: Google
Subject: A Little Head’s Up
As you may have heard, we’ve been testing a new design for the SERPs we display when we detect a query with local intent.  In the past these results have typically been a mix of local businesses, local directories and other random sites that figured [...]

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image liberally appropriated from Roger Hollander
Thanks to Vanessa Fox as always for eliciting grains of truth from Google.  At last week’s Google I/O conference Matt Cutts confirmed that there was an algo change at the beginning of May that will likely be affecting sites that generate a lot of long-tail traffic: 
”this is an algorithmic change [...]

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Last year I published the first IYP SEO Rankings Report which looked at which yellow pages/general local search sites ranked the best in Google for popular queries in the top U.S. markets.  That post has spawned a few other SEOs to try a similar approach for specific verticals.  Here are a few worth checking out:
U.S. [...]

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Someone has got to do this for yellow pages ads. Anyone want to go in on it with me?
via Kottke.org

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TechCrunch ran a Newspapers Are What? post last Friday that got me wondering what Google might suggest for a few yellow pages queries.  Who says algorithms don’t have a sense of humor?
Yellow Pages Are…

And for the Sarah Palin crowd:
Yellow Pages Is…

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Some ponderings by yours truly over on SearchEngineLand.

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Mike Boland of BIA Kelsey is overseeing the mobile local search panel.
Danny Francis of Cellcity walks through an implementation of GoOrlando which appears to be a simple IYP put on an iPhone.  Per Danny’s comment below this was just a demo app to show what a basic local mobile search app could be.  I am [...]

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Steve Marshall of BIA Kelsey Group is going over some consumer research re local search.  Some of the key points:

16% of consumers use Social Networking Sites as a Source for Local Shopping Info
47% think ratings or testimonials from users of a product or service is very important, up from 40% two years ago
18% of those [...]

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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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Last week I was on a panel at the Local Search Summit with Sarah Smith of Facebook.  I asked her about their platform strategy for small business and she responded that besides advertising they weren’t really focused on SMB Apps.  The FB Platform has been a big magnet for developers writing consumer apps, and while [...]

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National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic.  The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings.  Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword [...]

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There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over Twitter’s local search implications.  Over the past few months several Twitter services have launched with a local angle.  I thought it would be interesting to get them all in one place and provide some details:

Launched by the Praized Media guys, TwitArea is an add-on to [...]

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