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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In general you should know who your competition is in the SERPs, but Google just made it easier (unless I have totally missed this feature for months which is possible). I just noticed a “Pages similar to ” widget at the bottom of the results. Here’s what I got when I queried “localseoguide”

It [...]

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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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As some of you may already know this morning I was under the influence of Nitrous Oxide in a dentist chair. Before I headed off to oblivion I got into a discussion about local Web marketing with my dentist and his assistant.  His assistant relayed the following story about a doctor she knows in San [...]

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I haven’t seen them live on Yelp yet because years ago Jeremy Stoppleman banned my email address, but that’s another story.
The big question - are Facebook’s Like buttons complementary to reviews or do they cannibalize them?

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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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This just in;  Yelp has removed the internal nofollow tags from their site.  If you had read my posts, Yelp SEO Analysis Part I and Yelp SEO Analysis Part II, you might recall that internal nofollows were a big part of their SEO strategy, most likely encouraged by SEOMoz, their SEO consultants, who were big [...]

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according to TechCrunch.  The update now allows for writing reviews from the Iphone so get ready for a lot of “I am writing this while drunk!” type stuff.  I use the current Yelp App once in a while but I find that it becomes frustrating pretty quickly once you try to use the map to [...]

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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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When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people.
Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews.  One [...]

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I downloaded Yellowpages.com’s iPhone App this weekend and was psyched to give it a test run after hearing Frank Jules speak about it at Kelsey DMS last week.  The executive summary: not bad but needs work.
It does its main function of allowing you to search for businesses fine.  And this may almost be enough - [...]

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Some notes from Peter Krasilovsky’s interview with Sonia McFarland, head of business development of Yelp.  Not much new here but a couple of interesting data points.
- Yelp’s demo is older than you think
- In order to be an advertiser on the site you need to “qualify” by having a minimum number of reviews and minimum [...]

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The AimClear blog has a great overview of the top location-based iphone apps.

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My bud Ahmed has put together a list of the top IYPs in the US based on reach derived from Google’s stats.  Nothing too surprising except that Citysearch is #1.  I also think there are a number of sites missing from the list - 50states for example.  But still good info for all you local [...]

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