LOC@L SEO GUIDE

There’s a great discussion going on over on Mike Blumenthal’s What Is Merchant Circle Up To Now? post.  Mike had heard about Merchant Circle owning a lot of small business domains, did some research and suggested that MC could be squatting on a large number of SMB-branded domains and that many of these SMBs would be ignorant of this fact.

As readers of this blog know Merchant Circle is a hot topic for local online marketers and a number of these guys started to speculate in the comments section about sneaky things Merchant Circle may or may not be up to.  This is where it gets interesting:

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The Hitwise Intelligence blog is a great example of how a corporation can use proprietary info to attract customers.  I just saw this post by Robin Goad on the growing popularity of “opening times” searches, particularly around holidays, in the UK.

Last week the three fastest moving search terms for retailers were ‘tesco opening times’, ‘tesco opening hours’ and ‘asda opening times’; while ‘sainsburys opening times’ and ‘sainsburys store locator’ also featured in the top 10.

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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 find stuff.  The new app is no better.  This is likely a limitation of the available iPhone map tools more than anything else though.

Just saw this on the front door of a kid’s clothing store in Rye, NY.

The number of online “friends” your business has may be a good indication of its health. The storefronts next to Sasha’s were empty. Must have been using Yahoo 360.

In the previous post, where I stumbled on to ads on a Google Map on Merchant Circle, “Mappin’” Mike Blumenthal took me to the local search woodshed with the following comment:

In mid March, Google announced that they have changed the API to allow the hosting site show ads along with searches for local businesses performed through the API.

I think that is what you are seeing at MC.

Now I am no investigative journalist, but I can’t take one in the face on my own digital front porch and not try to wipe the egg off, so I pinged Merchant Circle to see what they had to say and they confirmed that in fact this is some kind of trial that MC is doing with Google.  They are using a non-public API that is different than the GoogleBar API.  Here is another example of a site that apparently is also in the trial:

http://maps.huge.info/zipcolors.htm

I was just looking at this page on Merchant Circle and noticed ads showing up on their Google Map!

I am sensing a trend.

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Full disclosure: this post was written late at night under the influence of a free streaming music site with healthy doses of Them, Leonard Cohen, Kruder & Dorfmeister, & Portishead.  No volcano vaporizer was harmed in the making of this post.

The effectiveness of nofollow tags has been the subject of epic debate on the SEO blog of record as well as on the other ten million and growing SEO blogs of record.  I guess if Google were using them that might put the argument to rest right?  Well, feast your eyes on the YouTube home page (the pink highlights=nofollow): [Read more →]

Well not quite every search, but as Mike Blumenthal just told me, the 10 Pack is now appearing in a number of broad, non-geo phrase searches.

Some observations of the 10 pack’s behavior in Web results (the “Web Pack” anyone?):

1. In every query I have tried the 10 pack appears in position #4.  It still gets pushed down by indented results and universal results (e.g. news results in queries for “doctors”) but if you remove these results it seems to always be in position #4.
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I have been spending a bit of time working through implementing the rel=canonical tag on a number of sites and I found myself returning to the Google Webmaster Central post on the subject trying to figure it all out.  The problem is that there are too many questions in the comments section and it takes forever to find the answers and clarifications from the Googlers.  So I figured I would just do some cutting and pasting and post only the answers right here.  This will save us all a bit of time:

Here are the first FAQs created by the Googlers:
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Ok I am hung up on Twitter today.  Here’s another thing I learned at the Kelsey Conference about Twitter - It’s an amazing marketing tool at conferences.

During the conference the moderators periodically mentioned that people should tweet conference-related stuff using #marketplaces2009 so that all of the conference tweets would be easy to find in Twitter search. A handful of attendees with ADD, including yours truly, took them up on the offer and started tweeting reactions to the speakers.

While it got a bit noisy as people often tweeted about the same stuff, anyone who was at the show and watching Twitter probably checked in regularly to see what was being said.  During the conference breaks I had three different people whom I had never met come up to me and comment on my Tweets.  Each of these people is now a potential new reader of this blog, a potential referrer of clients or a potential client themselves.  All for the price of a few digital bon mots.

I am back from the Kelsey Conference looking at the sorry state of my notes and emptiness of my blog and blaming Twitter.

My typical coverage of Kelsey shows includes a healthy dose of liveblogging to capture all of the interesting points made by presenters and then maybe a think-piece or two on the state of local.  At the moment I have neither to offer.

If you have been following #marketplaces2009 on Twitter you would have been exposed to a blow-by-blow of many of the conference sessions.  What’s the point of liveblogging when it’s all being crowd-sourced into Twitter?

Sorry for the radio silence.  It has been a busy conference and I haven’t had a chance to summarize my thoughts and conversations.

Will do so later this week.

Time for some liveblogging.  Screw Twitter:

Dotmenu is the parent co of allmenus.com and campusfood.com

Company did 3,000,000 online restaurant orders in January 2008.

Over 450K restaurants across the US

On avg 130MM Americans/day visit a restaurant

Americans will spend approximately $378B at local restaurants in 2009

CampusFood’s FB app = “Food Frenzy” = #187th most popular Facebook apps. 150K uses/day=3% of all orders via the site.

3,000 restaurants generated $60MM of orders through their system last year.  Services include:

• Online ordering
• Trackable phone numbers
• PPC
• Banner Ads
• Prominent listings
• Video Ads
• Email campaigns

Dotmenu takes the credit card, holds the money and pays the restaurant so they have no receivables.  In the billing they show the ROI of the program which is pretty cool.

They did 289 orders in the 10 minutes Tony was talking.

Sounds like these guys are doing well.

If you are interested in online menus you also might want to check out Foodiebytes.com

Just sat through the Jeff Berman of MySpace’s keynote at the Kelsey Group’s Marketplaces 2009 conference.  There was a lot of talk about personalization and how huge the audience is, but I only heard lip service paid to local.  Berman gave an example of how a roofer got a $30K deal via a $100 self-serve ad, but I didn’t get the sense that MySpace was truly focusing on local.

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I don’t spend a lot of time here on how you make money on your site other than “get qualified traffic via search or any other means”, but a buddy of mine in the SEO world is starting a new Adsense conference in partnership with AdTech that sounds pretty interesting so I thought I would use my bully pulpit to pimp it out.  All of you affiliate guys/spammers who are loyal readers should enjoy this one.

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