Category: Local Advertising

A year or so ago, the guy in charge of local search for a fairly big brand wanted to see if we were interested in a project to research if the vendor running their Adwords campaign was “stealing” their local organic traffic by spending millions each month running PPC ads on all of their branded local queries (e.g. “[BRAND] [CITY]”, “[BRAND] near me”, “[BRAND] [CITY] hours”, etc.). I told him he could save his money because the answer was almost certainly “yes”.

Mike Blumenthal has some nice LocalSEOGuide bait today on print yellow pages usage trends by advertisers entitled “Annual Print YP Death Watch”: “In many categories the ads are for national players. In florists for example there are 2.5 pages and only 1/8 of one page covers truly local florists….The print YP are no longer a local advertising medium catering to local business. It is clear that what is left of the print yellow pages has been taken over by regional…

Inspired by John Battele’s scoring of his 2010 predictions I figured I’d see how I did with my 2010 Local SEO Predictions: The Open Source Yellow Pages Will Emerge Let’s see – Citysearch turned into CityGrid and is now supplying yellow pages data/ads to anyone who wants it.  YPG launched its Yellow API strategy.  A slew of Local Search APIs came out.  I could go on, but let’s just call it a +1 (It’s All About) GOOGLE The launch of…

Just saw this in the wild Tweet

I am not at SMX East today, but I thought it might be helpful to grab some interesting local tweets bubbling up from #SMX and record them here. I’ll be updating this from time to time over the next couple of days: Hot from #SMX: The Search Crossover: Local, Mobile Social http://outspokenmedia.com/4wbfless than a minute ago via webOutspoken Mediaoutspokenmedia 74% increased conversion rate from mobile if you have a mobile optimized site #smxless than a minute ago via webNina Haleninahale

I have access to a new ad unit that may improve eCPMs on local pages. If you have a site with local traffic – big or small – ping me and I’ll hook you up.

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% in 2009 SMBs that use direct mail are relying on it much more as it’s easy to turn these campaigns on and off 77% of…

The Kelsey Group surveyed “Plus Spenders”, SMBs that spend at least $25K/yr in marketing v. the average of about $2500. According to Kelsey: · 90 percent of SMB Plus Spenders have a Web site, versus 62 percent for average SMBs. · Plus Spenders use more types of online media, and spend more for online advertising (well duh): In the past 12 months, Plus Spenders spent 26 percent of their total ad budget on online media, versus 21.8 percent for average…

Merchant Circle just launched a City “Mayor” program designed to promote the most connected SMBs in a service area on the site.  As Greg Sterling, he of the newly redesigned Screenwerk blog, put it: Because MerchantCircle gets so much traffic from SEO in search results this will also be a major SEO play for the SMB that is the mayor of his/her particular city. Merchant Circle has long been a favorite of mine and other local marketers for its ability…

SmallBusinessShift ponders the challenges of scaling an ambitious SMB SEM play: It’s not that Yext is a scam, although they do have some problems. The bigger issue is that there’s a communication and expectations gap when it comes to these big marketing companies and the businesses they’re serving. Yext, Yodle, etc. all have lots of venture dollars and high attrition rates. The only way to hit their targets is to aggressively acquire new customers. There are a lot of channels…