This post was originally published on Search Engine Land, but I didn’t like how they rewrote the title so here’s the director’s cut: To: Local Directories From: Google Re: Local Search Rankings Hey guys… You may have noticed that over the past year, a lot of the organic traffic to your sites has been… well, we guess the right word is “tanking.” As you know, it is our stated goal…
We’re back at C3 and starting out with “A Conversation With the Networks”: Doug Kilponen, SVP Biz Dev, Merchant Circle John Kim, VP, Products, Pelago Sumir Meghani, Director BD, Groupon Jed Nachman, VP Sales, Yelp Kim – If you can create content and connect with other people, it’s social media Meghani – Groupon has two types of social interactions – between businesses and consumers (the deal) and between consumers (getting each other to hit the tipping point for the deal).…
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…
Merchant Circle just launched an API to allow development of applications on top of their content. The site is loaded with unique business descriptions, reviews, coupons, SMB blog posts and other fun data that they think will be useful, particularly to the Foursquare’s. GoWalla’s and Loopt’s of the local world. Here’s the link to the Press Release and the API documentation. I believe 2010 will see a flood of local search APIs from established players such Yellow Pages Publishers and…
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 there are definitely some business-oriented apps out there, it’s pretty slim pickings. Anyone who is selling marketing services to large #s of SMBs has some…
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 targets. Many IYPs even use their Google rankings as part of their sales pitch. When I got an email from one asking me to advertise…
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…
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…
I was just looking at this page on Merchant Circle and noticed ads showing up on their Google Map! I am sensing a trend.
Just got a press release from Merchant Circle that they are launching a promotion where they will buy your next yellow pages ad if you are not satisfied with the MC experience (I haven’t read the fine print yet). They are not so subtly tapping into the negative pr that exists out there in the print yellow pages world. I am curious how many businesses will take them up on this. I think it might have been a far more…