Category: Merchant Circle

Downtreprenuer [doun-truh-pruh–nur] a person who organizes and manages a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk, because they have lost their jobs and baby needs a new pair of shoes. As different industries falter in the economic downturn (think real estate professions, the auto biz, etc.), people will start to look for alternative ways to make money. The Web offers one of the cheapest ways to start a business.  Get a cheap/free website from someone like Merchant Circle or Homestead…

Just sat down at the Kelsey Conference with Darren Waddell of Merchant Circle and Andy Klein of Spotzer to discuss their recent announcement that they will be offering free online videos to SMBs on MerchantCircle.com. Basically the way the system works is that you go to your profile page and by agreeing to get a video, Spotzer will instantly create a pre-made video for your business category and add your data (e.g., business name, phone number, etc.) to the video.…

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 search obsessed freaks out there.

Around 20% of the merchants on our site are not listed on any other yellow pages site. have no other online presence.

My previous post on Merchant Circle’s SEO generated a bit of heat as some commenters had been the recipient of some of their aggressive marketing tactics.  By coincidence this morning the Pleasanton Kitchen Remodeler who is installing my kitchen backsplash was over. The coincidence is that about a month ago I had signed him up for a free MC site because he had no website and was not listed in the yellow pages.  I asked him if he had received…

After my earth shattering post on using phone numbers for SEO, where I discovered that Merchant Circle had been using small business phone numbers in URLs, Kevin Leu of MerchantCircle pinged me to offer a bit more insight into their SEO strategy. Here’s what I found: 17.5 million page views on June (that’s some nice local search traffic) June search engine referrals were driven by 844,000 keywords (nice keyword volume) Phone number searches generate 15,000 to 25,000 page views per…

It’s Mr. Data! Making sure your business’ location and services data is up to date across the Web is perhaps the most important thing you can do to help potential customers find you. And the Local SEO Guide is here to help. The sites listed below are some of the most important in the local search world. On most you can update the data they display about your business for free and who doesn’t like a free yellow pages listing?…