Category: Online Coupons

Reviews of businesses on Groupon have been spotted on Google Place Pages since January: Last year I speculated that social local applications like Twitter & Foursquare could start to cause a lot of SEO problems for IYPs because they could easily replicate the IYP structure while providing a lot more unique content. Groupon reviews are yet another data source that will siphon search traffic away from traditional local directories. An IYP-like directory of businesses in every city that are running…

Closely, Perry Evans new “live social marketing” start-up, just launched GroupGro, a blog that provides SMBs with guides for navigating the daily deal space. Should be interesting to see how GroupGro and Closely relate to each other over time. When Perry mentioned GroupGro to me a couple of months ago, I thought it was a great idea given how much noise there was in the daily deal space. Tweet

Mike Boland of BIA Kelsey is overseeing the mobile local search panel. Danny Francis of Cellcity walks through an implementation of GoOrlando which appears to be a simple IYP put on an iPhone.  Per Danny’s comment below this was just a demo app to show what a basic local mobile search app could be.  I am curious to see what there non-demo apps might look like.

Twitter just announced it’s launching an API that will allow developers to add latitude & longitude to any tweet. There’s all sorts of funky services this could lead to such as a site that tracks the locations of Twitter spammers for people to drop nukes on and such (if they are dumb enough to opt in).  But I am thinking this could be a pretty big deal for players in the local search industry for the following reasons:

Per my previous post on CitySquare’s success with online coupons, it seems like offering deals on your site is the way to go in this meltdown.  I had lunch today with Loren Bendele, CEO of Savings.com, a deal aggregator.  According to Loren they had a record month last month in what would normally be a flat time of year.

DaveN has some interesting thoughts about keyword targeting strategies for attracting consumers living in a global recession. This doesn’t mean people will be searching for “discount caviar”…optimising for “cheap X”, “bargain Y” and “deals on Z” is going to be more important in commodity spaces though. Consumer goods, financial products, utility services and the like will see an upswing in popularity for searches indicating a high degree of price sensitivity. Look to phrases that incorporate these terms, as well as…

Just stumbled upon the reincarnation of Judysbook.  For you youngsters in the local search space, JB, along with Insiderpages and Yelp, was one of the original social-local-search poster children.  I believe they even trademarked that term at one point.  Whomever is running the show over there has smoked the local search crack pipe and decided that there’s gold in them thar neighborhoods.  Judysbook had previously abandoned local business search in favor of creating a social network around coupons and deals,…

If you could only add one more keyword to your site I would strongly suggest you consider the word “coupons”. I am hard-pressed to think of any other term that carries so much SEO juice. Everyone likes a deal after all.