I just caught this nice article on Law.com about a local SEO consultant (and charter member of the East Bay SEO Meetup), Araceli Parra, who was working as a legal secretary, taught herself SEO and saved the practice. A nice lesson for all of you law firms and other SMBs that are trying to figure out SEO and online marketing. Well done Araceli!
From the NYT – Turn your head and cough for the camera please. Apparently doctors in the “luxury” category (lasik, botox, boob jobs, etc.) are getting pretty aggressive at getting patients to post videos of their procedures on YouTube. Docs are offering nice discounts, and in one case a lasik doc is paying patients $1 a pop to email their friends about him. My favorite deal was a free $800 injection of Jurvederm in exchange for promotion. …
Last week I was hanging with the CEO of a company that sold internet marketing services to SMBs. We were dining at Redbones, a restaurant that had been advertising with their service for about two years. The owner of the restaurant came over and the CEO asked how the service was working for him. “Honestly, I have no idea,” was the answer, and he happily went back to bussing tables (the place was packed – apparently the marketing was working).…
Just read Greg Sterling’s linkbait on the end of smb websites and since for some reason Greg’s blog thinks I am spamming him I thought I’d reiterate my comment here (note to all bloggers please check your blog’s spam catcher and despam my profile!). In Greg’s post he posits that the profile page as sold by the IYPs, the Weblistics, Webvisibles, LocalLaunches, ReachLocals, etc. may eventually become the main vehicle by which SMBs drive leads, thus rendering the SMB website…
I got a call from Dan Hobin, G5’s CEO, who tells me that they have just become an ‘authorized reseller of Adwords”. G5 Search Marketing is one of those great Internet marketing companies you’ve never heard of. They focus on servicing the self-storage industry and by their account they are kicking butt and profitable. I am not sure what the big difference is between being authorized and unauthorized, but at the least G5 gets to use Google’s name in a…
The guys over at Palore have been sending me some interesting info on the local search sites they have been crawling. Recently they looked at how many sites a particular business appeared on as an advertiser. According to their data it looks like a high percentage of SMBs advertise on only one site. Check these out: Makes sense to me. A typical SMB is probably advertising online as part of print/online package from a local Yellow Pages co. The…
Stephan Spencer of NetConcepts. High Value Link Targets: Find PR10 /9 Sites: ercim.org, w3.org, usa.gov, etc. Look for sites one click away from Google They have a new tool that involves the Google Directory. Use a Backlink Anchor Text analysis tools: SEOMoz SEOBook Jim Boykin’s Tool Networking in the Blogosphere: Comment on “dofollow” blogs Submit to blog carnivals Be a contributor to a group blog Find old, inactive “free” hosted blogs with a relevant theme and request their login credentials…
Don Campbell has a pretty good overview of Yahoo Search Monkey and it’s relevance for online marketers.
As a follow up to my post on the true cost of SEO I recommend you check out the SEO Success Pyramid on Matt McGee’s blog. I recently was explaining how SEO works to the board of one of my clients in the flooring industry and they found it very helpful. Thanks Matt.
I often recommend to clients that they consider adding more articles to their site via a blog. The idea is to have an easy system to add content that is useful for both potential customers and search engines. If you are a plumber the content doesn’t necessarily have to be about how to fix a leaky pipe (although that couldn’t hurt). It might make sense for a plumber to write about how to plan for a kitchen remodel with the…