About 12 years ago, I took the 10 from Venice to the 110 to Pasadena and met with this guy at Idealab who had some crazy idea about sharing recommendations for local businesses with his neighbors via the Web. For some reason I bought the pitch and the next thing you know we’ve got 100,000 local reviews, we’re doing a syndication deal with Google Local, we launch one of the first pay-per-call ad programs, we spend way too much time on…
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…
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.
Don’t you hate it when another blogger beats you to the punch on writing about a good idea? Well, Steve McStud Espinosa kicked my butt this morning with his post, Take Advantage of Trusted Sources – Local Search Tactics. In the post Steve talks about how to link to other webpages that the search engines trust to boost your presence in the SERPs. Here’s a summary of how it works: Link to the Yahoo Local page for your business with…
Since I am now trading in local search gossip and innuendo (maybe I should turn this blog into Valleywag Local), I thought you might be interested in a little Twitter-based speculation. I just noticed on Emad Fanous’ Twitter Page that he is now “in the city of brotherly love”. Now this could be a Tweet that is not meant to be taken literally, but let’s not go that route. This is a family-friendly blog after all. So why would someone…
Marshall steps up to the plate with Charles Laughlin of The Kelsey Group pitching. An exec with a long history in IYP, etc. Full Disclosure: I had lunch with Pat Marshall once. I think the food was good and I paid, but I don’t think it will bias me one way or another. Update: Pat reminded me that it was my company (in other words my investors) that paid not I, and the lunch was at our request so of…