Local-Social Search: A Powerful Marketing Channel For Small Businesses

The courtship of social networking and local search will result in a marriage that diversifies the mix of sales tools and empowers circles of families, friends, co-workers and organizations to share experiences and opinions in the local search space. For a number of years, consumers have had a collective, powerful online voice through ratings and reviews. That voice continues to grow and has never been more powerful thanks to social media. Now, small businesses must learn how to harness “local-social search” or risk missing important growth opportunities. Social networking has take [...]

Filed in: Locals Only


Local Newspapers Need To Embrace SEO To Survive

It’s no secret that newspapers have been struggling with the disruptive innovations introduced by Google, and this has resulted in some level of resistance and a circling-of-the-wagons mentality by the industry. But, what if they were to go in the opposite direction, with full engagement? Search engine optimization could really help newspapers, and here’s one tactic for how to do it.

Filed in: Locals Only, SEO: Redirects & Moving Sites, SEO: Submitting & Sitemaps


Are You Ready For Google Local Social Search?

Google's new social search experiment is kind of a big deal for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is it will open up lots of opportunity for smart local search marketers. Over the past couple of years we've seen social-local search plays like Yelp gather steam while at the same time Google Maps results have slowly started encroaching on more and more Web results. Recently Google added place pages and Google local listing ads which should both start to grab more and more local search attention. In short, as Google improves its local search experience, it will get harder for sites to [...]

Filed in: Google: Maps & Local, Google: Social Search, Locals Only


Local Search: A Solved Consumer Problem

It pains me to say it, but local search is a solved consumer problem. I’m in pain admitting this, because I’ve been trying to create better local search mousetraps since 2003. Put simply, major search engines do a good enough job of surfacing local listings and phone numbers to consumers who need a specific product or service at a moment in time. The rest of the local search “opportunity,” beyond the one or two review aggregator sites lucky enough to also pop up—is all a matter of either SEO (indefensible) or arbitrage (sinking margins). In other words, consumers have accepted the [...]

Filed in: Locals Only


There’s No Debate That Local Search Has A Role to Play in Healthcare

Congress’ debate on healthcare has sparked many different opinions about the right path for the future of healthcare insurance. Regardless of where that debate is headed, all Americans share the same challenge at one point or another: finding good healthcare. And that’s where local search comes in—to help connect medical professionals with patients. Recently, Dennis Fromholzer at CRM Associates analyzed some data points from Knowledge Networks that show healthcare accounts for 14 percent of all Yellow Pages usage—or roughly one out of every seven uses. In 2008, there were [...]

Filed in: Locals Only


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