Mar 26, 2012 at 9:07am ET by Greg Sterling

Several years ago Universal Business Listing sought to become the "one stop shop" for local business listings syndication. The dream was that small businesses and their surrogates could sign up in one place online and ensure their data were in all the right places across the internet. While that has not fully come to pass, the company has taken a step closer through a deal with former competitor Yext. Yext began as a pay-per-call network and shifted last year to focus on local listings syndication. Yext works with small businesses but also brands with multiple locations. Emulating the no [...]

Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update, Plus Changes To How It Evaluates Links, Local Search Rankings & Much More

Feb 27, 2012 at 3:38pm ET by Matt McGee

Google has confirmed a new Panda update at the same time that it's announcing 40 search updates that happened in February (or are in progress right now). It would be all but impossible to fully sum up the full slate of changes here, but there are a few that seem especially noteworthy and will no doubt produce a lot of speculation among search marketers. Here's a look at the ones that stand out to me: Panda 3.3 Update Here's what Google says about its latest Panda-related change: Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitiv [...]

Report: National Marketers Love Local, Fail At Basic Tactics

Feb 6, 2012 at 11:18am ET by Greg Sterling

GMS Local, an initiative from GroupM focused on local search and local digital strategies, recently conducted a survey of national marketing executives (mostly in the retail sector) about their localization strategies and tactics. The survey was fielded in September and November 2011. What the agency found was considerable enthusiasm for local-digital marketing. Yet there was also a surprising lack of sophistication in many of their tactics. GMS Local found that most of the respondents spent more on local vs. national advertising and more generally on digital than traditional media marketin [...]

Report: Social Media Spending Threatens To Overtake Paid Search Among SMBs

Jan 5, 2012 at 11:01am ET by Greg Sterling

Borrell Associates has come out with an extensive new report about small business ("SMBs") and social media adoption. It contains forecasts and spending estimates as well as other data about SMB usage of social media as a marketing tool. There's a great deal of data already in the market about SMB adoption of social media. What they show is that between 45 percent and 70 percent of SMBs say they already have a presence on social media sites (mostly Facebook). Borrell reports that between 60 and 64 percent of SMBs have a formal presence on social media sites. An earlier 2011 study by [...]

Related Topics: Facebook | Google: AdWords | Search Ads: General | SEO: Local

Survey Says SEO The Single Most Important Marketing Channel For SMBs

Dec 8, 2011 at 9:35am ET by Greg Sterling

SEO: one channel to rule them all? A new "merchant confidence survey" from lead-gen company MerchantCircle/Reply.com, among 2,500 US small businesses, finds that search engine optimization is the marketing channel they would choose if they could choose only one. The question asked was: "If you had to put all your marketing time and budget into only one channel, what would it be?" The list of choices included SEO, paid search, mobile, social and traditional media. As you can see below SEO beats everything else by a mile. What's also interesting is how high "traditional media" ranked. [...]

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