Although it’s been around for a little while, Google is doing some promotion of its new “Small Business Network.” Believe it or not it’s a lobbying effort to represent small business interests in Washington DC and at the state level. It’s also a clever way to open a new direct communication channel with SMBs: Google’s […]
SEMPO announced an educational partnership this morning with yellow pages publisher Yellow Book, a division of the UK based Yell. According to the press release put out, the SEMPO Institute “will be providing distance learning education for Yellowbook’s media consultant sales team.” I believe this is the first such relationship between SEMPO and an individual […]
The term “online visibility” usually refers to the visibility of sites on the web. This column will discuss the online visibility of small and medium businesses (SMBs) and why it is harder to define, identify and measure SMB presence than web site visibility. Web site visibility consists of several relatively easy to measure features such […]
SMBs who wish to advertise online now have many options: vertical sites, local sites, search engines, traditional and new directories; SMB owners need only choose where they would like their business to appear. Online directories are a common choice for advertisers, and the group at Palore chose to examine the more traditional type of national […]
(Business owners, if you’re looking for actionable advice, skip to the end) I spoke at a local Chamber of Commerce here in the Portland area last week, giving a brief presentation on the fundamentals of SEO. Unlike a previous event I’d attended just three months ago in eastern Washington, about 75% of this audience had […]
Last week’s inauguration was a great time to reflect. Witnessing such an inspirational, historic event combined with the ground-swell of optimism gave me a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. Professionally, it made me think about how I can get even more resourceful in my marketing approach and solving the problems of my valuable clients.
As we’ve seen several times recently, there’s a chasm between consumer usage of search and SEM by small business advertisers (SMBs). Google developed its authorized reseller program to address this issue in part and create a network of third party relationships that could help it gain more traditional small business (SMB) advertisers, which it had […]
For the several years Nielsen and local SEM platform provider WebVisible have done research tracking online consumer behavior related to local search. Here is our write up of the previous round of findings from the last survey (October, 2007). Over the weekend I got a preview of some of the data from the most recent […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
I’ve been writing monthly articles for Small is Beautiful for about almost a year now, offering observations and insights into what we’ve seen working with small and medium sized businesses from the front lines but will be winding down a bit in 2009. Our focus is still very much on serving the SMB advertiser, but […]
Like many of you, I’ve attended lots of industry shows and events during the past several months related to search and directional marketing. What is especially amazing to me is how frequently I am asked about the ‘secret sauce’ behind optimizing online videos for search success, especially with regard to organic search. Truth is, we’ve […]
Here at Palore, we recently finished working on a large scale project in San Diego County, covering all businesses in all categories, from more than 10 leading local, vertical and IYP sites – a total of 168,466 businesses. The fact that the number of total businesses we reached exceeds the one published by some data […]
We’re wrapping up SMX China in Nanjing this afternoon. By all measures, the show was a success, with about 300 attendees and a dozen exhibitors, with people from China as well as many other Asian countries, India, Israel and even Africa in attendance. Search in China is thriving, seemingly impervious to the economic turbulence that’s […]
Yesterday I reported based on a MarketingWeek Online story that Microsoft was running a promotion to give away a free month of search ads. Microsoft told me the story was wrong and promised to send me more information. I now have that information, so let me share with you the program. UK advertisers will soon […]
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.
During the past year-plus of working with scores of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) on testing and then launching online video advertising campaigns, we have compiled a short list of common myths associated with online video advertising, implications for search, and what it means to the SMB sector. Gleaned from our own experiences, as […]
As I wrote in last month’s column, video offers enormous opportunity for local SMBs to market online more effectively. Admittedly, some folks differ with that point of view. For example, one commenter wrote that “although the technology exists for businesses to deploy video online, SMBs can’t compete with big brands on creative work.” This person […]
Google recently made some quite significant changes to the OneBox / Universal Search result that appears at the top of the result page when you do a query that Google determines has local intent. Previously, Google would display three local search results in the OneBox area, with a star rating and a review snippet. Now […]
Today, Thursday, January 17, 2008 at 9:00am PST (12:00pm EST), Google.org will be holding a conference call to discuss the launch of five strategic initiatives for the organization. The conference call participants include Sheryl Sandberg, Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations, Google Inc. and Board Member, Google.org, and Larry Brilliant, Executive Director, Google.org. Google […]
Local search and directory provider Superpages has announced video advertising on a national basis after a several-month test in selected U.S. markets. All the major U.S. yellow pages advertisers are now offering video advertising, though all are in early stages of rolling it out. To my knowledge, Superpages is the only performance-based model where bidding […]
Like many other directory publishers and telecom companies before it, the former British Telecom (now just BT) has formally introduced a fixed-fee simplified search marketing offering for small businesses in the UK. Called BT Web Clicks, the offering has been around for many months but was just announced yesterday. Five pricing tiers are available, which […]
Just like the category of local search itself, the phrase “local search” has many different aspects and dimensions. It is generally used to refer to a cluster of consumer behaviors or destination sites whose ultimate goal is to help people find businesses offline, in their local communities. But as the readers of this site know […]
Enterprise search firm FAST has launched AdMomentum, a contextual advertising system that let’s publishers manage and serve their own advertisements, bypassing Google, Yahoo and other third-party contextual advertising services. FAST calls the platform a “revenue engine,” and is targeting small & medium sized enterprises and vertical search sites. “The major ad networks have not been […]
One of the most challenging aspects of local search is small business (SMB) advertiser acquisition. Everyone is aware, especially Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, that the US SMB market is where the advertiser volume is: almost 99% of US businesses qualify as small businesses (here defined as < 100 employees). According to the US Small Business […]