Small Business Search Marketing

When it comes to local search optimization and, in particular, the Google Maps algorithm, you’re likely to get 10 different answers if you ask 10 local SEOs, What are the most important local search ranking factors? The answer to that question, like just about every other SEO question, is, It depends. It depends on your [...]

This is just a quick follow-up to yesterday’s post about the vagaries of Local SEO and, specifically, rankings in the all-important Google Maps seven-pack. David Pavlicko has dug a little deeper into the citations of those top seven bakeries, and posted some findings here:

Few things grate on me more than hearing my fellow SEOs talk about how easy local SEO is. There’s less competition! The competition isn’t SEO savvy! Keyword choices are limited! It’s a piece of cake, they say. That’s about as accurate as me saying that traditional SEO is a piece of cake. Sweeping generalizations are [...]

Hallelujah! Google has finally come to its senses and decided that it will review all community edits in Google Maps before they appear on business/place listings.

Google’s Local Business Center is undergoing a round of changes tonight, including a name change. Forget the “Local Business Center” name; it’s now called Google Places and can be accessed at google.com/places. (Actually, the old URLs you’ve used before will still work.)
But that’s just the most basic of all the changes Google has just [...]

Post-edit: Google has contacted me to explain that this problem is NOT related to the new Service Areas feature that’s being tested. Please scroll down for a full explanation.
If you’re a small business owner or a marketer with small business clients using Google Maps’ Local Business Center, a warning: Do not use the new [...]

We’ve talked before about the failure of Google’s Local Business Center to provide a way for service-based and home-based businesses to use Google Maps without … well, cheating. A couple weeks ago at SMX West, Google’s Carter Maslan was asked about solving this problem and he said … “I don’t want to say ‘hold your [...]

I sometimes struggle to explain Google’s ranking algorithm to small business owners. I just tried last week during a workshop here in my hometown, and I’m not sure if I did a good job. But fortunately there are other resources out there that do a better job than me.
One is this new article from [...]