Small Business Search Marketing

One of the most important things a small business can do with its listing in the Google Local Business Center is choose the right category(ies). In fact, “Associating LBL w/Proper Categories” scored very highly in last year’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey (see image at right).
Mike Blumenthal, aka Professor Maps, has just released a tool [...]

Small business owners: Just when you thought it was safe to send prospects and customers to your Google place page, think again. Google has added a new content section to place pages — recommendations of other nearby businesses. And as I point out on Search Engine Land, those recommendations often include your competition.
In that piece, [...]

Does the world need another local business/reviews site? AT&T seems to think so. Forbes says the company is planning to launch a Yelp competitor soon at Buzz.com. If nothing else, it’ll have a great domain name going for it.
But, a great domain or not, is any new site going to come along and even put [...]

Inc. Magazine has written what’s probably the deepest article/profile of Yelp that I’ve ever read. It touches all the points you’ve probably read before — how small business owners struggle with its power, how they struggle to deal with poor reviews, how Yelp users sometimes use the site as a tool for vengeance, how Yelp [...]

Here’s the latest addition to Google’s Local Business Center: a tool to add alerts/updates to your Google Maps Place Page. The widget you see here is only available to businesses that have claimed their listing in the Local Business Center; this update window appears in the upper right of the “View Reports” page. It lets [...]

Tri-Cities, Washington — where I live — is generally about two years behind the rest of the country when it comes to adopting whatever’s hot. I know this from spending close to 10 years as a web designer and marketer in this area, and from living here for more than 15 years.
So it wasn’t much [...]