Category: Local Search
Which is More: Claimed Google Place Pages or Businesses with Facebook Pages?
This is one of the long-running questions in my local search peer network, and perhaps one of the more important questions going forward when it comes to small businesses and online marketing. The general consensus is that there are more small businesses with Facebook Pages than with claimed Google Place Pages. That comes from anecdotal [...]
Submit Your Business to Acxiom via “My Business Listing Manager”
Quick post here to share something that’s news to me: Local businesses can submit a listing to Acxiom online via a site called My Business Listing Manager. This is important because Acxiom is one of the three primary business data aggregators in the U.S. (along with Localeze and Infogroup), and for years there’s been no [...]
Where Do People Look When Searching Google Maps?
This is just a quick pointer to an article I wrote on Search Engine Land a couple days ago: Eye-Tracking In Google Maps: Study Shows Value Of No. 1 Ranking & Social Content. It covers an eye-tracking and click-tracking study of Google Maps users doing local business searches. In a nutshell, the results show that [...]
Hey Bing Business Portal: Nice Update Postcard!
If you’ve ever updated a local business listing — on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or wherever — you’ve felt that fear and dread. It’s the fear and dread that comes when you submit the updated information and then start waiting for the postcard. Will the postcard reach me? Will it be obvious who it’s from and [...]
New OPEN Forum Article: Local / Holiday SEO Tips
Quick note that my latest article for the American Express OPEN Forum has just been published: Retail Wonderland: 5 Local Search Optimization Tips For The Holidays In it, I share a handful of ideas for small/local retailers to gain some visibility with holiday shoppers — things like optimizing for local category searches (such as “Topeka [...]
Bing Business Portal Continues to Grow
The Bing Business Portal was already pretty impressive when it launched back in the spring, and Bing has recently rolled out a series of updates and new features that only make it more impressive — not only for online marketing, but also for offline, too.
“Fix A Problem” – Google Places’ Latest Attempt at DIY Customer Service
Both the Google Places help forum and the Google Places help website are pretty difficult to use (that’s putting it mildly in some cases). The Help forum can often be a black hole where no help is found, and the help website can be extremely difficult to navigate. Perhaps those are part of the reasons [...]
Local Search Ranking Factors? Sadly, They’re Not Actual Industry Practices
Local search advice seems to go in one ear and out the other. I’m drawing that conclusion after reading the 2012 SEO Benchmark Report from Marketing Sherpa, which tells what local search tactics are actually being used by more than 1,500 marketers around the world. What I’m seeing is this: the tactics that score highly [...]
Recent Comments