Small Business Search Marketing

On Search Engine Land today, Greg Sterling unpacks a new Borrell Associates report that, if you had to explain it one sentence, says this: Small businesses that try local online advertising almost universally give up after six months. The actual stats Greg quotes are:

Up to 50 percent [of SMBs] quit by 90 days
Up to 90 [...]

There are a couple articles I published on Search Engine Land over the past few days that I think bear mentioning here for their meaning to small businesses. If you’ve already seen both of these articles, move along.
Yahoo Adds Local Content To Search Results Via SearchMonkey
What’s going on: All Yahoo web searchers are [...]

I’ve said before that I’m no PPC guru, so I could be way off on this one. But if you’re running PPC ads on the content network (Google or Yahoo), I’m thinking there’s a better chance your ad will be noticed and clicked on when there’s no content on the page to distract the user:

(click [...]

If you’re a company that’s desperate to get small business signups, and you don’t really have good marketing judgment, you’ll use Google AdWords to position yourself as a middleman offering a “free” link “for SEO credit”.

(Never mind the likelihood that most of your business listing pages have no PageRank to speak of. Heck, not even [...]

About three months ago, I shared some holiday SEO tips on Search Engine Land — and since SEO is not a quick-fix, immediate return kind of thing, August is when you need to be thinking about holiday SEO tactics.
On the PPC side, you don’t need such an early start. A great PPC campaign can bring [...]

Full link-o-rama tonight, which may be an unconscious pre-reaction to knowing there probably won’t be a link-o-rama at all next week, so here we go, peeps….
I’m gonna start with a short list of good articles that have nothing to do with search. Because it’s my blog, and I can.

The 7 Habits of High Successful [...]