Small Business Search Marketing

Does small business reputation management matter? I think so. It’s right near the top of my SEO Success Pyramid as one of the last “steps” to earning trust in your business.
The Pew Research Project has put the value of small business reputation management into numbers:

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 [...]

With Technorati in the midst of a major re-launch, it looks like we’ve lost one small-but-important reputation management tools: the ability to subscribe to keyword-based RSS feeds from Technorati’s blog database.
For ages, I’ve had Technorati RSS feeds setup for searches on my name and on “small business sem,” which is how many people refer [...]

Let’s talk reputation management. When someone types your company name into Google, you want to own as many of the results as possible. Your company web site, your blog (if it has a different URL), your Facebook business page, your Yelp listing, and other business profile pages will often rank highly. This is good. You [...]

Small business owners: Do yourself a favor and go to Google right now, type your company name in, and hit return. Look at those results. Are they good? Are they bad? Do you wish one or two of them weren’t there?
Plan on doing this at least once a month, if not more often. Reputation [...]

David Meerman Scott has a fascinating interview with Capt. David Faggard, who works at the Pentagon as the Chief of Emerging Technology at the Air Force Public Affairs Agency. That’s a mouthful, but as I read the interview, it basically means that Capt. Faggard is the Air Force’s social media guru.
With Capt. Faggard at [...]

The Cafe at Queensgate, a Richland (WA) restaurant, is an excellent place in my hometown for lunch: good food, helpful staff, and a terrific, bistro-style atmosphere.
You’ll notice that I didn’t link to them at all in that paragraph; I’d love to, but like so many small businesses, they don’t have a web site. And [...]

Follow along with me, please: The story begins on Sunday, when our local newspaper runs an article about a local military man named Burke Jensen who’s facing legal action because his new home isn’t landscaped.
Shortly after Jensen and his wife bought the house, he was sent to Kuwait. His wife went back to live with [...]