Yahoo Neighbors is essentially a forum or message board for every town in the USA. It’s an opportunity to add a layer of conversation to any local search someone does on Yahoo. In a sense, it brings some of the conversational aspects of Twitter and Facebook and adds them to local search results (but obviously not as fresh/real-time as Twitter is).

I write about marketing on Yahoo Answers pretty regularly, and about the exposure opportunities that exist there for small/local businesses … but, in reality, Yahoo Answers offers very little for, say, a local business here in the Tri-Cities that only serves the Tri-Cities. There’s no “Tri-Cities, Wash.” category on Yahoo Answers. I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a reason for a local restaurant owner, real estate agent, or bike store owner to devote time to Yahoo Answers.

But Yahoo Neighbors is a no-brainer for folks like that, for all the same reasons Yahoo Answers is a no-brainer for other small/local businesses:

• Exposure/mind-share/familiarity
• Reputation management
• Creating authority status in the community
• SEO

I think that last point could be especially powerful. As I said in the SEL article, Yahoo Neighbors is obviously built with SEO in mind and there’s no reason to think these local conversations won’t rank very highly in the SERPs. They will. And those conversation pages will have a lot of local, long-tail phrases — most of which are very easy to rank for, especially in smaller cities.

I also like how the RSS feeds and email updates on Yahoo Neighbors can serve as simple reputation management tools. That restaurant owner I mentioned earlier should sign up for the RSS feed of the “Restaurants & Night Life” category in his/her town.

Add it all up, and I think Yahoo Neighbors could be huge … but it’ll take a while to catch on in areas like mine, with smaller population bases. And I can’t help but wonder if Yahoo has the patience for it to succeed in small town America.

Hey! RSS Subscriber: Have you purchased my e-book, “How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes”? If not, what are you waiting for? It’s only $25 (for the time being). Find out why Search Engine Guide said, “I can almost promise that following the advice in the book will earn you your money back ten to one hundred times over.” Here’s where to learn more: E-Book: How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

I Think Yahoo Neighbors Could Be Huge

I’ve looked at Google’s local business listing many times before, but don’t think I ever noticed so many reviews until today. I’m sure they’ve been there; I just wasn’t noticing them. After years of looking at the reviews of real estate agents, local restaurants, doctors, and you name it, it cracks me up to see such an enormous, international corporation getting reviewed on its own Maps property. Nice.

And sure enough, the other search engines have reviews, too.

Can’t say I’m surprised that Microsoft is only 3 stars, compared to Yahoo’s and Google’s 3.5 stars.

I made one last check, not on a search engine, but on Merchant Circle. Figured they’d have some interesting reviews in light of their marketing history and customer service issues. But no … no stars showing, only four reviews and one of those is not actually of Merchant Circle. The three reviews MC does have include two 1-star reviews and one 5-star review … for an average of 2.3.

But gasp! … an unverified listing in Google Maps! Who on earth is doing SEO for Merchant Circle and let that slip? Yikes.

Hey! RSS Subscriber: Have you purchased my e-book, “How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes”? If not, what are you waiting for? It’s only $25 (for the time being). Find out why Search Engine Guide said, “I can almost promise that following the advice in the book will earn you your money back ten to one hundred times over.” Here’s where to learn more: E-Book: How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Google: A 3.5 Star Company

These are ads promoting the fact that my local paper (part of the McClatchy Group) is now part of the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium. I wrote on SEL a couple months ago about the success of this effort — it’s a collaboration in which newspapers use Yahoo’s ad-targeting technology to sell more online ads.

I actually think these ads are pretty effective from the small business owner’s perspective. They explain the idea of targeted ads without getting too complicated. (You can click the image to go to Flickr and see a larger version.) The ad on the left is the first one I saw, and then the purple one is more recent. If I’m a small business owner thinking about local online ads, that ad on the left would probably compel me to at least learn more about how it works, what it costs, etc. It says

One of these women is shopping for a car. Do you know which one? We Do!

Meanwhile, I don’t think I’m seeing any of the ads themselves on the newspaper’s web site just yet; I still see DoubleClick ads, which are part of Google’s empire. I’ll be interested to see how well the ads are targeted to me when they launch. I do spend a fair amount of time on Yahoo properties and also visit the paper’s web site somewhat consistently, too.

Hey! RSS Subscriber: Have you purchased my e-book, “How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes”? If not, what are you waiting for? It’s only $25 (for the time being). Find out why Search Engine Guide said, “I can almost promise that following the advice in the book will earn you your money back ten to one hundred times over.” Here’s where to learn more: E-Book: How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Yahoo’s Newspaper Ad Program in My Hometown

Yahoo says that Level 1 users will no longer be able to include active links in their answers. You can still include a URL, but it won’t appear as an active link. As the Yahoo blog post says, this is a “small but significant” change.

What’s it mean? If you’re playing by the rules and providing helpful answers to the community, not spamming, just keep doing what you’ve been doing. It just means that, if you’re still a Level 1 user, you’ll have to work a little longer and keep adding value to the community before your links will become active/clickable. (They’ll still be no-followed, just as they have for a long time now.)

Hey! RSS Subscriber: Have you purchased my e-book, “How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes”? If not, what are you waiting for? It’s only $25 (for the time being). Find out why Search Engine Guide said, “I can almost promise that following the advice in the book will earn you your money back ten to one hundred times over.” Here’s where to learn more: E-Book: How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Yahoo Answers: No Links for New Folks

Yahoo Adds Local Content To Search Results Via SearchMonkey

What’s going on: All Yahoo web searchers are now able to see a lot of local business content in the SERPs without lifting a finger. The “SearchMonkey apps” for Citysearch and Zagat are now on by default, joining Yelp and Yahoo Local. I explain it on the SEL post, but it basically means that a small business with full and accurate listings on these local/social directories can get some extra exposure now in the Yahoo SERPs.

Yahoo Adds ZIP Code Ad Targeting

What’s going on: If you use Yahoo Sponsored Search, you can now geo-target your ads to specific ZIP codes. As with all geo-targeting, it’s not perfect. But it’s something that only Yahoo and Ask.com offer. (And who advertises on Ask.com?) It’s brain-dead easy to do, too — the screenshots on the SEL post are from my wife’s YSS account. Just supply the ZIP codes you want to target, and Yahoo will draw you the map to review before you submit the new geo-targeted settings.

I’m not going to advertise everything I write these days on SEL — just the “Small is Beautiful” columns and, as in this case, anything I think needs to be seen by the small/local business owners who read SBSM.

Hey! RSS Subscriber: Have you purchased my e-book, “How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes”? If not, what are you waiting for? It’s only $25 (for the time being). Find out why Search Engine Guide said, “I can almost promise that following the advice in the book will earn you your money back ten to one hundred times over.” Here’s where to learn more: E-Book: How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Yahoo’s Local Push: SearchMonkey and PPC Targeting

(click for larger version)

Yahoo Sponsored Search FTW!

Hey! RSS Subscriber: Have you purchased my e-book, “How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes”? If not, what are you waiting for? It’s only $25 (for the time being). Find out why Search Engine Guide said, “I can almost promise that following the advice in the book will earn you your money back ten to one hundred times over.” Here’s where to learn more: E-Book: How to SEO Your Site in 60 Minutes.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

How to Increase PPC Success on the Content Network