This article is part of a four-part series on International Citations, written by two Australian Local SEO’s:

Ash Nallawalla, a Local Search forum moderator at Webmasterworld.com / SEO trainer.  Ash also manages SEO and PPC for Sensis Yellow Pages®.
Fabienne Rabbiosi, an online tourism marketer in Queensland.

Experienced Local SEO’s no doubt already understand the tremendous importance [...]

Note: this article is part of a series on International Citations.
Some of you probably know I’m a huge Anglophile.  I lived just off Farringdon Road in London EC1 for a semester, and have visited a number of times for both golf and sightseeing. So in some sense, I’m a little disappointed this post has taken me [...]

This article is part of a four-part series on International Citations.
Experienced Local SEO’s no doubt already understand the tremendous importance of citations for ranking well in Local Search, but as far as I know, only one guide to Canadian citations has been published by Canadian Local SEO Dev Basu.
Below are my own recommendations for where [...]

The Local Search world was abuzz when Google announced its rollout of a basic analytics package within the Local Business Center a couple of weeks ago. Clearly, certain powers in Mountain View are starting to sense the underlying current of frustration in the typical SMB owner’s world, highlighted by the recent Borrell study and Mike Blumenthal’s weekly (self-described) “snipes.” But are Google’s efforts to increase SMB awareness of and engagement with Local Search enough?

Included in this more-or-less monthly installment of my Links of Local Interest Series: Whiteboard Friday videos on Local, Twitter for SMB’s, what’s in a business title?, online reputation management, an introduction to Location Prominence, great advice from Matt McGee on launching a website, and a new Local/mobile road service for truckers.

Steve Espinosa & Local Search News have started a new Local Search conference–Local Search Summit. The first of what I hope will be many in a series will take place July 17th in San Francisco.

Borrell Associates just authored a report on SMB Search Ad Spend at the behest of Clickable highlighting the incredible churn rate among SMB’s who are being sold search advertising. In this post, I outline a few of my own thoughts about why churn on Local SEM services is so high.

The analytics of the the Google LBC’s Rich Dashboard are certainly nice, and I’m happy to see Google continue to pour resources into the Maps and Local Business Center teams. But I’m not sure Google’s priorities are in order when it comes to where small businesses (and really, businesses of all sizes) are really feeling LBC pain. In this post, I lay out seven improvements I’d like to see the Maps team put some brainpower behind in the coming months.

I invited 27 leaders in the Local Search Marketing community to participate in the 2009 Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Participants rated the importance of 49 criteria with respect to their influence on rankings in the Google and Yahoo Local “Universal” search algorithms (those that drive the 3-pack, 10-pack, and authoritative onebox search results and NOT the standard organic algorithms). Selected responses and some commentary from yours truly are contained in this post, as well as a link to the full survey results.

Despite not having a panel of its own at SMX Advanced this year (maybe next year, Danny?), it seems to me that Local Search is coming of age right before our eyes. Local has now reached a level of prominence where it’s time for SEO companies (and large, location-sensitive companies who do their search marketing in-house) to truly start thinking about Local as its own search division, deserving of its own strategy, budget, and human resources.