Local SEO Archive

I was so excited by my sneak preview of Mat Siltala‘s “Yelp and Siri Optimization” presentation for Local University Advanced at SMX East today that I was inspired to put this infographic together.  Incidentally, we are down to only five seats remaining for that session, so if you have been on the fence, today’s a [...]

Obviously this space changes pretty quickly…all that work I put into updating this graphic earlier in the Spring had a gaping hole in it by the time summer rolled around, thanks to the impending arrival of Apple Maps.  Whether Apple knows what it’s getting into with Local remains to be seen…hopefully they’ve got a pretty flexible database [...]

Siri, and by extension Apple Maps, is a hot topic these days. With good reason. But I think it’s important to take a step back and not fall victim to “shiny object syndrome,” as SEO’s (including your humble author) so often do. But the number of questions I get, and chatter that I see, about Siri seems to be way out of proportion. What should that proportion be?

I’m excited to announce a follow-up to the last GetListed.org/Whitespark.ca study (Best Citation Sources by City) this morning: the Best Citation Sources by Category for U.S. businesses. As with the previous study, Darren and I used his Local Citation Finder tool and looked at some of the most common keywords within 70 local search categories across 53 large US cities, 20 medium-sized cities, and 20 smaller cities. We then scored the sites inversely based on ranking position combined with overall number of occurrences. The sites that appeared most often and with the highest rankings were deemed “best” within each category.

I’m really excited to announce a joint study with Darren Shaw of Whitespark that we’ve just published over on GetListed.org: the best citation sources for 93 U.S. cities. The methodology for the study was pretty simple: using Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder, we looked for some of the most common keywords within 71 local search categories across 53 large [...]

Welcome to Year Five of the Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It’s always a total thrill to compile the opinions of the world’s top experts in Local Search Marketing and be the first one to see these experts’ collective opinions about what’s working and what’s not in the world of Local Search.

Mike Blumenthal pointed me to a Wall Street Journal article this morning which mentions the oft-cited stat that 20% of all PC searches have Local Intent. I just have a quick comment that I’ve made to several people in meetings recently but don’t think I’ve blogged about.

Has anyone noticed this yet? You can now review other businesses as a business on +Local. This is going to make it much, much easier for small business owners to get off the block and get just a handful of reviews of their own business pages.  They’re just going to need a point in the right [...]

Naturally, after a big interface update like the Places-Plus “merge” that just happened, the first question on everyone’s minds–from business owners to marketers–is “OK, so how do I rank in this thing?”  While my advice has always been to focus only on rankings in the general sense rather than obsessing over a certain position for [...]

Not that it is any surprise to anyone, but Google just announced the end of Place Pages. I’ll be posting my thoughts as I poke around on the new interfaces throughout the day. “Check back frequently,” as they say.