SEO Industry Archive

SEOs tend to work themselves into a frenzy over every minor news announcement that comes out of Mountain View–and one could probably say Local SEOs lie on the extreme end of the spectrum. In some respects, it’s understandable. Our space is constantly evolving, and to ignore these announcements can put us at a significant disadvantage relative to [...]

Back on Day Three — off to a bit of late start again :) Bo Fishback, Zaarly Zaarly is 10 months old, $1MM in seed funding, $14MM in Series A funding, and got Meg Whitman on the board.  They are doing peer-to-peer selling.  Say what you want, what you are willing to pay, and how [...]

And we’re off! Recap of Day 1 from BIA Kelsey’s Jed Williams Companies are partnering even with traditional enemies these days (ClearChannel and Cumulus, for example). Your biggest competitors are coming from markets you can’t even see right now. Being “average” at a bunch of different things means you are doomed to fail in today’s [...]

I’ll be blogging sessions on this thread throughout the next couple days. Looking forward to the conversations in the comments and/or on the ol’ Twitter.

A quick note, readers, that I’ll be heading to BIA/Kelsey Group’s Interactive Local Media conference next week in San Francisco.  You may remember from previous years, this has been one of my absolute favorite events to attend–much different from a typical SEO show, action-packed (and often contentious) presentations, and extremely stimulating networking.  If you’re in [...]

Hey everyone, I know I’ve been incredibly lax in posting recently.  October was a very busy month.  Including the last week of September and the first week of November, I was busy putting on four Local University events with Mike Blumenthal, Mary Bowling, Matt McGee, Aaron Weiche (PS–Minnesotans looking for a web gig, Aaron is hiring), [...]

Most of you have probably heard that Google will go before the Senate Antitrust Committee in a couple hours.  One of the star “prosecution” witnesses is Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. Regular readers know that in general, I’d like to see more oversight of Google’s activities by somebody & I’m hoping that these proceedings lead to exactly [...]

I came across a very pleasant surprise on NYTimes.com last night: this article on the ease of crowdsourcing business closures within Google Places.   “The Oracle of Olean,” Mike Blumenthal, features prominently in the second half of the article, as the Times found his experiment on closing Google’s Mountain View location particularly illustrative and amusing. [...]

Hat tip to Linda Buquet of Catalyst Local Marketing for being the first to spot the Austin and Portland versions below, and thus the first to publicize the overall concept. Google has just released city-specific business directories that are clearly going to compete with Yelp, Citysearch, and all the other IYPs in terms of highlighting [...]

Well, it’s hard to believe this is already the fourth time I’ve had the privilege to compile the opinions of the world’s top experts in Local Search Marketing. My initial comments about the results of the 2011 Local Search Ranking Factors survey follow below.