SEO Industry Archive

Hopefully the headline says it all, but if you want the official details, please head on over and read the official release. Needless to say, as a full-time employee of SEOmoz, I won’t be taking on client work for the foreseeable future :).  Going forward, I’ll be blogging almost exclusively on the SEOmoz blog, so if you’re [...]

Hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving holiday.  Sorry for the lack of posting recently, it’s been quite the busy fall :) Just a quick note to say that I’ll be at BOTH Blueglass X Tampa and BIA/Kelsey ILM West (Los Angeles) next week.  (I’ll be flying directly from Tampa to LA.) If you’re going [...]

After taking a bit of a sabbatical this summer following our largest-ever Local University in Austin, Texas at the end of June, my speaking engagements this fall are ramping up in a hurry.  I’ve got five presentations currently scheduled during the six weeks between the end of September and beginning of November, plus a nice [...]

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.

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.

Aaron Wall has done similar posts for years. But in pulling a couple of screenshots for Local University Advanced on Thursday, this one for “pizza” really struck me.

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.

It appears to me that Plus and Places are going to live on the same layer of Google’s business data index–one layer ABOVE Mapmaker–further evidence to support the theory that today was an interface update only and does not affect anything back-end is below.

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.