Mike Blumenthal once again breaks the news on a new initiative from Google Places: the ability for business owners to respond directly to reviews. Google is not the first local search portal to come out with this product enhancement, but as arguably the biggest and certainly the most visible, it puts incredible pressure on the remaining stragglers to do so. It’s a great complement to the UI/link shift — allowing business owners even more control over their Place Page–and is a clear indication to me that Google is headed more in the direction of Facebook Fan Pages every day.

As reported by Mike Blumenthal earlier this morning, Google Places is now making phone calls to selected (random…?) Local businesses to verify their contact information. Sort of a virtual reverse check-in, if you will. This initiative seems to be a genuine effort by Google to decrease the spam in their Places index–the engineers’ hearts are absolutely in the right place here. I am all for as much human interaction with business owners as Google thinks is possible. But it’s frustrating to see such a good idea executed in this manner.

My thoughts on what the latest changes to Local results in Google Universal search mean for both SMB’s and IYP’s.

In an effort to kill two birds with one stone, I recently (last weekend) published a collection of about 100 terms used frequently in Local Search — the Local Search Glossary. My definitions may not be technically 100% accurate but they’re rather intended to give business owners a decent sense of what each word or acronym means.

Back in 2008, when Pat Sexton and I were brainstorming the ideas that would eventually turn into GetListed.org, one of our very first long-term goals was to put together a low-cost seminar series that would introduce business owners to the world of online marketing. It pleases us greatly to announce a major step towards that goal: the very first GetListed.org Local University event in Spokane, WA on February 4th.

As many readers probably know, Telmetrics president Bill Dinan responded to my original Search Engine Land column about call-tracking last week. Greg Sterling was kind enough to let me post a response to Bill’s response on his blog this week.

Please check it out & let me know your thoughts either in the comments area on Greg’s blog, or on this post.

Marketers and advertisers have insisted for years (with good reason) that your brand isn’t how you want your customers to feel about you, it’s how your customers feel about you.
Well, in the internet era, the rise of social media has blurred the lines between brand and public relations. And another one of the age-old adages in the [...]

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.

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.

Barry Schwartz reported Google Maps’s Community Edit function now allows users to mark certain businesses as closed. Community Edits alone opened up a can of worms that I did not think Google wanted to get into. Community CLOSINGS are even more dangerous. When the business community doesn’t even know something exists (the Google Local Business Center), how can they possibly be expected to understand why their business is closed, and how to fix it?