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Local SEO Archive

The Mother of All SMX Local/Mobile Recaps

No. 111 • July 29th, 2008 • 30 Comments

Just returned from SMX Local in San Francisco and my head is still spinning. Chris Sherman, Greg Sterling, and the rest of the Third Door Media team did an amazing job with this conference, and if you are at all inclined towards Local Search, I’d highly recommend attending next year. Read the rest of this post for my summary of the most amazing tips from the conference (caution: there were A LOT of them!).

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Highlights of Eric Enge’s Interview with Google Local Director Carter Maslan

No. 109 • July 14th, 2008 • 8 Comments

Eric Enge just posted a remarkably thorough interview with Carter Maslan of Google Local. I'm going to run through the highlights here, but please, please, please read the interview in its entirety. What a fabulous interview. I applaud Carter for his open-ness in talking about the factors their algorithm is looking at, and I applaud Eric, for being so thorough with his questions.

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SMX Local/Mobile Preview, July 24-25

No. 108 • July 6th, 2008 • No Comments

If you're a Bay Area small business, or work as an SEO that serves businesses with a local focus, I'd highly recommend checking out SMX Local in San Francisco on July 24-25. Looking at the agenda, there seem to be many more sessions devoted to marketing topics and Local rankings than there were at last year's event. I have a feeling that Chris Sherman and the rest of the Third Door Team have taken to heart the suggestions of last year's attendees to focus less on industry-type topics and more on SEO.

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The “BCS” for Local Search Engine Optimization

No. 103 • June 30th, 2008 • 33 Comments

Frequent readers know that for five months a year, I have college basketball on the brain. But while the hardwood is vacant, I happily fix my gaze upon the college gridiron for a few months. My assertion with this article is that the college football BCS serves as a great analogy for Local Search–only in this case BCS stands for “Best Citation Sources.” The post looks at why InfoUSA, SuperPages, Acxiom, Localeze, Yelp and InsiderPages are so important in Local Search.

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Yahoo Leads the Way in Local Search Functionality

No. 102 • June 26th, 2008 • 4 Comments

Amidst all the negative publicity from the failed Microsoft merger (that, like the old man in Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail, appears to be "not dead yet"), Yahoo is proving that it still has the potential to be an innovative company. Their Local Search interface blows Google's away.

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Best of the Web Introduces BOTW Local

No. 101 • June 24th, 2008 • 7 Comments

A Soon-to-Be Must for Small Businesses My friend Eric Lander, in addition to writing some very nice things about me and the Local Search Ranking Factors project yesterday, also highlighted a very important news note in the Local space: Best of the Web has just launched a Local directory, appropriately named BOTW Local. Greg Hartnett, […]

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Local Search Ranking Factors, Vol. 1

No. 100 • June 17th, 2008 • 33 Comments

I invited 20 leaders in the Local Search Marketing community to rate the importance of 47 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.

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What Google’s ZIP Code Targeting Means for Local Businesses

No. 97 • May 29th, 2008 • 18 Comments

Greg Sterling reported last week that Google is now asking searchers to tell them their ZIP codes so that they can return geo-relevant results. In this post I take a look at some of the implications of this development, and expand on an earlier hypothesis about why Google introduced the 10-pack to Universal search in the first place. Yes, ZIP code targeting means more relevant results for searchers, but it's an innovation that might not be entirely altruistic.

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Local vs Traditional SEO: Why Citation Is the New Link

No. 96 • May 28th, 2008 • 103 Comments

In this lengthy post (sorry, it must some kind of delayed reaction to Twitter's 140-character limitation) I'll try to explain a hypothesis about optimization for the Google Local algorithm (along with the 10-pack, 3-pack and authoritative OneBox) that's been brewing in my mind for the past couple of months. It has really crystallized this week in various discussions I've had with other Local SEOs, including Mike Blumenthal, EarlPearl, and David Klein, and after reading a blog post by Stephen Espinosa. Other experts, especially Bill Slawski and Mike Blumenthal (in fact, I think Mike may have been the first person to turn me onto the word "citation" in some of my conversations with him?) have postulated the importance of "citations" for quite awhile, but for whatever reason, the concept never really hit home for me until recently.

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An Interview with Small Business SEM’s Matt McGee

No. 90 • May 8th, 2008 • 8 Comments

For those who hadn’t heard, Marchex and Matt McGee recently decided to part ways. Regardless of any “structural” changes that Marchex was making, I was surprised that they would let such a charismatic and knowledgeable ambassador for their company out of their grasp! But their loss will be someone else’s gain. (It might even be […]

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