5 Tips To Kill The Competition In Local Search

If your business has a local presence — anywhere — you must take advantage of Google+ Local. Creating and optimizing Google+ Local profiles is a critical marketing practice for local small businesses, multi-location enterprises, national franchises and companies with a single physical…

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6 Local Tips For Small Business SEO Success

We all know that a key component of any small business’ marketing strategy is to effectively position its brand in search engine results. But is it possible to dominate search results with content you control — or at least content you’ve influenced? The answer is yes. There are…

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10 Pro Online Reputation Management Tips For Local Businesses

Online marketing experts have spent a lot of time providing advice on managing online ratings and reviews for local businesses — but reputation can have much broader impact than your reviews in Yelp and Google. There’s hardly a business out there that doesn’t have an occasional…

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5 Go-Tos To Make Online Reviews Work For Your Business

By now, everyone knows that online reviews can have a tremendous impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. Ultimately, a single review — positive or negative — can tip the scale in favor of one company over another. No doubt, the power of reviews on Google+, Yelp, Angie’s…

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Health & Medical SMBs Spend More On Marketing Than Other Industries

When we conducted an online survey of 668 US small and medium-sized businesses in October 2013, a large number of these businesses (just over 20%) classified themselves as belonging to the Health & Medical Industry. This group consisted of a wide spread of specialists, including chiropractors,…

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How Local Businesses Can Leverage Twitter’s New Nearby Feature

Twitter has made headlines in recent weeks with the quiet launch of its experimental Nearby timeline, which allows eligible mobile users to discover tweets posted by others in their immediate vicinity, regardless of whether they are following them. This feature is currently available to a select…

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Checking In: Our Top Local Search Columns Of 2013

As more and more small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) venture into the digital marketing arena, they are quickly recognizing the importance of being visible within local search results. This past year saw the official launch of Google’s Knowledge Graph Carousel for local search results,…

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Use Google Keyword Research To Target The Long Tail In Local Search

There’s something of a void where local business marketing is concerned. Local marketers understand they need to target keyword queries in SEO and PPC campaigns, but they assume they know what people search for, and they miss out on valuable referrals because of it. Here’s a brief guide…

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62% Of Marketers Say Local Search Is Getting Harder

During the recent InsideLocal webinar series, I’ve had the chance to gather the opinions and feelings of the hundreds of search agencies, consultants, “in-bound” marketeers and business owners who logged in to listen. We ran a number of on-the-spot surveys (or polls) during each…

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5 Trusted Accounts Every Local SEO Should Have

As local marketers, most of us know how to set up a Google Places for Business account or create a Facebook Page. But, these are not the only accounts you should be creating in order to get the full benefit of your local SEO campaign. Below are five tr…

SMBs Spend An Average 46% Of Marketing Budget On ‘Digital’

In October 2013, BrightLocal teamed up with ChamberOfCommerce.com to conduct an insightful piece of research into the attitudes toward and usage of Digital Marketing by SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses). (In the survey, we used the phrase “Internet or Mobile Marketing” to make it…

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How Local Businesses Can Overcome Obstacles To Mobile Conversion

For the growing number of consumers who rely on their mobile devices to search for local business information, their focus is on making a purchase — and fast. The latest Google/Nielsen “Mobile Path to Purchase” study, released last week, shows that consumers who use their mobile…

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Ingress: Is Google’s AR Game A Stealth Local Data Effort?

I recently got a new Android phone and found a little card in the box advertising Ingress, the “massively multi-player location-based alternate reality game from Niantic Labs at Google.” Ingress had slipped past my notice despite Greg Sterling’s mention of it nearly a year ago….

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Did Hummingbird Just Kill Your Local SEO Strategy?

Let’s cut to the chase: no, it didn’t (see Betteridge’s Law of Headlines). But Search Engine Land tells me the Hummingbird stuff really drives the page views these days, so you only have yourself to blame. :) That said, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, along with all of the…

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How Local Businesses Should Size Up & Tackle Social Media

The most frequently asked question posed these days at events, webinars and new client meetings is “What is the best social media platform for my local business?” Research shows social channels are becoming more important signals in major search engine algorithms that affect the entire SEO and…

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34% Of Local SEOs Make Less Than $30,000/Year. Why?

As the local search industry evolves and becomes more complex, the role of local search consultants and agencies becomes more critical. Complexity is increasing across most areas of our fast-growing industry, which makes “local search” all the more confusing for local business owners….

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The Structured Data Brouhaha At SMX East: Clarifying Contentious Issues

If you attended the Structured Data Superstars session at SMX East earlier this month, you probably witnessed a very brief interchange between myself and Googler Pierre Far at the end of the session. Pierre woke everyone up by stating that some of the semantic markup recommendations I’d…

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