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27 Feb This post is from from my other blog here I read a great article today over at Convert Offline, It’s No Secret… Link Building In Local Search Is Different. Tim talks about link building for the local business. I have talked about this subject a while back at Building small business websites for today. In that post I link to a couple of articles I wrote on the subject. “In the same way that the best links for traditional websites are those that help with traffic, the best links for a local service business are those that provide help with conversions.” I could not agree more. Make sure you read the comments too. Earlpearl said, “My experience is that it is tough to get local links….and requires lots of consistent effort..” Yes link building is not always easy and will take some time but it will be worth your time. A few places to look for potential local links are Merchant Circle, ShowMeLocal, MojoPages, Localguides, etc-directories where you can search by location. 
26 Feb This post is from from my other blog here I am always interested in hearing what others have to say about local search. I have been following a number of very good interviews with those in local search marketing that I wanted to share with you. SEO Igloo has been running a series. So far there has been:
Convert Offline also has had a couple that I liked:
19 Feb This post is from from my other blog here Brian Wool put it quite well in his article, Local Search: The Rodney Dangerfield of Online Marketing
In his article, Brian goes through and gives some reasons why he believes this but concludes it with by saying the: “Consumers get local search, want local search, and are engaged. Now we just need the rest of the marketplace to catch up.” Around the same time Brian wrote his article, Greg Sterling wrote an article When Will Local Get Respect? Greg goes into some of the statistics about the marketshare, etc but he has a great point to make about local search. “Local is the “last mile of search.” It’s about directing consumers to offline businesses (whether big boxes or local plumbers) and tracking the efficacy of the online spend. One of the other problems is that local is not like the iPhone, where we can clearly measure success in terms of market share and unit sales. Local IS the Internet; it’s about how we now use the Internet in myriad ways to conduct research and communicate with one another about purchases, events and activities in the real world.” I really like how Greg put it.; local search is more about how we do things vs. how much of the marketshare it has. So for the small business owner, the point is, even if local search does not get all of the hype and headlines others aspects of on-line marketing gets, be aware of the importance of local search and make sure you are active in it. Get your business profile on-line, optimize your web site better for local search results, look into geo-targeting your paid ads, etc. Just saw a nice post at Convert Offline, Local Search Keyword Analysis. This article looks at the on-line campaigns of 2 different businesses. The results he shows are interesting and definitely provides some insight on how to optimize your web site content. I thought this brief analysis helped illustrate Greg’s point about local search being how folks are searching on-line. The article concludes by saying, “If you don’t have a website that can be found by searchers that are looking for you, you are losing a ton of business.” Amen
05 Feb This post is from from my other blog here Found a couple of interesting articles on building local traffic and interacting with potential local customers a while back. Both of these had crossed my mind before but these guys wrote about them first so…. Going Local in StumbleUpon by Jake Matthews StumbleUpon is a cool social marketing tool. I have been using it for a number of months and LocalBizBits has gotten quite a bit of traffic from it. Jason described the system as, “They are there for discovery. If you show a user something local, they will get excited about it and probably talk it up…” I am not going to repeat the whole article, (so read it) but StumbleUpon can be a great traffic building tool and is set up to help folks with similar interests to connect and share. Jason concludes by saying: “…SU helpful for bouncing your site traffic, but you can also connect with very targeted users on a local geographic level, gender and topical interest areas to bounce your foot traffic” Meetup.com = Local Marketing by Andrew Shotland Meetup.com is another site/social networking that I have been trying to work into my schedule. Meetup is setup to help those with similar interests to “meet up” offline. Andrew says it is a “simple, inexpensive ways to reach your target customers”. I definitely agree. I have been working on setting up a Meetup in my area. There is one Meetup group that I am a part of, but so far the meetings are only averaging 1-3 people coming. The only cost of using Meetup is your time. Hey why not create a meetup event and then plug it on Zvents? Talk about local!
04 Feb This post is from from my other blog here I am still numb! The New York Giants are Super Bowl XLII champions! AMAZING. What an incredible game, what an incredible season and post season! Eli and company came and beat up Tom and the Patriots. As a football fan, I know how incredible a perfect season would have been but as a New York fan, it was great to see the Patriots get their butts kicked. Oh how the mighty have fallen! Super Bowl championships do not happen very often so I am simply going to sit back and enjoy this one! Back to work tomorrow…..
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“Local search receives very few mentions and little analysis from the mainstream media or analysts relative to the dollars it generates and its potential growth. So why does local search get so little respect?”