Local Search

SMX West day two is just about over and I wanted to post the live blogging I have found throughout the day. Here are some of the sessions that were live blogged today. Beyond The Google AdWords Tool: Advanced Keyword Research Tactics, BruceClay.com Building Buzz On Facebook: Getting Liked &...

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Optimizing Search Engine Marketing For Seasonal Opportunities Many in-house search marketers operate within a seasonal framework, whether a retail high season...

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Many in-house search marketers operate within a seasonal framework, whether a retail high season culminating in Christmas, a peak summer travel season, or another cyclical ebb and flow of sales time. Additionally events, like the Olympics or a presidential election, can impact search engine...

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A typical way of thinking of a SEM program is to look at multiple metrics individually, such as the average rank, cost per click, click through rate, conversion rate, cost per action, return on ad spend. Analyzing these metrics separately is a good start but does not allow search marketers to get...

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Sharing. It’s a fundamental principle of social interactions that harkens back to Kindergarten 101. And yet… companies can lose sight of this essential concept when it comes to creating, syndicating, or rebroadcasting content in the social stratosphere. It’s one thing to showcase news,...

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Governments, non-profit and other organisations are under constant pressure to improve transparency and, as a result, are making vast amounts of data available to the public. The range of data sets available is enormous, with 16 nations currently spear heading open data initiatives, and countless...

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Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and Google SVP of Advertising Susan Wojcicki are now seated for her on-stage keynote interview this morning at SMX West. It’s a capacity crowd as Chris Sherman introduces Wojcicki as “one of the 50 most influential business executives” (Forbes). He...

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Localeze, 15 Miles and comScore released findings from their 5th Local Search Study. The survey of 4,000 US adults (together with behavioral data) documents how consumers search for and find local business information across digital platforms. It’s a pretty comprehensive study and there are a...

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With its msnNOW site barely two weeks old, Microsoft is already reaping benefits on another property: increased traffic to its Bing search engine. But the way it’s happening may also lead to artificial increases in Bing’s market share numbers. First, the traffic stats: Experian Hitwise...

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The more obvious reason there is a signing frog on the Google home page is because today is a leap day, happens about every four years and Google decided to leap with a frog. But the reason the frog is signing like in an opera is because it is the 220th birthday of Gioachino Rossini. [...]

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Uptake was an ambitious travel site that never quite broke through. It used social data and sentiment analysis to try and provide better travel discovery and decision support to its users. Originally called Kango, we wrote about the site in 2008 when it relaunched as Uptake. AllThingsD...

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As Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum loses two primary races to rival Mitt Romney, perhaps he can console himself with, ironically, another loss. Spreading Santorum, the page defining “santorum” as a by-product of anal sex, has finally dropped from the top results on...

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SMX West day one is just about over and I wanted to post the live blogging I have found throughout the day. Here are some of the sessions that were live blogged today. Creating Conversion Friendly Mobile Landing Pages, Search Engine Roundtable Creating Conversion-Friendly Mobile Landing Pages,...

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Microsoft and Nokia announced the fruit of their recent mapping collaboration today. Each company has a blog post describing what’s changed and improved (Bing, Nokia). The effort comes out of the companies’ strategic partnership in mobile. As part of that arrangement Microsoft is...

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: 10 Content Ideas To Improve Organic Visibility In the past series of articles, we focused on determining what keywords were already generating business for a web...

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The Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring, designed for both novice and experienced practitioners, offers advice, best practices and techniques to help you get the most out of every lead that enters your database. Whether you’re a lead generation pro or just getting started, these scoring models,...

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In the past series of articles, we focused on determining what keywords were already generating business for a web site and then optimizing your existing pages to improve organic results for those keywords. In this and some future articles, we’ll cover adding new content to a website as well...

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Bing has announced three new features for Bing Webmaster Tools but the biggest new feature to me is the new Bing Webmaster Tools API. Markup Validation Tool. This feature allows webmasters to enter any URL and see what the markup looks like on the page, within the code. Keyword research tool. This...

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It seems as though everyone has written an article about Pinterest. No, this is not really a Pinterest article, but I too, have written an internal POV for clients of Resolution Media as well as collaborated on a tool for brands to effectively capture their audiences on Pinterest. What fascinates...

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On any website, getting the homepage right is a critical (and difficult) series of important design decisions. When you’re also catering for navigation to appropriate countries covering much of the globe, that difficulty is increased and the impact of getting it wrong can be catastrophic for...

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Confirms Panda 3.3 Update, Plus Changes To How It Evaluates Links, Local Search Rankings & Much More Google has confirmed a new Panda update at the...

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Google has confirmed a new Panda update at the same time that it’s announcing 40 search updates that happened in February (or are in progress right now). It would be all but impossible to fully sum up the full slate of changes here, but there are a few that seem especially noteworthy and will...

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Both Google and Yahoo used search data to create their own Oscar ballots. Turns out, their predictions were terribly wrong. At best, Google may have correctly predicted Meryl Streep winning, depending on how you read things. But overall, neither of them really got the winners right. Google’s...

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Former AdMob executive Jason Spero, who is now Google’s head of mobile sales, took the stage earlier today at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona to offer up some new, global smartphone user survey data and 2012 predictions. The Google-sponsored survey had a sample size of roughly 1,000...

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Last week my colleague, Michael Martin presented Mongoose Metrics data that demonstrates that less than 10% of you are mobile ready in 2012.  He also presented some pretty compelling reasons for going mobile in 2012, including the Compuware study that 57% of customers would not recommend a business...

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Despite Google moving away from the large black navigation menu on the web version, it seems like they are testing that exact same version on the mobile version of Google. Alex Chitu posted screen shots of Google testing the new large black drop down menu on Google mobile. Here are pictures: The...

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SMX West is approaching fast, and one of the sessions that caught my eye was the Enterprise SEO – Challenges & Solutions. The panel is loaded with speakers with deep experience in enterprise SEO. I decided to reach out to the panelists and get a preview of their presentations, so I asked each...

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So you’ve set up your PPC account, have been monitoring it for a while, and things are going swimmingly. But now what? You feel you’ve done everything you think you can do to the PPC account. Not so! There’s always more to do! In this article, I’ll discuss some ideas you can use to give [...]

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Check-in services have been one of the few Web 2.0 concepts to tightly combine location data with social media interactions, but it has not been clear if such services convey distinct local ranking benefit beyond the sort of citational reference provided by general online business directories....

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Are you used to using Google as a way around the Wall Street Journal’s paywall? Think again. The WSJ has been holding back stories available through Google’s “First Click Free” program, a move that I suspect other newspapers might soon emulate. Over the past few weeks,...

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Search In Pics: Life-Size Google+ Circles, Google Tinfoil Office & Church Signs In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled...

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In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google Tinfoil Aviation Desk: Source: Google+ Geeky Sign At Google: Source:...

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In the early days of ‘Mad Men’ marketing, half of all Marketing spend was famously wasted – the Marketer just didn’t know which half. Many a Marketer’s sleepless night was spent wondering what levers of their Marketing spend to push forward and which to dial back. Then, along came the...

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One year ago, Google launched its “Panda Update” designed to filter low quality or “thin” content from its top search results. Below, our infographic produced in conjunction with BlueGlass covers how Panda works, what it impacted and the various updates from Panda 1.0...

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Reported first by TechCrunch last night, Apple has paid a reported (but unconfirmed) $50 million for Chomp and its roughly 20 employees. Chomp offers both iOS and Android apps and a desktop site and is dedicated to solving the problem of app discovery. Chomp can either be described as a search...

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Google announced they are now showing concert rich snippets on band web sites so that you can see upcoming concerts and even book them on ticket sales web sites. The results will show you upcoming concert tour dates in your area right on the results page under the band’s web site. Here is a...

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Imagine searching on your own company’s name and finding a competitor’s ad that said you were “Sold Out” right on your business’ most important holiday. That’s what florists like the owner of Chez Bloom in Minnesota had happen, as originally reported by Brand...

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Is SEO Killing America? Last week at the Tools of Change conference, Clay Johnson, author of the new book The Information Diet gave a keynote talk titled...

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Last week at the Tools of Change conference, Clay Johnson, author of the new book The Information Diet gave a keynote talk titled “Is SEO Killing America“. Sigh.  If you’ve been involved in search for any length of time, your first reaction may be, this again? Haven’t we...

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Google announced the related search links at the top of the Google Images search results are now visually appealing. You can now mouse over the related search phrase and Google will hover open an image preview of what the first three images look like for that image search query. Here is an example...

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After handing over its core search results to Bing in the summer of 2010, Yahoo promised that it would continue to try new things related to its search interface. One of those new ideas is a feature that would let Yahoo users begin a search on one device — a desktop computer, for example...

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This Forrester Research independent report discusses: Three recommendations for attracting online shoppers Click-stream analysis conducted over the holidays What you should and shouldn’t expect from social campaigns Download now »

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In the last several months, there have been hundreds of articles written about Google+, its influence on the search engine marketing industry, discussing how marketers should be protecting against it or preparing to utilize it in the future. Due to this influx of Google+ publicity, our team has...

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The Yahoo/Microsoft Search Alliance this week is beginning to transition Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns to AdCenter accounts in the UK, France and Ireland. The companies last month announced they’d begin testing adCenter ads on Yahoo in those countries. Organic results have been powered by...

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A recent article by fellow Search Engine Land contributor Matt Van Wagner on long-tail keyword management  - as well as some recent experiences with several large-scale advertisers, inspired me to write this article on quantitative long-tail management. Too often, I have seen cases where marketers...

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When I do an SEO audit on a webpage, one of the first things I check is the <title> tag. Why? Well, I have several reasons. In my book, the <title> tag possesses all of the following: It has the most SEO power of any tag on the page for establishing keyword relevance Its contents...

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Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Bing Linked Pages: Better People Search Results Microsoft Bing announced a new feature named Linked Pages. The purpose is to make the search results for you and...

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Microsoft Bing announced a new feature named Linked Pages. The purpose is to make the search results for you and your friends more personalized as well as richer. If I am friends with you and you do a search in Bing for [barry schwartz] you will see the following search result at the top: Linked...

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Conversion testing is the holy grail of ROI on the Internet. Every day, more of our customers start picking up their phones, asking what new test we are planning for their website. Or may that be a result of sales people “incidentally” dropping Conversion Optimization and in doing so, providing the...

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Due to the agile and complex nature of paid search, managing a paid search program can often degenerate into a constant barrage of fire drills and ad hoc report requests. I have been there and it is not fun. I have also found that there is a way to dig out of this chaos and [...]

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