Local Search

There are a million rules for search landing page design. You have to optimize the content and decide whether more stuff is better or worse for conversion. But it’s all moot unless your focus is on getting into the head of your customers. Searcher personas are the tool that delivers clarity as you...

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Microsoft has started to roll out a new, simpler look for the Bing SERP. It looks very much like the “old Google.” It’s more spartan than the previous Bing UI — or “clean” if you prefer. As Google has added more graphics, icons and features to its SERPs some have...

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Facebook IPO is set now for May 18. Prior to that date Facebook executives will be on a roadshow selling the IPO to brokerages and institutional investors. According to the Journal CEO Mark Zuckerberg ”will make some appearance on the roadshow, though...

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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: Video: Google Speaks About Search Quality Raters Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has published a video talking about a topic that Google has never...

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Google’s head of web spam, Matt Cutts, has published a video talking about a topic that Google has never really talked about publicly before – Google Quality Raters. The video goes through the process used by Google with these Quality Raters. Matt Cutts specifically says these quality...

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Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube best practices This white paper discusses: Three strategies for maximizing Twitter’s impact on SEO Tips for Facebook ads, events, groups and places Common principles between social and search marketing Download now

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In the past few months, link building as we’ve known it has been totally shaken up by three major events: Google anounced that they were changing how they view links (nicely recapped here:) Pandamonium! Certain large blog networks were devalued and webmasters started to receive warnings about...

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Talking to the Global SEO manager of a large organization with offices around the world, he was bemoaning the high turnover of staff and the difficulty of keeping people in SEO posts around the world with the right level of SEO knowledge and expertise to achieve their goals. It’s a challenge...

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If you’re optimizing a site of 10,000+ pages, one-by-one title tag edits isn’t really your best bet. Enterprise SEO is all about scale. So, when I’m working on a behemoth of a site, I look for lazy site-wide wins first. I define a lazy site-wide win as one that: Won’t...

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Segmentation is the key to success in most marketing activities. Simply recognizing that how traffic gets to the site tells us a great deal about its value should prompt analysts to dive into data. Doing so often reveals big opportunities in device segmentation. Golden Tablets I’m not talking...

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I had a chance recently to speak to DataPop CEO Jason Lehmbeck. Before DataPop Lehmbeck was at Overture/Yahoo. DataPop is an agency/platform that specializes in “offer driven” search campaigns. I was talking to Lehmbeck about mobile search trends and what kinds of consumer response he was seeing to...

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SEOmoz, the SEO toolset company, has announced they have successfully raised another $18 million in venture capital from Foundry Group and Ignition Partners. Foundry Group put in $15 million and Ignition Partners put in $3 million. Co-founder and CEO of SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin detailed the financials,...

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Google has had what it has called “comparison ads” for some time, but these comparison units are getting a new look in Google’s search results beginning today. Google hopes the change will better explain to searchers that comparison listings come from companies it has a commercial relationship...

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Those marketing mobile applications via Google AdWords are getting some new weapons in their arsenal this week. Google has announced four new tools: a new Mobile App extension for AdWords, additional information to the click-to-download format, the ability to see Google Play stats in AdWords, and...

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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: Five Key Learnings From A Local Marketing Success Story One of our most compelling speakers at the 2012 Local Search Association annual conference was Mary...

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One of our most compelling speakers at the 2012 Local Search Association annual conference was Mary Boysman, VP Brand Marketing and Advertising at Aspen Dental, a fast-growing, multi-market health care provider. Speaking to a crowd of local search leaders from around the world, Boysman described in...

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The “rotate evenly” setting on an AdWords campaign has been a long-time best friend to habitual ad testers testers and landing page tweakers everywhere.  Next week, the “rotate evenly” setting will stop rotating after 30 days and default to a different setting,...

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Ask someone who’s new to mobile SEO about it and they’re almost sure to tell you that mobile sites are duplicate content. The fear is that having the same content on two URLs will do the same thing it does in traditional SEO and split link equity and social shares, making it more difficult 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: StarCraft Themed Google Easter Egg “Zerg Rush” Calls An Attack On Your Search Results Google’s newest Easter egg, a search for “zerg...

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Search Marketing Now will host a webcast next Wednesday, May 2 at 1 PM EDT. “Big Data Management – Forensics” will feature Brad Geddes, founder of Certified Knowledge.org — and also recently crowned the most influential SEM by his peers — and Matt Van Wagner, President...

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Search Marketing Now will host a webcast next Wednesday, May 2 at 1 PM EDT. “Big Data Management – Forensics” will feature Brad Geddes, founder of Certified Knowledge.org — and also recently crowned the most influential SEM by his peers — and Matt Van Wagner, President...

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Google’s newest Easter egg, a search for “zerg rush,” forces to to fight an onslaught of invaders to save your search results.  This Easter egg is themed after the popular strategy game StarCraft, and may just be the geekiest Easter egg to date. In Starcraft a variety of races...

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Google’s newest Easter egg, a search for “zerg rush,” forces to to fight an onslaught of invaders to save your search results.  This Easter egg is themed after the popular strategy game StarCraft, and may just be the geekiest Easter egg to date. In Starcraft a variety of races...

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More and more, I have been interacting with executives using campaign management tools as their internal reporting systems. In most cases, these companies have an analytics package but prefer to use ad server data rather than analytics for internal tracking. Campaign management tools and analytics...

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More and more, I have been interacting with executives using campaign management tools as their internal reporting systems. In most cases, these companies have an analytics package but prefer to use ad server data rather than analytics for internal tracking. Campaign management tools and analytics...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

What began as an experiment 10 months ago is now showing up in nearly one of every five Google search results. I’m talking about authorship — Google’s use of the rel=author markup to identify content creators next to their content. A new SearchMetrics study published this week...

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What began as an experiment 10 months ago is now showing up in nearly one of every five Google search results. I’m talking about authorship — Google’s use of the rel=author markup to identify content creators next to their content. A new SearchMetrics study published this week...

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Was your site hit by Google’s new Penguin Update that targets spam? Are you not guilty as charged? Google’s got a new feedback form for that, as well as a method to report spam that should have been caught. I’m Innocent! The head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts, shared...

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Today, Google has expanded the historical search query data to 90 days. The number of queries reported has increased as well: the report will now list the top 2,000 for each day of the selected date range (vs. the previous top 1,000). This is great news, as this is data not available anywhere else...

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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: Penguin Update Recovery Tips & Advice Struggling to know what to do in the wake of Google’s Penguin Update? Judging from all the comments and forum...

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It’s unlikely to impact Google or Yelp in any way but Wolfram Alpha is getting into local search. According to a blog post today users can now search online or on its mobile apps for nearby businesses in a range of categories (chains only right now): Wolfram|Alpha now knows the locations...

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Struggling to know what to do in the wake of Google’s Penguin Update? Judging from all the comments and forum discussions we’ve seen, plenty are. We’ve got a little initial advice from Google on the topic, mixed with our own. What Was Penguin? The Penguin Update launched on April...

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  Advertise with Video, Social, and Mobile This white paper discusses: Selling your boss on the importance of investing in video ads Social metrics need to be more than counting "likes" Consumer mobile trends and outlooks Download now »

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Move over Panda, there’s a new Google update in town: Penguin. That’s the official name Google has given to the webspam algorithm that it released on Tuesday. What’s An Update? For those unfamiliar with Google updates, I’d recommend reading my Why Google Panda Is More A...

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It's been long known in the industry that brand term keywords garner a much higher click-through-rate. As a result, marketers often start by bidding on their own brand terms.

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Quality Score display and the addition of labels aren’t the only AdWords changes this week. Google has also updated the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator, eliminating the standalone Traffic Estimator that could be used without logging into an AdWords account. With the Keyword Tool changes,...

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Robin Wauters at The Next Web recently wrote about an interesting trend taking place at upstart search engine DuckDuckGo. DDG (DuckDuckGo) is self-described as: We are a search engine with:  Way more instant answers.  Way less spam and clutter.  Lots and lots of goodies.  Real privacy. Wauters...

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Google’s latest search algorithm change designed to fight spam and improve its search results went live yesterday. Plenty of people are seeing its impact already. Better or worse? It’s easy to find some examples of things being bad; it’s hard to say overall if there’s been a...

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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 Launches Update Targeting Webspam In Search Results Google has announced that it is releasing a new search algorithm that it hopes will better catch people...

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You know that rumor about Microsoft shopping Bing to Facebook? It sparked lots of speculation about whether that would be a good move for both companies. Turns out it did happen, according to a report in the New York Times citing executives who made overtures to Facebook on behalf of Microsoft...

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Yesterday, Google rolled out a new search algorithm it says should better prevent webspam from polluting its search results. Who won and who lost? Searchmetrics has done a quick analysis. Winners include names like Poynter, Spotify and The Verge. Losers have some surprises like Cult Of Mac and...

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Ad network Chitika, which regularly publishes findings from activity on its network, has released some data that show owners of iPhones and iPads search more than Android owners. This is a bit counter-intuitive and unexpected, given how prominent search and the search box are on the homescreen of...

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On Thursday, April 26, Noon EST, 9 AM PST – Join speaker Justin Merickel of Adobe Systems as he discusses how to use display targeting capabilities to attract more high-value customers. Register now!

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Alert! Alert! Your social community is in crisis! Remember that third-party article you posted to the company Facebook Wall yesterday afternoon? Its content sure didn’t seem controversial at the time. In fact, you deemed it the perfect intersection of informative, relevant, interesting, and...

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Google announced they are removing three features from Google Webmaster Tools. Google made the announcement on the Google Webmaster Central blog saying the three features going away include the site performance report, the subscriber stats and the robots.txt creation tool. Google placed reversed...

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Google today unveiled two changes to the AdWords interface that will likely be useful to marketers — three additional components to the Quality Score, along with account labels to allow the easier grouping of keywords, ads, ad groups and campaigns. Quality Score, one of the most important...

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Google has announced that it is releasing a new search algorithm that it hopes will better catch people who spam its search results or purposely do things to rank better that are against Google’s publishers guidelines. Going live today, Google says it will impact about 3% of search queries....

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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: Breadcrumb Trails Come To AdWords Display URLs on AdWords search ads are getting another element — breadcrumb trails, a set of links next to the URL that...

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Display URLs on AdWords search ads are getting another element — breadcrumb trails, a set of links next to the URL that lets users navigate directly to relevant sections of a site. An example of a breadcrumb trail would be “Apparel > Women’s Clothing > Tops >...

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Several weeks ago, I had the privilege of being part of a Search Marketing Now (SMN) webinar, it was sponsored by Optify and focused on B2B link building tactics. Scott Fasser, Director of Customer Experience at Optify and I shared a number of B2B linking tactics and then hosted a lively Q&A...

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