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Local SEO – Big Google Places Changes

July 23, 2011 By Michael Leave a Comment
Google Places Bomb

Google made some big changes to Google places this past week that will affect local SEO. How much we don't know yet, but we'll watch and see what happens. Google Places Review Purge If you go to your Places page or any other Places pages you'll see a huge change to reviews and citations. Google has removed reviews from Yelp and other 3rd party review services and replaced them with a big red button for a Google Review. Google Places Citations Killed Citations are gone. They've been removed. … [Read more...]

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Local SEO – Race Horse or Race Track?

July 20, 2011 By Michael Leave a Comment

There are many decisions required for best results from local SEO and local internet marketing. Many small business owners don't have large marketing budgets and SEO takes a back seat in their plans. Local and small business SEO is a long term program. Effort and investment today will not pay off for a few months or longer. Print advertising, pay per click and other forms of immediate gratification advertising are easier to execute and justify in the short term. Search engine optimization is … [Read more...]

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Local SEO and Slow SEO

June 30, 2011 By Michael Leave a Comment
Slow SEO Turtle

We rush, we rush and then we rush some more. We look for magic bullets, low hanging fruit and quick hits. Not all things can be done quickly though. We know it, even if we don't like it. Local SEO results can take much longer than we like, but that's not so bad. Let's look at a new idea I had today when writing some new content. Let's talk about Slow SEO. What is Slow SEO? Slow SEO is what happens when you don't have the deep pockets to spend lots of money on search engine optimization and … [Read more...]

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Are You Advertising for Your Competition?

June 28, 2011 By Michael Leave a Comment
Local SEO Example Uncle Bill's Diner

If you rank number one for your own business name, you've met the most basic local SEO requirement. If you're not, you are advertising for your competition. The most basic local SEO requirement for your website is ranking number 1 in Google, Yahoo and Bing for your own business name. If your business is Uncle Bill's Pancakes, you must rank number 1 for Uncle Bill's Pancakes. Even if you've done no local or small business SEO, you may rank number one for your business. If not, you have some … [Read more...]

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Local SEO Tips – Using Internal Links

June 27, 2011 By Michael Leave a Comment
Local SEO

If you look at your site, are you inter-linking between your own pages and posts? A big part of local SEO involves long-tail keywords and you have the power to support your own pages. I analyze a lot of small business SEO sites. On many of these sites, I see content without links to other pages or posts on the site. This is a big mistake. Your own pages on your site carry PageRank, just like external pages, that can be sent to your other pages. I read in Fast Company this week that the … [Read more...]

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Local SEO – Every Keyword is a Campaign

June 16, 2011 By Michael 1 Comment
Keyword Campaign Index Card

Here is your Local SEO 3x5 Card for the week focusing on keyword campaigns. Search engines rank pages not websites. This is so important to keep in mind for local SEO. Even if CNN is ranking number one for your keyword term, you are competing against that page, not the CNN website. If you set out with your small business SEO campaign thinking that you are going to beat a competitor's website, you're likely to waste time and money, make yourself very frustrated and end up believing that SEO … [Read more...]

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Assessing Local SEO Competition – Part 3

June 14, 2011 By Michael 1 Comment
Biloxi Seafood Results

This is the third part of Assessing Local SEO competition and this one is where we introduce our: Local SEO Secret Weapon In Part 3, we're going to talk about the tool I use to assess small business SEO competition quickly. The entire process shown here takes less than 10 minutes. The tool is Market Samurai. Of all my SEO tools, this is the one I use most often. It's not free, but it's the big time saver for assessing local SEO competition, helping you develop your SEO strategy and getting … [Read more...]

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Part 2 – Assessing Local SEO Competition

June 10, 2011 By Michael 2 Comments
seoquake-density

This is the second part of our Local SEO competition assessment series. In the first part we talked about the major factors in assessing your local competition. Be sure to read Assessing Local SEO Competiton - Part 1 before reading this second part. We'll continue with the example we used in Part 1 - Biloxi Seafood Restaurants. Using the Google Keyword Tool, we saw that there are over 33,000 monthly keyword searches related to our term. That's significant traffic. The next step is to evaluate … [Read more...]

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Assessing Local SEO Competition – Part 1

June 6, 2011 By Michael 1 Comment
Biloxi Seafood Wonder Wheel

How much should it cost you for your local seo program? The answer is based on one key factor - competition for the keywords you're targeting. Assessing Local SEO Competition - Part 1 This will be a multi-part series on assessing small business SEO local competition. This first part will define exactly what we will be looking for to determine the level of competition. Parts to follow will deal with tools for manual assessment and then tools for automating the assessment process. Here are … [Read more...]

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The Elements of Local SEO

June 1, 2011 By Michael 1 Comment
Local SEO Image

Local SEO will be the primary source of search engine traffic for many small businesses. When we talk about local SEO, two distinctions are important. First, you are local if you are selling to the local community. Think of a hardware store or beauty salon. Second, you are local if you are selling some tangible property both to locals and out of area people. Think real estate, classic cars, boats and so on. The elements of a local SEO campaign are fairly basic, but can get more complex … [Read more...]

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