Just checked out the new Google Places Iphone App – “now with Hotpot!”. It’s a nice enough local reviews service The UI is simple and looks good. Besides being able to review a business, which is nothing new these days, perhaps the biggest thing the app has going for it is the aggregation of all of the other review sites’ reviews. It’s not clear to me that sifting through 50 reviews from various sites on a Google Places App is…
Update: Matt Mcgee informs me that this is way old news. Still interesting though. First CityGrid and now Yahoo!? What’s Yelp up to? A reader from a daily deals site just asked me why Yelp was linking to Yahoo on the bottom right of this URL with the words “New York Burgers” in the anchor text. Upon further exploration, I found similar links on every business profile page I checked. And if you search Google, you can find millions of…
Just spotted in the wild: (hat tip to Vik at Chitika) Tweet
I was telling Greg Sterling about how the new meat market in Pleasanton is killing it on their Facebook Page, which was created by a customer, and on Yelp despite the fact that they don’t have a Google Place Page and the business itself isn’t even participating in any of this. From Greg’s The Curious Case of Main Street Meat & Fish: The amazing thing is that these guys have a full-blown social media campaign (and SEO) going without their…
Today the Yellow Pages Association released a new study based on Comscore data that shows an increase in local mobile usage, particularly as it affects the use of local directories. Here are some of the highlights: The number of mobile subscribers accessing business directories on a mobile phone increased 14 percent year-over-year to 17.3 million users in March 2010 the number of people accessing business directories on a mobile device at least once per week increased more than 16 percent year-over-year…
In general you should know who your competition is in the SERPs, but Google just made it easier (unless I have totally missed this feature for months which is possible). I just noticed a “Pages similar to ” widget at the bottom of the results. Here’s what I got when I queried “localseoguide” It appears that GOOG is using a site’s homepage meta description tag to add the snippet after the link. As you can see from this query for…
image liberally appropriated from Roger Hollander Thanks to Vanessa Fox as always for eliciting grains of truth from Google. At last week’s Google I/O conference Matt Cutts confirmed that there was an algo change at the beginning of May that will likely be affecting sites that generate a lot of long-tail traffic: ”this is an algorithmic change in Google, looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries. It went through vigorous testing and isn’t going to be…
As some of you may already know this morning I was under the influence of Nitrous Oxide in a dentist chair. Before I headed off to oblivion I got into a discussion about local Web marketing with my dentist and his assistant. His assistant relayed the following story about a doctor she knows in San Diego (I may have lost something in the translation as when it comes to laughing gas I am a 60%er): A teenage patient wrote a…
I haven’t seen them live on Yelp yet because years ago Jeremy Stoppleman banned my email address, but that’s another story. The big question – are Facebook’s Like buttons complementary to reviews or do they cannibalize them?
National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic. The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings. Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword targets. Many IYPs even use their Google rankings as part of their sales pitch. When I got an email from one asking me to advertise…