…and hot on the heels of our last post comes a story that illustrates the potential of Foursquare for local online marketers.
If you live in Baltimore, you may know Miss Shirley’s Cafe. This popular brunch spot is particularly hard to get into – on Sundays, the wait often passes 2 hours to get a table.
Miss [...]

One of the things I stress with local businesses I am working with is that online marketing isn’t the only way to generate leads, as many search marketing consultants would have them believe.  In many cases, direct mail will work better than online campaigns, and in all cases where it is affordable, I recommend an [...]

We’ve mentioned David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors article before – it’s a crucial guide to the ins and outs of how Google (in particular) determines where in the Google Places results a local listing will show up.
Each year David Mihm surveys a number of top SEO practitioners regarding the local listing results they’ve seen, [...]

We’ve spoken a lot about how Twitter is a great medium to build relationships with your customers and prospects…but Twitter can also be an effective tool for generating local leads.
As Jonathan Volk points out, you can even automate the process. By feeding various articles to a locally-targeted Twitter feed, you can direct prospects to a [...]

If you’re in any way social media-savvy, you’ve probably encountered Yelp before. (If you haven’t, it’s one of the leading review sites on the web. Users can post reviews of various businesses and interact with people who post other reviews. If you’re working with a B2C company and they’re not on Yelp, drop what you’re [...]

One of the things that is clear from coaching people about how to help local, small businesses with their online marketing is that most people over-complicate what needs to be done.
The fact of the matter is that most small businesses have done next to nothing to give themselves a fighting chance online, so anything you [...]

Of all the local directories out there, Google Local (now Google Places) is still the king of the hill. Not only are they a part of the most widely-used search engine in the world, but they also have the most integration with third party applications.
Thanks to Google’s extensive API, developers for web and mobile applications [...]

Up until now, the Google Local Business Center has had some real limitations for the following scenarios:

Service businesses that work in multiple cities but only have an office in one
Home-based businesses that don’t want to reveal their home address on their Google Maps listing

The first scenario has been particularly troublesome for us and many of [...]

We’ve been telling every small business we talk to in the last six months that they should be claiming and optimizing their local listings in the major search engines; this strategy includes getting reviews of your business.
The impact of reviews on local search marketing results – I think people intuitively understand that having reviews of your business [...]

I found this tool recently; it’s a great way to quickly check on the status of your – or a prospect or client’s – local listings in the major search databases:
GetListed.org
Here is a look at Everon’s results for our listing in Broomfield, CO:

It’s got some great features, like being able to save your listings to [...]

It’s funny – behind all of the amazing technology and automation that makes internet marketing possible in the first place, the reality of good online marketing is that it requires a lot of manual effort.  In order to be as productive as possible, it’s important that local online marketingpractitioners find tools that will help them cut [...]