Hot off the press! Today Google announced a fundamental change in the way they display local listings. Called Google Place Search, it’s set to dramatically increase the importance of small businesses having a well-optimized Google Places listing.
Here’s how the new service works:
When you type in a general search like ‘IT support’, Google will continue to [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

With everything from Twitter and Facebook to Foursquare and Gowalla offering ways to identify yourself online, geolocation has become a hot item on the web lately. And why not? Local search is growing, and more and more applications are finding new ways to turn the World Wide Web into the ‘Backyard Web.’

The implications for advertising are amazing. From Brightkite using [...]