Renegade Search

Yesterday, I was shocked to see a post on Search Engine Watch, a well-known and widely-read industry site, covering a new service called 'Local Paid Inclusion'. According to the article, LPI was some sort of a partnership between Bruce Clay, Inc (a long-running internet marketing and training agency), and multiple search engines and directories -- including Google, Bing and Yahoo. The post explained that the new service would allow companies to pay to show up in the local results section of a search engine results page.

At first glance, that might not sound unreasonable. After all, search engines do make nearly all of their money off of advertising, right. So it seems entirely possible that they might partner with a third-party agency to improve their local advertising solutions. But what really stuck out about this proposal was the suggestion that this wasn't advertising in the usual, search engine sense. Rather than placing their customers' sites in a clearly-marked 'paid advertisement' area on the site--which has been the MO of search engines since the dawn of online advertising--this new service would actually allow people to pay their way into the normal search engine results.

CONTINUE READING »

For most SEOs, the most important part of Local Search Optimization has typically been ensuring that a business has a lot of visibility in Google Maps. A few years ago, all you really had to do was make sure that your company had an accurate, claimed listing for that service, and you could bank on getting seen whenever a user was looking for your type of company in your city. But in the past few years, there have been plenty of developments in the search world that have complicated things immensely. Foremost among these is the continued blurring of maps results and organic search results in Google results.

Over the past six months or so, we have been noticing that it's been increasingly difficult to separate local search from organic search. This trend first started happening with blended results, which appear when Google Places results are mixed in with other links in a Google search page. Blended results presented some problems--it was difficult to predict when a Places listing would appear before an organic link, for one. Yet at their heart, these were still local search results.

CONTINUE READING »

Given the recent high-profile launch of Google+, it's clear that the biggest player in the search space is making good on their commitment to social media as a major component for search results moving forward. If the buzz across other social media sites isn't enough of a sign that Google+ is worth paying attention to, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has gone on record stating that all Google products and services will eventually be completely integrated with Google+.

CONTINUE READING »

Social media is all the rage these days, almost everyone from babies who aren't even born yet to grandparents are on Facebook, looking up reviews on local business has never been easier with Yelp, you can't walk into a party without someone using the word "tweet." Users have quickly adopted social media into their lives and now business are striving to catch up with their customers and engage with them through these channels. Foursquare is especially interesting for businesses because it reinforces customer loyalty and repeat business. However, there are a lot of caveats when it comes to social media; some business execute it seamlessly...while others leave something to be desired.

CONTINUE READING »

NASCAR. FEMA. NCAA. DARPA. UNICEF. NASDAQ.

What do all of these have in common? Not much, aside from being acronyms. And by virtue of that, they are pretty strictly verboten from Google Places profiles.

According to the guidelines from the market leader in local search, business owners are not allowed to use 'excessive capitalization' in any part of their profile. This means that a local listing simply won't be displayed if there are any strings of more than three capital letters in a row. And there's no method to request that Google reconsider profile inclusion.

CONTINUE READING »