At this point you’re certainly aware of the increased importance location listings play in your marketing mix. Their increased visibility in search results (which is based on consumers’ ever-increasing appetite for local content), their importance to mobile searches, the high trust factor consumers ascribe to them, and the high user intent behind local search (72% [...]

Google announced this week that it will be rolling out vanity URLs for brands (first in a beta stage, then at an undetermined date on a widespread basis. This represents another step in Google’s commitment to making G+ a true marketing destination for brands, which is another reason you shouldn’t be ignoring G+. As we’ve [...]

You supply Google with the right information for your locations, optimize them for local markets, and nurture the local dialogue. But, Google still manages to pull different information from somewhere and present that in the results. Chances are, this information was once good information and maybe still is “not wrong”, but it is not what [...]

Hopefully you’ve prepared a mobile-optimized experience for your web site based on the continued growth of the mobile market, the high purchase intent that users exhibit, and the fact that many of your competitors haven’t done so. But if you are still holding out for another reason to embrace this opportunity, here’s a great one: [...]

Back in May we observed a big shift in the Google search results for a host of local service and retail queries. I documented some of the observations in my  local search expert (designed experiment on links)  column on Clickz  entitled “Was the Penguin Update in Fact the Honey Badger Update?”. In effect Google’s Penguin update [...]

The Olympics have made for great fodder for social media discussion over the past week, not only for the performance of the athletes themselves but also for the performance of NBC in broadcasting the events. The network’s follies quickly spawned a Twitter hashtag meme, #NBCfail, because of issues like: Editing moments out of the opening [...]