Posts tagged Listings
Google, Bing & Yahoo in Partnership to Sell Top Organic Local Listings
Jan 31st
The top U.S. search engines have entered into an agreement with Universal Business Listings and Bruce Clay Inc. to launch a new program called Local Paid Inclusion that promises to “put your business above the competition” in local organic results.
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Yext Launches PowerListings Turbo: Update Local Listings the Easy Way
Dec 13th
Yext, which initially started as a pay-per-call advertising service for local businesses, recently invested $10 million developing a platform that small businesses can use to effectively manage local business listings. Yext’s PowerListings is now the platform driving over 35,000 local listings and the company has developed relationships with 36 different sites that host local business [...]
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Dominate Multinational Google Place Listings With Microformats & Display Ads
Dec 6th
By dominating the SERP real estate for related search terms, taking around 65% or more of all search traffic (depending on the flavour of Places functionality) for top level terms, Google Places performance is critical for travel accommodation businesses across the globe.
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Latitude Express Utilise Social Bookmarking to Boost Natural Listings – MarketWatch (press release)
Dec 5th
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Latitude Express Utilise Social Bookmarking to Boost Natural Listings
MarketWatch (press release) Latitude Express introduced their digital mascot in September this year to entertainingly explain SEO in layman's terms through a collection of informative blogs and videos, which has proved to dramatically improve the agency's engagement with clients. … |
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How Users Search For Local Businesses + 5 Tips To Optimize Local Listings
Oct 24th
In a recent staff meeting, it emerged that the most regular question our customer support agents get asked by our customers* is: “When we track our local search rankings, how much should we focus on search terms that include a local term (e.g. town name, ZIP code) vs. generic keywords without the…
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Google Places Now Updates Listings First, Asks Businesses Later
Oct 13th
Google just launched a more streamlined process for updating small business listings on Google Places, but it asks forgiveness instead of permission. Instead of requiring owners to manually update the listing, Google Places will now automatically update with user-submitted info or updates to another source on the Web that Google identifies. When a listing is updated, the system will notify the business owner of the change by email.
Google touts this as a convenience and points out that a business owner can quickly log in from the email and correct any erroneous changes. But this is sort of a strange update. Google Places listings are an important way for businesses to be discovered from Web search, and business owners might not be partial to those listings updating without their expressed consent. Then again, some might feel that maintaining Google listings is a hassle, and this update will save them the effort.
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This update indicates that Google needs tighter control over the information in its business listings. It’s hard to spin an update that takes control out of business owners’ hands as a good thing. Local businesses are an important strategic part of Google’s expansions into local and mobile revenue streams, and imposing automatic updates on those listings is an aggressive play.
It’s worth noting that this a part of Google’s business for which the company is under scrutiny for anti-competitive practices. Yelp, Google’s most celebrated competitor in local business listings, testified in Washington against Google for, among other things scraping Yelp’s content for its own purposes and later pushing Yelp results out of the way.
Google is pushing hard to control this market. It bought Zagat to get better content about local businesses, it bought Dealmap to push against Groupon on local deals, and it’s using Android to close the loop and get businesses on board with Google Wallet NFC payments.
What’s the rush? Well, Google rules search for now, but Apple just shipped a record number of iPhones loaded with an artificially intelligent search assistant called Siri. Location – and thus mobile devices – is an essential part of connecting consumers to local businesses, and Siri is the most convenient way to make that connection on the new iPhone. Guess what: Siri uses Yelp.
Are you a business owner? What do you think of the change? Does it make your life easier, or would you prefer to have control?
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Business Listings: What’s the Crowd Appeal?
Oct 7th
Although crowdsourcing local business content online can be a quick and perceived easy task for some local search platforms and businesses, particularly in vertical categories like restaurants and travel, there are many reasons why it should not b…
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A New Google Rich Snippet For Listings
Aug 26th
It appears Google is testing a new type of rich snippet for displaying listings. I reported this at the Search Engine Roundtable and included a few pictures from various sources. The rich snippet, which is not yet confirmed by Google, seems to show real estate listings as well as possibly…
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Google: AdWords Express Is NOT Sabotaging Organic Listings [Update]
Aug 20th
Google’s recently released local advertisement tool, AdWords Express, experienced a technical issue that made it seem users were having their ad displayed instead of their organic listing on blended search results.
Background of Google AdWords E…
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