Two different approaches for using a popular event in local search strategy.

Philadelphia Restaurant Week is a popular event where participating restaurants offer a multi-course menu at a fixed price (much like other restaurant weeks around the world). Obviously this popular event is searched for locally (click on image to enlarge it): [...]

If  your business is focusing on providing online or offline services to a group of people living in specific part of your city or neighborhood, it is crucial to understand your local customers and “tailor” your  propositions to their unique needs/expectations. In this short post I’ll show how  small businesses can conduct some very basic local market research using freely available online tools . [...]

While researching car share clubs/programs in Philadelphia I noticed that both main  rivals on local market – Zipcar and Philly Car Share -have to work harder on their search engine strategies (if there are any..). I’m aware that both are very recognizable brands in Philly, nevertheless it should be in their interest to dominate search engine results. This post is all about some very basic SEO issues found on both sites. [...]

On Wednesday, Gregg Stewart from TMP Directional Marketing hosted a webcast called “Local Business Listings: Straight Talk With the Data Providers”. Participating were representatives from the three primary local data providers: [...]

A few weeks ago, Scot Wingo and Mark Vandegrift from  ChannelAdvsior presented an interesting webinar, called “How to counter the severe drop in traffic to GPS”.  Google Product Search, or GPS, is a shopping vertical still underestimated by many small and medium  ecommerce sites. It’s free and it can improve your product visibility in the search engines dramatically. By optimizing product feeds for a large ecommerce or a start-up,  I’ve  found that return on investment from Google Product is higher than the ROI from traditional SEO -because  it’s relatively easier and faster to rank for broad terms in the Google Products index than in the main Google’s web index. [...]

At the end of July I attended my first SEO meet up here in Philadelphia. The local SEO meetings have been run by V and Eppie for two years now. The July meet up was perfect for me because it was rather informal and without a specific topic – the perfect circumstances to blend in. Apart from the regular members I was quite surprised to see a few small business owners who are doing some DIY search marketing. [...]