Is There Such a Thing as ‘Too Local’ in SEO?

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All things in moderation, including your geo-targeting. There are some instances where every single business should embrace local strategies, but if you go too local, you might miss out on some great clients and projects…

How Hyperlocal Tech Is Reviving Brick-and-Mortar Sales

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Retailers have a plethora of customer data and technologies at their disposal which can be effectively combined to personalize the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. By tapping into the rich analytics and capabilities of these cross-functional offerings, they can be well positioned to regain market share..

As SMB Investment in Digital Increases, So Does the Need for Better Performance Metrics

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With all the noise in local marketing, how can SMBs reliably answer the ROI question? How can they increase the signal-to-noise ratio in their marketing metrics even as they increase their investments in online marketing? A good place to start is by focusing on one metric, above all else: Lead Acquisition Cost…

Survey Highlights the Challenges of Marketing to Smaller SMBs

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The evidence suggests that marketers who can tell a simple and compelling story tying ROI to hard evidence will stand the greatest chance of winning SMB confidence. The trick is doing this at sufficient scale to be profitable…

The Importance of Responsive Web Design for SMB Sites

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It’s critical for local businesses to have a beautiful site that doesn’t just scale down to low resolutions, but also looks great on all devices — from a 27” desktop display to a “smart” refrigerator, and every tablet, phablet, and phone in between. That’s why for the majority of local businesses, responsive design is the best mobile strategy…

4 Reasons Location-Based Services Will Become a Thing Again in 2015

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With improved location accuracy, improved POI data, and efficient background location processing, developers will be equipped to build apps that can truly extract relevant real-world user experience. Location will mean more than a wandering blue dot; it will mean the places we’ve traveled, the relationships we’ve developed, and the resolutions we’ve kept…

The Uberification of the “1099 Economy”

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A new buzzword has emerged in the tech lexicon: “1099 economy.” Referring to the growing ranks of single proprietors and contractors, this trend is part of the massive transformation taking place in the local services economy…

Do We Really Want to Live in an Uber-fied World?

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Given Uber’s recent missteps, we, as an industry, need to take a long look in the mirror. Founders really need to think hard about the culture they are creating, and the potential uses and misuses of the data they are generating and collecting…

Solving the Dirty Data Problem in Location-Based Advertising

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Our work with leading ad tech companies has shown that 80% of the location data appended to ad inventories is inaccurate. The inaccuracies come from antiquated IP positioning providers who trace ad requests through the Internet to find the hub access point and assign the hub’s latitude and longitude to the IP addresses…

Significantly Insignificant: The ‘Absurd Precision’ of Location Marketing

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The industry has evolved from targeting zip codes, to neighborhoods, to 100-meter tiles, and now we see claims of targeting within four feet of a mobile user. Ever-increasing degrees of precision are appealing to marketers — but mobile campaign managers should further explore the realities (and complexities) of location data…

Finding the ROI in Retail In-Store Analytics

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Interior analytics is still an emerging discipline, and defining the hard ROI of specific solutions can be tough. Here are a few ways that retailers can use in-store data to understand their customers and better facilitate the shopping experience…

Hyperlocal Execs’ 2015 Predictions (Part Two): Cir.cl, xAd, Yodle, VendAsta

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As we have for the past three years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2015. We ran the first installment of their responses yesterday — now here are the rest…

Hyperlocal Execs’ 2015 Predictions (Part One): Moz, Foursquare, Placed

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As we have for the past three years, Street Fight recently asked a number of hyperlocal luminaries to weigh in with their predictions for where local is headed in 2015. We’ll be running their responses in two installments, today and tomorrow…

The Year in Local Search: A Timeline of the Top Stories of 2014

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The holiday season is a time to contemplate the year gone by, so we’ve rounded up some of the top news stories in local search over the past 12 months. It was a year marked by Foursquare’s rebranding, Google’s new SMB interface, and upgrades from the likes of Apple, Yelp, Yahoo, YP, MapQuest, and Bing…

Lessons Learned From the Call Analytics Trenches

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It may be a long time before the true value of call analytics data is fully realized, but I’ve been recording the digital marketing revolution one (often uncertain) hello at a time…

Social Studies: Are ‘Follows’ and ‘Likes’ Right for All SMBs?

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Social media simply isn’t right for the vast majority of local businesses. Even with its extremely low out-of-pocket-costs, social marketing takes a tremendous amount of ongoing effort and diligence to have any hope of generating what a local business would consider to be results…

Handicapping 2015’s Mobile-Local Happenings: 5 Areas to Watch

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At the crest of a new year, several trends signal what we can expect to see in mobile and location-based media. Next year we’ll see the mobile ad market continue to grow, we’ll see local continue to be Uber-fied, and we’ll see mobile social sharing go local as well…

Communicating With Mobile Consumers in the ‘Experience Age’

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In 2015, the customer experience will be more critical than ever before, as consumers’ attention spans continue to shorten. Brands must engage consumers in the most personal, relevant and timely fashion to grab their attention…

Getting Down to the Basics of Local Search Marketing

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Small businesses can sometimes find out at their peril just how important it is to take control of how they are represented online. As professionals, we want to make sure businesses understand that our expertise has value, but not at the expense of scaring or confusing them. Instead we would do well to promote the idea that local search is accessible to all…

In the Golden Age of News Media

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We are in one of those eras in business where chaos, disruption and innovation are the norm. The legacy news media business as we have known it is completely and utterly broken as an operable model at a time when folks seek more information than ever before…