“Obviously Google still controls a fair bit of the searcher’s pre-purchase mindshare, and they obviously want to retain that role,” writes Mike Blumenthal. “They are also fighting like crazy to be relevant in a world where 50% (and growing) of users’ total digital media time is spent in Apps.”
The mandate for brands is simple: manage data attributes as a crucial element of your location marketing strategy. But it’s not enough to create attributes. You need to constantly monitor the ever-changing nature of your business and your customers and be ready to act on your attributes as needed.
A great site with proper titles, tags and meta descriptions alongside good and relevant ad copy, and an intelligent approach to drive the maximum number of relevant clicks, is the best defense for the local business against the self-awareness of the RankBrain machine.
If you’re concerned about attracting customers through SEO content, you likely have mixed feelings about the recent enhancements made by Google to improve user experience. But here are three ways that Rich Answers can actually improve the quality of your web traffic.
Managing location data across hundreds and thousands of locations requires dedicated resources to scale the data and change it. Just as importantly, a business must treat location data as a competitive asset, organized and managed like inventory.
The reduction of local search real estate represents a huge challenge to marketers, who must work even harder to ensure their clients’ listings can compete in a shrinking field. It also suggests that a strategy combining organic and paid efforts is becoming ever more important.
The kinds of connections being made between travelers exploring a new city and local businesses are similar to those that people make when they are looking for goods and services at home. And Airbnb has made it clear over the past couple of years that the company wants to help travelers “live like a local.”
To many in the industry, the idea of making connections between marketing impressions and dollars spent seems like it could be the holy grail — giving proof positive to businesses that their marketing dollars are well-spent, and unlocking further budget.
Google continues to remind businesses that location data is the foundation of their brands. The question is whether your business is taking advantage of the opportunities Google is creating to use location data to build your brand.
Pingup, which describes itself as a “transaction platform for local services,” announced a new partnership with Yahoo this morning. The move expands Pingup’s publisher network, allowing users searching for local services on Yahoo to book an appointment on-demand through the Pingup platform.
A lot of local marketing companies are operating in the shadow of prior practices and companies that created a lot of distrust in the market, says Moz CEO Sarah Bird, who will be a speaker at Street Fight Summit West next week: “Part of the vision of online-to-offline attribution is to overcome that snake oil effect and build trust so you can point to data.”
Google’s counter-attack to the world of apps can be seen in several places. In fact most Google moves are to drive mobile behavior through its front door. This principle underpinned nearly every announcement at Google I/O.
Google has been refocusing its efforts to create a “better web” by not only increasing the importance of mobile-friendly websites and better mobile browsing experiences but by fundamentally redefining what the mobile web experience is altogether.
Lots of companies have taken a whack at the local home services space — from Angie’s List to a raft of startups. ClipCall, which came out of beta in January and will present t Street Fight summit West on June 7th, relies on customers using the company’s app to record video of a job they need doing and then sends that video out to nearby experts.
Merchants and marketers have to be findable and present useful information regardless of the searcher’s context. And that’s where the mechanics of local search marketing get messy. It feels like a great opportunity for tools and managed services that help break down those silos, and measure effectiveness across or between them.
Vistaprint, which provides print and digital marketing products for small business owners, announced today that it is launching a presence management tool which SMBs can use to update information about their business on over 100 local directories.
Knowing your hours of operation is one of the first searches that customers undertake as they navigate their options when they look for things to do and places to go. Being available to potential customers means managing your store hours as a dynamic and scale-able data asset.
A battle is being waged online, as independent merchants struggle for top billing in local search results. We asked six experts in the local search industry for their best strategies for “winning” local search. Here’s what they said.
With 2015 drawing to a close, it’s time again to look ahead to what we can expect in the hyperlocal space in 2016. We asked Street Fight staffers and weekly columnists what they thought would be the biggest story (or stories) in local in 2016. We ran the first installment yesterday — now here are the rest.
If SEO is about websites and marketing is about brand awareness, location management is about brick-and-mortar businesses and removing friction along the customer journey from online search to offline purchase. Ignore it at your peril.