I’ve just come off the road from numerous meetings with national and regional advertisers. One common area of interest among advertisers seems to be: how to best communicate to the online audience.

Should a company focus on building their messaging around their brand image, or on driving direct response via their Web site and online media? At the risk of annoying my SEO department, who are happy to pack a keyword into every section of a Web site (no doubt necessary), the answer is both. Branding and direct response messaging can co-exist online, as both are vitally important to short- and long-term sales creation.
(more…)

Google just announced that you can now embed local business videos into your business listing on Google Maps.  These videos will be displayed under the “Photos and Videos” tab. Until now it seemed as though Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) had been the only ones looking to harness this potential.  However, this recent partnership may give IYP publishers a run for their money, and hopefully make it more cost effective for businesses to implement this on IYP’s and local search sites such as SuperPages.com, YellowPages.com, or Citysearch.com.

Click here for full article

Last November, Google opened up Google Maps to community editing, allowing registered users to move around the pushpins where businesses were located in attempts to improve the accuracy of local business information. Yesterday, Google took this a step further and is now letting registered users update/change location information (address, city, phone number…etc.), as well as ADD new business information. Do you have to be the business owner to do this? Google says no. ANYONE can edit this information. But you have to be registered, and since everything is recorded, malicious competitors (who want to switch phone numbers or listings) will be caught if anything is altered under a false pretense. Google also announced that once a business is “claimed” by a business owner, it cannot be edited.

Click here for the full article

Ever wonder why Emily’s (the file clerk in the basement) phone rings off the hook? Is she really that popular? Upon closer examination, you realize her direct phone line is listed as the main sales line for your company on a number of local search sites. So in effect, those are your local search sales leads going out the window.
The culprit: incorrect listing information for your company has found its way into the local listing database of some data provider and is now spreading like wildfire from local search site to local search site. (more…)

Before we continue our review of local search strategies and tactics, I would like to take a moment to comment on a new program by Google that I found interesting over the past week.

Google Local Business Referrals

Google is placing a high value on sourcing accurate local business information by making its first move into organizing a local data collection and potential future sales force. Google’s Local Business Referrals (LBR) program provides registered “business referral representatives” with up to $10 for each listing approved by Google and verified by the local business via online form or postcard. (more…)