Posts by Mary Bowling

Here is the January 2013 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

• Comscore tells us that the 2 smartphone manufacturers set to dominate the market are Samsung (running Android) , with 26% of mobile subscribers, and Apple (with its own iOS6 operating system with 18%. So far, the Windows phones are a bust in the US, which is really bad news for MSN and Bing as more and more searches move on to mobile devices.

• TomTom replaces Google Local Search results with its own TomTom Places Not only is TomTom a data provider to Apple Maps, it also offers a navigat...

Here is the December 2012 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

• It's a no brainer that mobile devices will play a huge roll in shopping this holiday season. Smart phones and tablets will be blazing with mobile search, mobile advertising, coupons and deals, product and price comparisons and checks for nearby product availability. If you or your retail clients arenít onboard with a mobile and tablet friendly website by now, youíre going to feel the pain this Christmas.

• Yelp ditches Google Maps in favor of Apple Maps as part of it...

By now, everyone in the Search world has heard about Apple Maps or experienced it for themselves. Much of what is being said about it isn't very flattering, but that doesn't really matter.

Google makes a habit of releasing products that are far from perfect-sometimes so far from perfect that near-crippling pains mask the vision of what the product can become. Just look at Google +Local for Business. Five months after its debut it's still so mired in extremely ugly customer service issues that Google has barely been able to move forward with the planned new features on the front end.

Sometimes, this is done because a first step must be taken before even a fuzzy picture of where...

Here is the November 2012 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

• A survey entitled How Long Does Local Search Visibility Take? rounds up the opinions of a sampling of Local SEO's, thanks to Phil Rozek. You'll get some great tips from people with a lot of experience in the trenches.
• Locu expand its offerings beyond the restaurant space to help retailers better push their product and pricing information out across the web...

Here is the October 2012 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

• Pew tells us that 45% of US adults now own smartphones and that 53% of all phone subscribers have smartphones. If you're still wondering if you need a mobile Web site, you're already losing business because you don't.

• Groupon debuts a payment system to make it easier for deal purchasers to pay via Apple's mobile devices.It also gives merchants a bit of a break on transaction fees for their Groupon offerings. I can't imagine that discount has much of an impact, though, wh...

The Monster That Ate the NAP

Quite often, Local SEOs are handed a bloody mess to clean up. It's not unusual to find a mess within a mess, a mess that has expanded across the Local universe at warp speed and/or a mess that has devoured the business' real NAP and spit out multiple imposters to take its place. None of these situations bodes well for the SEO who has not adequately researched a business' NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) consistency before taking on a new client.

Real Life Case

I'm currently trying to help an outfit that has used 5 different bu...

Here is the September 2012 installment of 'What's New in Local Search'. It's been another busy month so I won't waste your time and am just going to dive right in.

• A study finds that Yellowpages.com can deliver calls to businesses at a lower overall cost than Google AdWords does. The study was commissioned by YellowPages.com. That's great if they can do it and prove it without using call tracking numbers, but...

• Google buys Wildfire, a platform that helps "brands run and ...