Archive for the ‘Local Marketing’ Category
Yelp Beats Google to Service Area based Rankings
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011Nearly a year ago Google added the ability to set a service area for local businesses in Google Places. At the time there was speculation as to how it might influence rankings and many local SEO’s quickly realized it had little to no influence at all. Except that if you opted to hide your address, because you were a home based business, it more or less kicked you right out of the rankings all together. That unfortunate side effect of hiding an address has been fixed since the roll out of the new blended oragnic-local results. But there still is no ranking benefits outside of the actual city your address is tied to.
Will Google one day get around to using service areas as a ranking factor for businesses serving say, a larger metropolitan area from one of the outskirt communities (a common occurrence)? Well it appears Yelp has recently done just that.
“…business owners in service-based categories who have unlocked their Yelp page will be able to add up to 5 major cities to their areas of service via our Business Owner Tools!
The best part? Once a business updates its areas of service, it becomes searchable in those cities on Yelp.“
This feature has been added only for specific categories of businesses, these that tend to be service based businesses that travel to customers locations.
Now that Yelp has upped the ante, how long till Google follows suit?
New Blog – Hello world!
Monday, December 28th, 2009It’s about time! I’ve been blogging over on my personal domain, stever.ca, but figured I should be running a blog here on this site. So only days before 2009 ends I decided to throw one up. 
I’ll be keeping this blog focused towards local internet marketing. My random ramblings about general internet stuff, web design and other random stuff will continue over on my personal blog. Including my super cool Honda cb750 cafe racer motorcycle.
Here I’ll write about Google Maps, organic search, and just about anything pertaining to local web marketing, in particular for small brick and mortar local businesses.
