When your customer base is small, you can be exceptionally responsive to the needs and desires of those customers. But what about when the goal is active growth? Your website acts as a natural extension of word of mouth (not a substitute for it). [Read Full Article]

In February, Darren Shaw of Whitespark presented the much anticipated Local Search Ranking Factors (2017) at a Local U workshop. Let us break it down into the executive summary you need to run it up the chain. [Read Full Article]

You're a creative. Musician, writer, visual artist or actor who's trying to break out in your industry. You have passion, a stack of business cards, an awesome website and a manager, but there's one more thing you should consider adding to your list of many talents: basic SEO knowledge. [Read Full Article]

Outside of Yelp (whose review snippets were removed from Google) and native Google+ Local reviews, here are the top third-party sources for dentist reviews in the US. [Read Full Article]

Local online exposure is now imperative if you plan to grow your business. It’s also getting more competitive. To get a grasp on where to start, here are the five major components to focus on. [Read Full Article]

Common Issue: Your Google Places listing was verified by an ex-employee or SEO company and you would like to get control back from them but you've been unable to, perhaps because of a lost password or falling out. [Read Full Article]

Looking back on the past year, the importance of maintaining your business in the digital realm is readily apparent. Gone are the days of thumbing through a phone book, reorganizing your Rolodex, and coupon-clipping apart your local paper. Real-time information, mapping, and customer reviews are ubiquitous in local search. A wealth of information is at the click of a button - at least it’s expected to be -- if you’re a consumer. Consider some of this data. According to a Cisco update, global mobile data traffic grew an overall 81 percent last year. To help put that in perspective, consider that mobile data traffic this year was almost 18 times the size of the entire global internet data traffic in 2000, and more than 500 million new mobile device connections were accounted for in the last year. The growth is exponential. At the end of 2013, a Busin... [Read Full Article]

If you occasionally suffer from Local SEO fatigue, join the club. It's a fun and ever-changing space, but watch out for speed bumps. Here's a list of some of the most annoying and/or downright scary (but at the same time humorous) things about local search marketing. [Read Full Article]