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Austin Internet Marketing Meetup Notes from 7/2/08

For the past couple of months I’ve been attending the Austin Internet Marketing Meetup, organized by Laura & Adam Alter, (who have a ton of experience and do a great job hosting). Once a month, professionals and n00bs alike gather to talk shop, watch presentations, and network. If you’re a small business owner interested in learning more or are involved with Internet marketing as part of your job, I’d definitely recommend joining. It’s very low-key and everybody is there to learn and have fun.

Anyhow, this month’s topic was local SEO. I won’t rehash Laura’s stellar presentation (which you can access online at Slideshare Laura's blog), but there were a couple of themes that emerged:

Local search is the future

As the web and mobile devices become more context-aware, the value of local SEO rises. The more geographic information the search engines have, the better they can gauge user intent, thus delivering hyper-local and specific results.

Local search is incomplete

A lot of effort and resources are being put into local search by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like. However, they are all rapidly changing how they deliver and organize local results (prime example: the Google 10-pack). In many cases, they are beholden to third-party information providers such as list brokers, mapping companies, and review sites.

Info oligopoly

A small number of players distribute a disproportionally large percentage of small business listings. InfoUSA, Superpages, Axciom, and a few others supply a myriad of affiliates with business information. Be sure to get listed with a number of these and let the profile information trickle down to the smaller sites.

Reviews matter

While it is unclear exactly how much reviews matter, the point is that they do matter and shouldn’t be ignored. Some great tips for encouraging reviews were thrown out by group members. Another reason to sign-up!

Citations + links + reviews

Citation is an additional criteria in local SEO due to the difficulty small businesses face in acquiring natural links. While getting inbound links is still crucial to the success of a site, Google acknowledges that it is unlikely that your local plumber has dozens of folks linking to his one-page website. As another method of gathering cues that the business is local, Google looks for online references to that business. The key point is that it doesn’t have to contain a hyperlink to have some weight. David Mihm has a killer post on the topic.

There was plenty more discussed, plus sandwiches, what else could you ask for? Thanks again to Laura and Adam for putting this together. I’ll see you all there next again next month.

Related entries:

• Who’s linking to your site? 3 quick and simple ways to check
• Not just semantics: SEO-friendly page headings
• 15 internet marketing terms you should know

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