Virtual Strategy
Here's one more local business listing site aimed at helping brand marketers connect with consumers. Locality -- formerly known as Centzy -- announced it raised $4.3 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners, and general partner Jared Fliesler joined the company's board of directors. Locality will use the funds to build out its platform for local business services. The local search site claims that since launching publicly last year, traffic has grown more than 10 times, especially in small towns. About 75% of Locality's traffic comes from outside the country's top 10 cities.
Street Fight
Lenovo, a brand without a brick-and-mortar store, has stepped up hyperlocal marketing through search engine campaigns to draw more attention to the brand. The strategy includes relaunching Lenovo.com, and rolling it out in more than 70 countries -- complete with mobile marketing campaigns. Stephanie Miles tells us that while Lenovo is a global company, many retailers where its products are sold "don't have the capacity or the funding to develop their own mobile experiences." The local search strategy relies on more than 5,000 location-based mobile search pages targeted at shoppers in specific cities. Read the
article here.
BIA/Kelsey
Search marketers are buying more social local paid-search ads. The local search market will expand from $6.0 billion to $8.6 billion in the next five years. Mobile-local search will drive the uptick. Desktop search volume continues to rise as well, however -- largely a product of consumers adopting tablets and the use of category-specific sites like automotive and jobs.
Media Rating Council
The Media Rating Council (MRC) said Wednesday that it will lift its Viewable Impression Advisory by the end of Q1 2014 in an effort to identify and remove obstacles required to use the metric. The organization intends to have the viewability measurement standard complete before next year. MRC said the remaining issue involves reconciling the viewability measurements of different vendors, so it plans to launch a reconciliation project to audit and accredit vendors. A little off the beaten path of search, but important nonetheless.
Search Engine Journal
Google's Penguin algorithm can become very expensive to recover from, so it's important to avoid acquiring the wrong type of inbound link. Jayson DeMers provides a list of the types of links to avoid. Doing so will minimize the risk of being penalized by Google. Some of those include article directory links, link exchanges, and low-quality press releases. He also explains how to clean up the links. Read this article
here.
Web Pro News
Chris Crum has spotted a change in Bing Shopping. Microsoft alerted search marketers in August that it would discontinue the service, and it appears Microsoft has officially pulled the plug on the feature. Bing said it would launch a new product search feature that uses its index of tens of millions of products, along with machine learning, to show products on the main results page. He shows us what the change looks like.
Conductor
Search engine marketing firm Conductor launched Tuesday the marketing application programming interface (API) Searchlight. It relied on cloud-based management services technology from Mashery, an Intel company. The API provides insight into the search patterns of customers and performance of pages to profile-buying cycles. It also allows marketers to easily integrate technologies.
Search Engine Watch
Jay Taylor gives us three reasons why small and-medium-size businesses should invest more in their Web site. They tend to invest more in marketing to their Web site. Although SMBs need to point consumers from paid-search ads or social campaigns toward their Web site and landing pages, companies need to represent themselves professionally from the Web site. The Web site represents the brand, explains Taylor. Read the article
here.
ClickZ
Josh Bledsoe details three objectives designed to improve digital strategy and business goals -- such as lowering the cost per conversion -- and provides tips for each as well as a few numbers to get marketers thinking. Conversion optimization is an obvious investment for any marketing strategy. It's important to ensure that each page created for the Web site has a purpose, and double-check that search engine crawlers aren't wasting time indexing pages they shouldn't. Read the article
here.
Guardian
A piracy indexing site funded by Bitcoins, NewsNab+, has set up shop within the Tor network, which The Guardian describes in a previous article as a hangout for pedophiles, drug dealers and arms traders. The network allows file-sharing index sites to operate like search engines for piracy links. It is not indexed by search engines and cannot be accessed via the open Internet or Google. "It is designed to stop people including government agencies and corporations learning your location or tracking your browsing habits," writes Samuel Gibbs.