Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Type in a generic search term for nearly any local service and you’re likely to see listings for national brands and retail chains. Local businesses have largely been pushed out of the first page of organic results for generic product/service keywords. Although Google displays a higher percentage of local search results for generic search terms than Bing or Yahoo, non-local, non-SMB websites still take up roughly 50% to 65% of the page-one space, according to a study by BrightLocal.

In order to get back on top, local merchants have to make a change in their SEO strategies. That means using more geo-modified terms, and it means relying more heavily on long-tail keywords — for example, “top hair stylist” or “wedding hair stylist” rather than just the generic “hair stylist.”

Here are six strategies for local merchants looking to compete for page-one real estate on Google, Yahoo, and Bing....

FA primer on location-based marketing on mobile.Location-based marketing blurs the line between the digital and physical world. To drive foot traffic and sales at bricks-and-mortar stores, marketers target shoppers on their devices.

To do that though, marketers need to effectively identify and utilize consumers' locations. New services are giving people a much better incentive to share where they are, while new technologies are emerging to make location-based marketing a more exact science. In a new report from BI Intelligence, we look at the three of the primary types of location-based marketing approaches: geofencing, geoconquesting, and geoaudiencing, each of which uses location somewhat differently. We also look at some the latest and most effective location-based apps that are giving consumers' good reason to share their location....