In the event you didn’t already know, Yahoo is for sale. Despite its revenue-growth challenges, which will be on display today as the company releases Q1 earnings, Yahoo remains one of the internet’s major “brands” and the third largest property after Google and Facebook. Yesterday was the deadline for interested potential buyers to submit their…
Voice search is really picking up steam. In 2015, 60% of people who use voice search apps like Siri started doing so within the last 12 months according to research by MindMeld. Yet, so much of voice search is still about reading search results. With a promising market showing such strong growth facing such weak…
Yesterday YP announced that they have integrated Better Business Bureau (BBB) ratings within business listings on yp.com and the YP App. The ratings will only be shown for businesses rated “A” or “A+” by the BBB, and users can narrow searches by these top-rated businesses. The move helps differentiate YP’s listings, bringing unique rating data to…
Buried in comScore’s recent and extensive U.S. Cross-Platform Future in Focus report is a chart that shows mobile usage is helping traditional newspaper publishers and magazines grow their digital audiences — sometimes significantly. This was something of a surprise to me. Conventional wisdom holds that most newspapers and magazines are dead men (people) walking. Yet…
While local searches commonly start with a search engine, it isn’t as large of a portion that some might expect. According to a recent report from YP, only 36% of consumers begin a local search with a search engine and the rest of consumers start on a fragmented array of choices. According to the report, there…
One of the interesting themes that has emerged in discussions and recent data is small business marketing self-management vs. outsourcing: DIY vs. DIFM. This has always been a topic in the industry but what has become clear more recently is that most of the market is DIY today. Data from an InfusionSoft survey of SMBs…
Last year, Google+ and Google My Business wrapped up their messy divorce. Even before the official announcement, Google+ was packing its boxes and moving out of Google properties, and in late 2015, these moves affected Google My Business. Local business information can now be found scattered across eight different Google properties, so here is a…
Yesterday LSA held another digital marketing bootcamp for local businesses in San Francisco. While there were some really interesting moments and discussions, the most interesting moment to me came during Bing’s presentation about mobile and mobile paid search. The Bing speaker asked the local businesses in the room for a show of hands of how…
Amazon.com has just introduced two additional voice-enabled hardware devices to complement its flagship Amazon Echo. With the expansion Amazon is more explicitly angling to be a player in the voice search/virtual assistant world as well as in the “smart home.” The device pictured above is the Echo Dot. Cheaper than Echo, it can do a…
Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages last week – a format for mobile webpages that reduces load time dramatically. In pages I tested, load times were less than a second and sometimes virtually instantaneous. This reflects a trend that might impact local businesses as much in the near future as mobile does today. We may soon…
