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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Loci 2012 – Anita Campbell

Small business expert & ex-patriate of corporate America, Anita Campbell serves as CEO of Anita Campbell Associates Ltd, a woman-owned consulting firm helping companies and organizations reach the small business market. As Publisher of several online media properties and syndicated content, Anita reaches over 1,000,000 small business owners and entrepreneurs annually.  She is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Small Business Trends. She also hosts Small Business Trends Radio, where she interviews other small business experts, publishes Selling to Small Businesses and is a key mover and shaker in the annual  SMBinfluencer Awards.

She has a very clear bead on the SMB POV.

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Here are 2 interesting gems from over at BizSugar that struck a chord with me for mainstream small businesses that need to get customers locally:

The Impact of Local Celebrity in Local Marketing:  (This one is about getting a local celebrity to review your product, since the value of user reviews has become somewhat less credible these days with astroturfing and paid review services. As media reports surfaced in the 2nd half of this year about Amazon deleting reviews because of paid review services, the value of user reviews started to decline fast in the public’s mind. User-review credibility is  not completely gone but user reviews are less likely to be believed after this year, I think.)

The Local Marketing Triangulation Strategy that Gets Results: (I like this one for the idea of “localized content” to make your marketing as relevant as possible to the local community.  This is an underutilized strategy, but one that most small businesses could adapt.)

And then there’s this one which merely reinforces the utterly confusing nature of Google’s entire local strategy these days: Google: Delete Your Google+ Local Page If…
If you read that article quickly you might assume it means every business without a local presence should delete its Google+ Page — which would be a disaster.  I think Google needs to make things easier for small businesses, and the search community needs to come out with clear and unambiguous step by step instructions — there’s been so much change in Google’s local strategy and too little clarity.