Last updated: 10/16/10

I am not here to reinvent the wheel- simply to aggregate the resources that I used to learn how to rank small businesses locally… and how to make that a profitable portion of your internet marketing business plan.

Local SEO and Lead Gen First Steps

• AdHustler.com’s Local Online Advertising Series | Solid, practical, executable information. Go here first. 
• The Wickedfire posts that got my started are nicely aggregated here.
• Shoemoney’s Local Affiliate Marketing white paper. | Advertisement for his tools aside, this white paper is actually very good at giving you a wireframe platform of ideas.
  • In non-pdf form check out: How To Make Money Setting Up Your Own Local Affiliate Program
• CDFNetwork’s 83 Proven Local Lead Gen Niches
  • Also, if you are serious about branching into Local Lead Generation for your business, I highly highly recommend Chad’s Local Lead Plan. 99% of all eBooks / forums are bullshit. This one is not.
• 9 Killer Tips for Location-based Marketing
• One Dead Simple Tactic for Better Rankings in Google Local | SEOMoz delivers. Always.
• Local SEO Case Study | by Aaron wall @ SEOBook.com
• Local Business SEO (Wickedfire.com)| Very long series of forum posts, recently-updated, includes loads of resources and advice on breaking in and getting ranked.

Tools

• Raven Internet Marketing Tools | This tool will automatically research your competitors by examining the keywords it extracts from your site and track it’s SERP ranking for each word, determining your competitors on the fly and displaying your positions side by side. (Free 30 Day Trial then $19/mo.)
• SEOBook Toolbar for Firefox | A bandwidth suck but amazing tool. Compare with:
• SEO Professional Toolbar for Firefox | A late-comer to the game of free tools, but it is free… and it tracks Yahoo backlinks. Why not give it a go?
• Alexa and Compete | Know your competition’s stats and traffic trends.
• Inbound Link Analyzer | Just make sure you compare these stats with
• Yahoo Link Search | Within Yahoo, you can search for inbound links by querying “link:http://www.sitename.com” and further distill these results by adding “-site:sitename.com” (which eliminates internal links).
  • “linkdomain:” This command finds all pages that link to any page within a domain.
  • Combining the “linkdomain:” and “link:” syntax command identifies what pages within the site that are being linked to. Ex: linkdomain:sitename.com -link:http://sitename.com -link:http://www.sitename.com -site:sitename.com
  • Remember to query with both ‘www’ and non-’www’ extensions. You’d be surprised what you’ll uncover if you (or your client) hasn’t enabled a 301.
• Domaintools | Spammy sites cluttering your 10-Pack? Look up who’s behind them. Then reverse engineer their methods or turn them into the webspam team.

Local Directories

• Google Local | Be listed or die.
• Yahoo Local | Don’t ignore- especially since Yahoo Mobile is the default browser on Blackberries.
• Best of the Web | The original directory. For above-the-board sites only. Nice backlink to have.
• DMOZ | Ditto on the above. Hard to get a backlink from, but awesome one to have in your quiver.
• Yelp | Questionable business ethics, but a must-have if you are an actual business of any kind.
• 4Square & Gowalla | One or both, doesn’t matter… 4Square has greater marketshare and brand recognition (as of this writing) and has been integrated with Bing Maps. It’s also been mentioned that Google is crawling Foursquare- but not Gowalla. If you ignore these check-in social networks you are leaving money on the table.
• Twibs | Twitter Business Directory

Tracking Leads and SEO Traffic

• Tracking Local Search Traffic with Analytics | Includes info on tracking with Google Maps- great little resource.
• Tracking Phone Calls in Local Lead Gen | Write-up and how-to post by Eric Nagel
• Google Analytics for Local SEO | This is a 7-part series. Disregard upsells, acquire monetizable info.