Here is this week’s roundup of the top news items related to local marketing and advertising, local media, technology, local commerce, consumer behavior and more.
Insight & Commentary
2018 Prediction: Map Listings Will Drive the Future of Local Search (February 12, 2018)
LSA Insider: “As proximity continues to narrow and the use of mobile search on the go rapidly rises, optimized map listings will play an even larger role in determining which businesses a consumer visits.
4 Reasons SMBs Think They Don’t Need SEO & How Marketers Should Respond (February 12, 2018)
LSA Insider: “It may seem like everyone understands the value of SEO by now. However, some small business owners are still unconvinced that their companies could benefit.”
Why Keywords Are Still So Very Important for SEO (February 11, 2018)
Search Engine Journal: “When properly leveraged, targeted SEO keywords should be used to inspire all page content in order to satisfy searcher intent.”
Strategy & Tactics
How Marketers Must Prepare for the Voice-Connected Consumer (February 13, 2018)
Street Fight: “2018 has barely kicked off and already it is apparent that voice technology will influence many of the year’s brands and customer experiences.”
How Brick-And-Mortar Brands Can Use Identity Resolution To Build Traffic (February 13, 2018)
GeoMarketing: “Identity resolution is the process of connecting people, data, and devices at any level of granularity and across any channel in order to garner insight from interactions with your brand.”
How to Create a Functional Content Strategy (February 14, 2018)
Search Engine Journal: “The great thing about content marketing is that it has a knack of working for you as long as everything you create is built with the user in mind.”
Stats & Studies
Study: Over Half of Consumers Prefer to Shop In-store to ‘Interact with Products’ (February 14, 2018)
LSA Insider: “Although an increasing number of consumers are beginning to purchase items online regularly, the in-store experience still has its benefits in the eyes of customers.”
78% of Video Content to be Screened Via Mobile Devices, Marketing Study Predicts (February 12, 2018)
Small Business Trends: “In the first-ever report of its kind from eMarketer, a global digital video forecast predicts 78.4 percent of viewers will use their mobile phones to watch digitally streamed content in 2018.”
Organic Search Sees Largest Growth Rate in Over 2 Years (February 9, 2018)
Search Engine Journal: “Total site visits driven by organic search were up 6% year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2017, which is said to be the strongest rate of growth since 2015.”
Industry News
Introducing LSA Market Landscape Reports: Location Intelligence (February 15, 2018)
LSA Insider: “The intention of these reports is to offer LSA members and the broader local ecosystem audience an overview of the market segment, profile the major vendors and offer questions and considerations for buyers.”
Facebook’s fight against spam and clickbait and what it means for advertisers (February 14, 2018)
Marketing Land: “Facebook has overhauled its News Feed algorithm in response to critics — including advertisers — questioning the quality of the environment.”
Digital Advertising Trends (February 15, 2018)
MediaPost: “The digital advertising industry shows few signs of slowing down, according to a paper by Brian Finnerty for MarinSoftware.”
Member News
Facebook to begin counting viewable-only impressions for Pages’ organic reach next week (February 9, 2018)
Marketing Land: “Facebook originally said it would switch to only counting viewable impressions in November 2016, but the new system took longer than expected to build.”
Google gets in on mobile ‘story craze’ with new AMP Stories format (February 13, 2018)
Search Engine Land: “New, visually rich mobile content format is designed to generate more engagement from users.”
