March, 2010

Welcome to the first issue of our PinPoint newsletter, providing important insights, announcements and intelligence you can use. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook! Feel free to pass this on to clients or friends and we hope to see you at an industry event soon.

Our Guest Expert Says

We recently sat down with Jeff Beard, president of Localeze and asked him for his thoughts regarding current challenges with local search business listings.

Q: Jeff, what do you see as the most significant challenges for a local business that wants to be found online?

JB: I would have to say its fragmentation of information. Today, fragmentation is having an adverse impact on a business's online identity. It's the Wild West in the local search space.

Jeff Beard
President & CEO
at Localeze

Intel from the Localeze Database

With over 14 million local business listings in the Localeze Enhanced Business Registry, this authoritative database provides a wealth of statistical intelligence on the local business landscape. In this issue we focus on a few key areas to give you a snapshot of the local business market.

Localeze now has 522,618 listings, verified, enhanced and managed directly by businesses or their authorized representatives.

The top 6 categories within those listings are:

Tax Preparation
Insurance
Hotels, Motels & Lodging
Banks & Credit Unions
Automobile - Parts & Accessories
Pharmacies

Of Localeze's 522,618 business-managed listings 51% are National Brands and 49% are local businesses. This data indicates that both national brands and local businesses recognize the importance of local listings identity management.

Delta file changes
Our most recent Delta File reports that Localeze has added 266,196 listings (1.9% of the database), deleted 296,832 ( 2.1% of the database) and made changes to 1,386,406 existing listings (9.9% of the database). To learn more about the Delta file, click "Read More".

Tools, Technology and Products

The local search environment is constantly changing and we work hard with our local search platform partners to learn their best practices and provide visibility for business listings.

New to the Business Registration Manager
Listing validators have been added to enable business clients to check the status of listings and optimize them for increased visibility.

Business Clients: Watch your email inbox for your new monthly account dashboard
Whether you manage one location or thousands, it is important to keep your listings information accurate, enhanced, and frequently re-verified to optimize their local search platform visibility.

For help with technical issues, to provide feedback or to learn more about the applications please contact Technical Support at support@localeze.com

Best Practices for Maximum Performance

Localeze Best Practices Top Tips:

#1 Keep your business listings data current!
One of the key ways a local search platform partner can differentiate itself is by maintaining and presenting the most current data available. At Localeze we view timely and consistent loading of our data as an important best practice. To help you, we not only post the entire dataset monthly but we also offer data feeds on a weekly basis.

#2 Utilize our large collection of descriptive keywords
We encourage you to use all of the descriptive and informative keywords Localeze painstakingly collects about local business, including almost a half-million listings keyword enhanced and managed by major brands and local businesses themselves. This powerful information is organized into easy-to-present groupings including Products, Brands, Services, Specialties, Certifications, and much more.

For more information, please email searchpartnerfeedback@localeze.com