Hi Everyone. Rich Owings had sold the company to Peter Frisa back in March 2025, and Rich is officially retired. The new name of the company is now Local Edge Marketing. Please check back as the site will be going through updates and changes. Thank you.
My backstory, or how I went from GPS to SEO
Sixteen years ago, I had moved from Western NC to Northern California, and was spending my spare time exploring massive (50,000 acre) tracts of private land that I was being allowed to mountain bike on. There was a maze-like network of logging roads that were often overgrown or blocked by landslides, so in order to figure out which ones connected, I used aerial photos and started mapping my exploits with GPS. [Read more…]
The importance of defensible traffic
Think that chart above is close to the ideal? Look how much of the traffic is coming from Google. Great, huh? You couldn’t be more wrong… [Read more…]
Three reasons why business owners should attend WordCamp Asheville
WordCamp Asheville is May 31 and June 1, and here are three reasons why you, the local small business owner, should attend:
1. If your website uses WordPress, you can learn how to manage much of it yourself, without having to pay anyone to do routine tasks; the beginners track is ideal for this. And if you don’t have a website, the May 30 pre-camp will help you get one up and running by the end of the day.
2. It’s on the weekend, so many business owners can attend without having to miss work.
3. WordCamp Asheville is dirt cheap — 40 bucks gets you two days worth of detailed knowledge, lunches and a t-shirt to boot!
Register now. Tickets are going fast and I’m expecting it to sell out.
4 reasons to have a well developed Google business page
Here are four reasons to have a well-developed Google business page. And when I say well developed, I mean fill in as much information as possible, upload photos, add social links, etc. [Read more…]
3 things to know about Google carousel results
A few months ago, we started seeing a different type of local search results from Google, featuring a carousel with images (as shown above). Here are three things you need to know about these new search results: [Read more…]
What I’ll need from you
If you sign up for my SEO or Local SEO services, I’m going to ask you for a few things:
What are citations and why are they important to local businesses?
No, we’re not talking about parking tickets! Citations are listings of your business on various directories and sites around the Web. They may or may not include a link to your website. Some prime examples are YellowPages (yp.com), Yelp.com, Angies List, etc. [Read more…]
Tech tips: Use a password manager
Tech tips is planned as a regular series, to help small business owners make more efficient use of technology.
Barely a week goes by without news of a major password breach exposing millions of user names and passwords, with the passwords sometimes posted to the Internet! If you use the same password over and over, or even a variation of it, you’re playing Russian roulette. The only question is when, not if, you’ll be compromised. [Read more…]
NAP – The most important part of local search
Name, address, phone number (NAP) – Pretty hard to mess up, right? You’d be surprised. [Read more…]