Over the past year there has been an absolute explosion in the demand for SEO, and for digital marketing services in general. Here’s what I think is going on. When COVID hit around March 2020, many businesses shut down their paid acquisition and suddenly realized how over-reliant/exposed they were on paid. Most businesses had either ignored or under-invested in SEO, so suddenly a lot of people got the SEO religion.
May’s Local Pack-o-Meter data is in and shows basically flat growth in all categories, except one. People Also Ask:
Two weeks ago I showed a case where a client site had broken some redirects, lost organic traffic shortly thereafter, then magically gained it back without fixing anything. The Tl:DR was that Google was getting pretty good at “fixing” tech SEO problems itself. But don’t toe-tag technical SEO just yet. At the end of last week, this client finally fixed the redirects, and look what happened.
Almost seven years ago today, LSG released its first-ever free tool, NAP Hunter. NAP Hunter was a free Chrome extension that “basically runs a set of standard N.A.P. queries through Google so you can quickly find various citations, their URLs and their Google position.”
And what I mean by that is Google has figured out how to automate a lot of the technical SEO things we used to take for granted as the domain of the technical SEO practitioner. That metaphor makes sense right? Zombies are kind of like automated fixes to technical SEO problems? Let’s just pretend it makes sense. I needed a catchy headline. I bring this up today because two weeks ago one of our clients decided to redirect all of…
BIA Advisory Services reached out to me a few weeks ago for some feedback on a study about how the big online news platforms were affecting the businesses of local news broadcasters. In their recently published study commissioned by NAB, “The Economic Impact of Big Tech Platforms on the Viability of Local Broadcast News”, BIA estimates that local broadcasters lose $1.9B annually by supplying their content to Google & Facebook. The study concluded that none of these platforms allows broadcasters to…
For all you Local Pack-o-Meter watchers, you may recall that last month we saw an increase in the presence of both Ads and Shopping Boxes and chalked that up to business optimism about the economy. I don’t want to say that April showers are raining on the parade, but we did see a slight pull-back in both these SERP features:
In fact, we never have been in Kansas, but Google seems to disagree. In November 2020, Google suddenly decided that Local SEO Guide, Inc, a business located in Pleasanton, CA, was actually located in Fawn Creek Township, KS.
Hey @methode any chance regex filters coming to the GSC Search Analytics report any time soon? — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) August 15, 2015 Well it finally happened. Google Search Console’s Search Performance report now supports regular expressions. So this is great because you can now do cool searches like:
This is the first in a monthly series of updated Local Pack-O-Meter data. Each month we will report on the changes we see in Google SERP features across ~60M U.S. search queries (graciously provided by Traject Data). Without further ado, here is the March 2021 report: As in February, most of the action in March took place in Local Packs, PAAs, Ads, & Shopping Boxes. These changes feel to me like they are leading indicators of a strengthening economy.