Since local spam is a hot topic around the Local SEO Sphere these days, I figured it would be fun to look at brands that are violating the Google My Business guidelines for representing your business and getting away with it. Because I mean, what’s the point of guidelines if large advertisers and brands can get away with obvious and blatant violations, amirite? So, speaking of obvious and blatant, let’s get this one out of the way up front. It’s good…
Whoa, Dan! How did you get a time machine back to the late 90’s to show us this rockin’ GeoCities site (personally, I was an AngelFire guy)? Well, easily surprised reader you are wrong! This is slammin’ retro site is so totally tubular that it ranks on the first page of Google searches for a query bucket that has 250k monthly searches! Wait, what? Yup, you read that right. This site was previously ranking 3rd/4th for…
So I do Google Opinion Rewards to earn Google Play Credits to play Final Fantasy Record Keeper. If you grew up gaming in the late 80’s early 90’s I highly recommend checking it out. Anyway, I was going through a survey this morning and after the first question of “What Types of Searches” have I done this week, it got really really interesting. Google Opinion Rewards are normally anything but interesting, the last one asked me if I had visited…
Woke up this morning to see that Dixon Jones, who runs marketing for Majestic, will be transitioning out of his role and into retirement. Majestic has long proven itself to be a top shelf (maybe even THE top shelf, but more on that later) link index tool and his contributions to the industry have been equally top tier. I’m both sad and elated at the news. Dixon has been a huge help in getting the Local SEO Ranking Factors off the…
Do I have your attention now? Sweet! I’m happy to announce that we just updated our Local SEO Ranking Factors! This year we really expanded the data set of the study. We looked at the 150 largest metro’s in the US and doubled the number of keywords we were looking at. This means the data set from this year is significantly bigger than last year. We also added a large number of factors this year. While last year we used…
Then come check out my session at SMX East 😉 On Tuesday, I’m going to go over what the data truly says about ranking in local pack results. Do you need to focus on link building? Is there even such a thing as a “#1” ranking factor? What value do traditional local signals, like citations, still have the rapidly changing world of local search. I will also be teasing some data from the unreleased 2017 Local SEO Ranking Factors, so…
This is a screenshot for the search term “vegan food.” I have put red boxes around the distance from search aka proximity of each of the three results in the local pack for that search term. These businesses are in the least proximate order. And the reason why is pretty simple, proximity isn’t as important as relevance/searcher intent when it comes to local searches. I used arrows to highlight the category of each of these businesses. The first two are…
Voice search is all the rage. To hear it from a marketing or search technologist, the voice search revolution is on us. Lowering barriers to access and radically changing the way we interact with devices. There is only one problem, take it away Dr. Malcolm I hate to break it to everyone, but voice search is not good. Like straight up not good in terms of being able to consistently provide answers to search queries in ways that are sensical…
I mean, just look at this ad I got trying to help me cash in on government solar credits: I’ve been looking into getting a solar hookup for our house for a while, great targeting Facebook! But wait, I did a double take when I saw the ad because: How odd to see a promoted post from a person, so I decided to investigate. Check out ‘Beth Reese’ What a committed solar activist! So if you look at the right-hand…
Local SEO Guide is happy to announce Locadium, a Google My Business reporting system built from the ground up for multi-location brands and agencies. According to a recent poll of Local SEO Sherpa’s, 78% of them have problems with Google changing information on GMB profiles. Now I know you are saying: “Dan, there is the ability to see changes suggested by Google in the GMB dashboard”. Thanks, random Internet person! You can see Google suggested updates in the various GMB…