I would easily take this bet. Today, tomorrow and twice on Sunday. Now, I wasn’t at MozCon, and I didn’t see Dr. Pete’s preso. Just the Twitter stream. So even knowing how Twitter and games of telephone can distort someone’s thesis, I would STILL take this bet. And the reason why is simple, people always overlook local search and the deeper layers of the web. Now look, I don’t need to tell our regular readership that local search is the…
It was a pretty big deal to the world of local search when Google removed “Search Tools” from their search engine. It may seem like NBD, but everyone in local search knew that that was the best way to see what a local search looked like in a different location from your own. After that was eliminated, there was a mad dash to find out how to best spoof searches from other locations. While there were a few ways to do…
I was reading through the transcript of the excellent discussion of ranking factors by friends of the show Mike Blumenthal and Mary Bowling and figured now would be a good time to post the results of the survey I conducted about the trimodal local search algorithm. The question was pretty basic: When it comes to prominence, relevance, and proximity what do you think is the most important type of local search ranking factor? Well, the results are in, and at least…
Yesterday, Andrew and I gave our last presentation of the 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors. Since we are well on the way to presenting the 2017 Factors, we wanted to mix it up a bit. This presentation includes some recent research on proximity, “near me” factors and some research around locators and location pages (that I will publish in greater depth when I have a second). Keep calm and Local SEO on!
The 2017 Local Search Ranking Factors, a survey of Local SEO professionals on what they think it takes to rank in local search, was just released at MozCon Local/Local U. Andrew and I both love participating in the survey, as it’s a chance to see what the Local SEO hive mind is thinking. I highly recommend checking it out to see how people are thinking about local search rankings. Coming out of the 2017 version, the talk of the town…
If you have been paying attention to the countless pieces put out, you know that “near me” searches to find a local business are climbing rapidly. Just check out how Google Trends evaluates the search trend of the term “near me” for their search engine: Not only has “near me” risen as a whole, but specific near me searches have also skyrocketed: These searches are being heavily driven by mobile searches and the proliferation of using mobile devices, like smartphones, as a primary…
This is a tactic that I still see get trotted out from time to time, and it never really made any sense to me. To be clear, this is about adding city/state to on-domain content pieces like your <title> tags, URLs, H1, body copy etc. I wanted to take a moment, just sit right there, and tell you why you shouldn’t spam city/state in your on-domain content anywhere. It Doesn’t Correlate With Ranking According to the data driven research we…
The newest version of NAP Hunter Lite is now in the Chrome store. Chrome extensions should automatically update to the newest version, but in case you want to check it out you can here. In this version we added the following queries as defaults (you can unselect them, and any query, in the options menu for the extension): “Phone Number” -Name “Phone Number” -”Address” “Phone Number” -”Address” -Name “Address” -Name -”Phone Number” These should particularly help with pesky practice/practitioner citation…
There has been a big push by some in the local search space to have Local SEOs vigorously engage in reporting “spam” on Google Maps/Google My Business. The GMB profiles in question are ones like this: Per the screenshot, they are violating Google’s guidelines with their name and by breaking the no adult content rule and thus are eligible to be removed if reported. This is something that I find very interesting, for a few reasons: I don’t think it’s spam…
Looking for link issues can be a really time consuming and labor intensive problem. Thanks to Majestic, and their killer proprietary link metrics, it can be much easier to get a quick view into potential link issues. A client recently reached out and let us know that they thought they were having some issues with the recent Penguin roll out.This client has a very large site and have had some link issues in the past, so it’s definitely something that warranted investigation.…