I recall a presentation by Ted Paff, Founder of Customer Lobby, where he asked an audience of HVAC business owners, “How many of you love Uber?” Pretty much every hand went up. Then he asked “How many of you would rather use a yellow cab?” Pretty much every hand went down. “Congratulations!” he yelled, “because […]
I have seen a lot of chatter online lately between SEOs about how the new U.S. tax laws will affect them. I have been having an ongoing conversation about this issue with our long-time accountant, Ed Borine, and I figured it might be of interest to share what he has been advising us. It’s all […]
Running Amok at the Google Plex In November I met up with Google Top Contributors from North and South America for Google’s TC Summit. Here’s ⅗ of my face with some really fantastic humans who like to help others with Google’s stuff. A little background: Google’s Top Contributor program is basically a group of hand-picked […]
(Editor’s note: This post has received some criticism that I “gamed” the outcome by using the unusual case of a two businesses with the same address and phone number. While I agree that the majority of businesses won’t have this issue, there still is a huge swath of them that do. We deal with them every […]
Many sites use bot blockers like Distil Networks to stop scrapers from stealing their data. The challenge for SEOs is that sometimes these bot blockers are not set correctly and can prevent good bots like Googlebot and BingBot from getting to the content, which can cause serious SEO issues. Distil is pretty adamant that their […]
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 […]
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 […]
In case you had any doubts that CTR has a direct impact on Google rankings, feast your eyes on this Search Analytics data:
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, […]
Now that Apple has switched from Bing to Google for SIRI’s web search results, I have been trying to wrap my head around the implications for our clients. In keeping with Apple’s secretive ways, it’s not exactly clear there are any. Here’s a voice query result for “outdoor seat cushions”: The results are typically […]
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 […]
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 […]
I was having an interesting conversation with an agency client this weekend about why mobile traffic had been flat/down to their retailer clients’ location pages since the end of 2015. My initial response touched on part of the answer: “I suspect they are experiencing a change in traffic to their site as a result of […]
Pretty crazy. Not much to say other than thank you to all of our fantastic clients and to our fantastic team – Dan, Ashley, Jessica, Amber, Steven, Christa & Jill – who collectively have made the past few years quite an experience. We’re honored to be included with all these amazing businesses. There are a […]
That’s what a retailer client asked me a few days ago. It was odd because before last week, their home page traffic was killing it. But a quick look at the home page traffic in Google Search Analytics looked like a text-book case of “softness”: Besides the double-black-diamond slope, what was really troubling about this […]
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 […]
UPDATE: I AM AN IDIOT. APPARENTLY TWITTER FIXED THE PERIOD PROBLEM LAST YEAR AND I DID NOT GET THE MEMO. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GROW UP WITH UHF. Wherever you see “period”, please substitute threaded conversations with multiple people, bots, nazis, lists, and anything else you want to complain about Growing up, we […]
via GIPHY I just discovered this morning that an e-commerce client had changed its privacy policy URL (thanks SEORadar!) but had not bothered to redirect their old privacy policy URL to the new one. I guarantee my in-house client had no idea this change was happening (we do have a lot in common). I imagine […]
Last night I attended a gathering of mostly in-house SEOs in San Francisco, many from brands we all know. One of the goals of the event was to provide an open forum to share some of our current SEO challenges to get feedback from each other. It was amazing, or perhaps not, how remarkably consistent […]
One of the more common questions we have received since launching Locadium, our new GMB monitoring service, is how it differs from Yext and similar services that monitor NAP consistency. The answer is pretty simple – Locadium monitors GMB changes and alerts you when it detects a change or a dupe listing that has been […]
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 […]
Ben Thompson’s post this week on Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover touched a nerve. Thompson’s thesis is that companies that are monopolies tend to face considerable problems once the monopoly ends. He boils these problems down to: Nature “The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad […]
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 […]
It’s a bit awkward to write about a company we have an investment in without sounding like a total salesman, but I am going to give it a try. Even if we had no interest in SEO Radar (full disclosure: we do), I’d like to think I’d still be writing this. Cause it saved my […]
We are working with a mattress retailer who would like to show up higher for mattress brand queries like “Tempurpedic mattress”. So I thought it might be helpful to see what types of pages currently rank for that query. Here are the top ranking URLs. Check out result #4: Here’s a link to the query […]
Couldn’t resist a little hashtag-jacking… This is one of those posts where I #humblebrag about having been too busy to post much this year. The demand for our services and the complexity of some of our engagements ha…er…must…stop…the…marketingspeak… What I’m really trying to say is two awesome people have joined the Local SEO Guide team […]
So Rand is “stepping away” from Moz… When I started trying to figure out SEO around 2003, I had no idea what I was doing. As I recall I stumbled onto a few voices that helped me start to make sense of things – some of the more memorable were Andy Beard, Aaron Wall and Rand Fishkin. Each […]
I was just looking for info on a local restaurant to hit in Pleasanton tonight and noticed this obnoxious message from Wix: Even if Tri Valley Bistro has a free Wix site, is this any way to treat a customer? Do you think Tri Valley Bistro’s customers either would be interested in creating a Wix […]
The news that IAC’s Home Advisor is merging with Angie’s List to form a new public company is both surprising and not all that surprising. In InsiderPages’ early days, we considered Angie’s List one of our top competitors but we were always baffled why anyone would pay to get access to their members’ reviews, particularly […]