It must be tempting for a brand to try to do the fun, edgy social media thing, like tease a new promotion or rebranding: For 60 pancakin’ years, we’ve been IHOP. Now, we’re flippin’ our name to IHOb. Find out what it could b on 6.11.18. #IHOb pic.twitter.com/evSxKV3QmT — IHOb (@IHOb) Dear Internet, we abbreciate […]
So for those of you don’t know, I have a 3-year-old daughter (her name is Harper). Here is her hand: When she was an even littler girl then she is now, she got pink eye. Bekah and I spent a bunch of time googling and calling around doctors offices and urgent cares trying to find […]
Local SEO Twitter was slightly a flutter yesterday after my bud John Mueller apparently mentioned you should avoid placing “Near Me” in titles if you want to rank for “Near Me” searches: Want to rank for ‘Near Me’ searches? Avoid placing ‘near me’ in your titles, make sure your address is on your site and […]
At college, after getting demolished in squash against, Mike, a hyper-competitive pre-med, he asked me what I planned to do for a career. I told him I wanted to get into television. He sneeringly countered how he was going to become a surgeon and extend his patients’ lives by many years. The implication being I […]
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 […]
The people at The BDX Summit were nice enough to invite me to Austin to speak to a group of homebuilders about SEO. While I gave my presentation, Graphic Recorder & Illustrator Katherine Torrini drew this poster. It was an amazing thing to see. It reminded me of when my mother would sometimes take me to children’s concerts at […]
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 […]
And speaking of reputation management for small business, I was checking out LSG’s GMB description after Colan Nielsen had posted about them showing up in GMB Knowledge Panels the other day (They’re gone again btw) when I noticed in the “Reviews from the web” section we had a lousy 3/5 rating: Like any business owner, […]
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 […]
While procrastinating last Friday afternoon, I noticed a distress call show up in my Twitter feed: Hmm… I might talk to @AlanBleiweiss and @Marie_Haynes. They’ve got loads of experience in this world. — Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 30, 2018 Now Marie and Alan are both fine SEOs, but I’ve got to admit when I saw […]
When I got into this biz in the previous decade, there weren’t as many of you goofballs out there sharing all of your amazing SEO insights as there are now. As an SEO newbie, I was always on the prowl for the voices of SEO pros who didn’t sound like they were full of shit […]
For those that missed the news this morning, I couldn’t be more excited to see @SIMPartners join the @Reputation_Com family! https://t.co/c1pqdtD9uy — Adam Dorfman (@phixed) February 28, 2018 While I did not expect Reputation.com to be the suitor, it is not surprising to see it embrace SIMPartners. Reputation.com has grown from a service that took […]
One of the biggest challenges for SEOs is Google itself. The black box of Google, as Dan described it to me early on at my time at LSG, limits its displayed metrics in Google Search Console to representative calculations. Google causes even more SEO indigestion when you try to claw out a site’s historical performance […]
The chatter amongst the SEOratti is that Voice Search, AI, Machine Learning and SkyNet are a-coming and you better either get ready or prepare for extinction. If it pleases Twitter, in rebuttal, may I present Exhibit #532 in the case for Shotland’s Law (“The better something looks on the surface, the worse it looks underneath”). […]
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 […]