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 […]
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, […]
At this late date, if you are not taking care of your local listings on the Web when you move your business, congratulate yourself for being royally out of touch with how business works in 2017. Last week I headed over to my dentist, Home Page DDS, for a cleaning and on the way recalled […]
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 […]
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 […]
Warning: I am not a financial analyst, but I play one on this blog Yext* has updated its S-1 filing to include more detail on its revenue and other aspects of its business in the run-up to its pending IPO. Since we’re all interested, I figured I’d provide some summary info. Some of the key […]
As the news of Yext’s S-1 filing in advance of its IPO makes it way throughout the Search industry, I can’t help but think that it will be a seminal event in the annals of Local Search. I’ll leave it to others to pore through the S-1 and pick it apart, and it appears there is plenty […]
I have wasted a good portion of my life clicking past this useless page. Yeah, I know, use Shortcuts, but still. It has been years since this report was useful. Why is it still around? And why is it so prominent in the UI? Instead of spending time making the side nav bounce around so you […]
Let me start out by saying I don’t really know Larry Kim. I have had a few conversations with him on Twitter. He seems like a smart, hard-working entrepreneur. I have never used his company, Wordstream, so I can’t really speak to anything about Larry or his service other than what I occasionally read on […]
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 […]
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, […]
It’s been a while since I did the old “Local SEO Predictions” thing, but 2016 is indeed a year of oddities. For some lengthier thoughts check out my latest column on SEL: Can SEOs Make Local Search Great Again in 2017? Or just check out this tweet by Max which pretty much says all that […]
Wix has helped millions of small business owners create a stunning online presence and is proud of their sites’ SEO capabilities. So proud, in fact, that Wix has offered $50,000 to anyone who can outrank them in Google for “SEO hero”. In honor of Wix’s SEO Hero contest we have put together a collection of some […]
The Google My Business Help blog now says you can add a menu to your GMB listing via the API according to the new menu guidelines for Google My Business. According to the guidelines, there are two kinds of menus:
Jen Slegg’s post on Google’s Updated Site Move Recommendations for Webmasters is timely in that we are working on multiple large domain migrations at moment – tis the season I guess. As I have often said, redesigning a website and migrating the domain at the same time is the SEO equivalent of diamond cutting. There are […]
Today at State of Search Yext’s Christian Ward mentioned this result from “the world’s largest correlation engine”. Kind of says it all: BTW super-impressed with this year’s State of Search. It always was a great conference but it has grown up big time. Kudos to DFWSEM.
Yesterday I had a call with a start-up client whose SEO has been performing quite well. Since July, their organic traffic had grown by almost 700%, but growth had slowed most likely because of some site updates that screwed up their SEO (note to client – check with your SEO before you update the site). […]
My SEL post, When Going HTTPS Don’t Forget About Local Citations, spurred a minor tempest in a tweetstorm, when a reader asked Googler’s John Mueller and Gary Ilyes for their thoughts. As you can see below John emphasized that “you don’t lose PR with 301s”: John was likely referencing this section of my post:
There’s not much published on the Web about how to rank well in Apple Maps. While the nature of a mobile map result makes “ranking” sort of an ephemeral thing – the order & radius of results will vary depending on the searcher’s physical location – there are a factors that seem to most positively […]
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 […]
When Google’s Penguin 4.0 update was announced on September 23rd, one of our clients had a number of key pages on its site get deindexed. Their site certainly had several technical SEO, usability and other issues, but I’d hardly classify it is “webspam” which is what Penguin purported to target. Of course as soon as the deindexation […]
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 […]
Update: As usual Professor Maps found this one a while ago…#doh! Looks like we’ve got another candidate for Mike’s Summary of Recent Local Pack Tests: a set of three local “swipe-shows” of businesses in categories related to a searched brand appearing at the bottom of the SERP (Dan is calling them the “3-Headed Snake of […]
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 […]
Is your store locator a crazed bastard stepchild? Some more evidence that Possum|Platypus|Patagonia|Loren Baker was the “near me” update. We just discovered that the store locator page on one of our clients’ sites was deindexed by Google about two weeks ago. There was nothing “technical” that would have caused Google to do this (i.e. no noindex […]
Local SEO strategies targeting “near me” queries in the Local Organic section of the SERPs (the non-Local-Pack/Map results) have been kind of a thing for a few years what with Google making it a default suggestion for most queries it considers even remotely “Local”: While SEOs have been studying the effect of the latest update on […]
Then you might want to try adding some Lean Startup/Agile methodologies to your process. It works wonders for us, and is so tasty too! If you are interested in learning more, check out my post over at Moz.
Kind of big news in Apple Maps land. 9to5Mac reports that Apple Maps now has public web pages for some Points of Interest and Landmarks. And if these URLs are public, that means they’re indexed in Google, or at least some of them are: […]
Google has long been trying to compete with Yelp on the local review front, however, getting community involvement has always seemed like a challenge for them. After Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s recent embarrassing exchange with the affable Mike Blumenthal on Twitter, I switched off of Yelp and took my talents to GMB, and I have to […]