Category: Featured

This post was edited on 03/23/2023 to account for new team members. Introduction This week, I wanted to talk about imposter syndrome in the SEO world.  “Imposters” are people who feel like a fake; people who may be doing their job just fine but feel like, at some point, they’re going to be ‘found out’ as a fraud or as someone who shouldn’t hold their position. I first experienced imposter syndrome when my (amazing) teammates congratulated me during my first…

I love this scene from Jurassic Park  People always remember this scene for the could/should line but I think that really minimizes Malcolms holistically excellent speech. Specifically, this scene is an amazing analogy for Machine Learning/AI technology right now. I’m not going to dive too much into the ethics piece here as Jamie Indigo has a couple of amazing pieces on that already, and established academics and authors like Dr. Safiya Noble and Ruha Benjamin best deal with the…

Show me the waters of your homeworld Muad’dib This post is gonna contain spoilers beyond the recent Dune movie, be warned. So forecasting in SEO is such an interesting subject. I really hate the cop-out answer of “it depends” and judge the SEO space for falling back on this lazy crutch as a way to answer real business questions. Just to be fully transparent, I have worked in-house and would pass over/fire a vendor who was unwilling to help me…

Hi! I’m Dan! I think the SEO discipline is a research based discipline. One of my favorite concepts is Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO), which I’m going to link to rather then explain but I still expect you to read it!  Since bad data begets bad research begets bad tactics begets bad outcomes, I think it’s important to have intellectually honest and valid research. If only our industry was open to peer review. For those interested in peer reviewing other…

DAN THAT IS A MOUTHFUL! In another life I was an academic random internet person, deal with it and move on. So a couple of members of the team have been pushing me to document the Local SEO Guide approach to SEO and a topic came up internally over the past few weeks that I think is a great example. I think the mental model we have for approaching SERPs and rankings is broken. Specifically, it’s causing people to misunderstand…

Remember when Google finagled with their system to make it so that you couldn’t double dip on Featured Snippets/Instant Answers (Get a Featured Snippet and rank on page 1 in 10 blue links). Well, there are a lot of people who have been skeptical about the value of this particular search feature in this new world. Were they right? Were we all fooled by Google into giving them free content for SERPs (Featured Snippets) that are great for their user…

Do you manage freelancers? Yeah? Whether you’re managing an external team of freelancers or an internal team (big or small), managing work is easier when you have the right tools. That’s why having the best fitting project management tool is absolutely essential. Effective and successful project management has visibility, increases organization, is easily integrated, is robust, and is easy to use, and bonus points for a professional look and feel. As our external/freelance team has grown, we’ve found ourselves needing…

And what I mean by that is Google has figured out how to automate a lot of the technical SEO things we used to take for granted as the domain of the technical SEO practitioner. That metaphor makes sense right? Zombies are kind of like automated fixes to technical SEO problems? Let’s just pretend it makes sense. I needed a catchy headline. I bring this up today because two weeks ago one of our clients decided to redirect all of…

For all you Local Pack-o-Meter watchers, you may recall that last month we saw an increase in the presence of both Ads and Shopping Boxes and chalked that up to business optimism about the economy. I don’t want to say that April showers are raining on the parade, but we did see a slight pull-back in both these SERP features:

In fact, we never have been in Kansas, but Google seems to disagree. In November 2020, Google suddenly decided that Local SEO Guide, Inc, a business located in Pleasanton, CA, was actually located in Fawn Creek Township, KS.