Using Local Pack Grid Rankings for Competitive Local SEO Analysis

Local grid rankings reports have been a great local SEO tool for a while. They can give you a sense of how a business ranks across various areas of a city, county, etc. Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s grid rank report: We found these reports so useful, we built our own uglier version in Looker Studio so we could customize the data. One of the first things we did was set up competitor grid rankings. The idea was to see…

Open Sourcing 2017 Local SEO Ranking Factors Data

I just got back from #TechSEOBoost and spent a lot of time engaged in amazing conversations about data analysis, math and very importantly sharing data. So, after thinking about it, I decided I’m going to open source the data we used for the 2017 Local SEO Ranking Factors. This data is pretty interesting, and honestly would be pretty expensive. It’s ~150k rows of data (each row representing a different business listing on Google My Business). That data was scraped by…

Don’t Ever Trust Google With Your Life

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 out where you take a tiny kid, with pink eye, at 5 pm on a weekday. After spending a few minutes searching around, in total dad…

Who Is Next In Local Listings Management?

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 care of those “caught with a hooker” search results for you to something that is starting to look like a full-service digital marketing solution. Here’s…

Moz Local Review – Does It Work?

(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 day. That said, if you are one of the lucky businesses that is not affected by this kind of thing, then your results with Moz…

Correlation, Causation & Local SEO

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.

More on HTTPS & Local Citations & 301 Redirects

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:

Apple Maps Now Publishing Listings Taken Directly From Businesses

It’s Apple Maps news week here at LSG. Apple now appears to be publishing multi-location business listings taken directly from the businesses. Case in point, several electronic vehicle charging station chains have popped up on Apple Maps with a “provided by” notice on their profiles. As you can see from the screenshots in this post, Apple Maps is publishing business listing data from the following companies: Blink Network ChargePoint EvGo I also have found listings for another EV Charger network, SemaConnect,…

Apple Maps Adds 4 New Business Listings Partners

[row][one_half] [/one_half][one_half] [/one_half][/row] Apple Maps has updated its Attributions page again with four new business listings partners, 3 US-based location data management/marketing companies and a Swiss Yellow Pages company: Location3 MomentFeed SIM Partners Swisscom Directories Previously Location3 and SIM Partners were accidentally “announced” as partners almost two years ago. At that point we had heard that these partners were in some kind of beta program to see if their data was good enough for Apple Maps. I suppose this latest…

Be True to Your Source of Truth

Anybody that works with Local SEO at scale, and even those that don’t, has experienced the pain of having to wrangle True pieces of NAP information for dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of locations. Clients usually hate checking this, and trust me, I get it. It’s really hard to be able to break data discrepancies in your own records e.g is your internal documentation correct or is the website correct? And wait a second, there is this different piece of…