It’s been nice knowing you all, but SEO is officially over, dead and gone. As you very likely know $GOOG has made a bunch of changes that impact the Keyword Planner (and by default Local SEO.) First they started combining keywords and showing grouped monthly search volumes. Then they started showing ranges for keywords unless you had some level of ad spend. Local SEO is very dependent on Keyword Planner data for one simple reason, it’s the best place to get…
Per my previous post, Are You Doing Local Answers SEO?, we have noticed these types of results are becoming more common for queries that have local intent: Click to enlarge these sorry screenshots This is in line with the increasing presence of Knowledge Graph results over the past year. We believe that Google is starting to view many local queries as “questions” (as opposed to “searches”) and it is trying to provide answers whenever possible. Over time, we see SERPs…
I am publishing part of this post that just went live on SearchEngineLand because: The original title was “Why Local Rank Trackers Suck”. I get why SEL rewrote it as “Why Local Rank Trackers Fail” – it’s a family site after all – but I think you’ll agree “Suck” is much more accurate. The editors changed the top image I provided to a stock photo. While I think the article works fine without the image, it’s the image that…
Because the listing isn’t closed… Okay, so that makes no sense right? Let me start from the beginning. We have a client that has a Ford dealership. When doing searches for Ford + geo, we were seeing the above “permanently closed” business showing up in the Knowledge Graph panel. So we had a team member investigate the issue by calling GMB support and asking why a closed listing was showing in the KG. Apparently the listing was showing up because…
Last week, when we uncovered that Apple Maps had cut deals with at least ten new companies (e.g. Yext, Location3, Yodle, etc.) to provide business listings data, I got a few emails asking what the big deal was. Here’s what I see is going on: Apple has come to realize that organizing the world’s local business listings information is no small job Apple has come to realize that relying on big data aggregators is great for getting bulk but not…
It’s Apple Maps week over here. Just wanted to point you over to my latest post on AMM, Apple Maps Is Not Intended To Be A General Business Directory, my rant on why I think Apple Maps should allow home-based businesses to be listed. Kind of ironic given this from the U.S. Small Business Administration: “What do Apple Computer, Hershey’s, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and the Ford Motor Company have in common? These well-known corporations all started out as home-based businesses. In…
Last week, Google started to switch out its local Carousel results for a new set of mobilish-type pack results that appear to rely heavily on its local Knowledge Panels, so let’s call it a Knowledge Pack, or “K-Pack”, for the purposes of this post. In his seminal post Some Thoughts On The New Pak Results From Google, Professor Blumenthal mused: “I would love to hear what happens to web traffic for the directory type sites that seemed to be doing…
Nyagoslav (think Cher, Michael, Brittany, etc.) gets all OCD on my recent post where I used our NAP Hunter extension to surface some bogus N.A.P. data issues. He really peels back the rotten onion: “The NPI registry is one of the most trustworthy data sources in the medical industry, so the chances that this was the initial source of the bad data are very high. What is of particular interest is the fact that the NPI record was last updated…
…but not really. I mean who really wants to understand how duplicate business listings are created and how the problem can be solved? It’s not exactly cocktail party conversation. But if your business is affected by them, like every business that relies on local search traffic is, perhaps you might want to take a few minutes out of your day and read the white paper I wrote for Yext, The Definitive Guide To Duplicate Business Listings. Here’s the fancy graphic…
Airbnb just released a beautiful interactive infographic on the local economic impact the company has had on nine cities. If you are considering using content to attract links, for both national and local SEO, this would be a good piece to study. The design is beautiful, but the interaction and “scrollability” is what sets this apart from your typical everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to infographics. It’s also responsive and the different elements work nicely on a mobile browser: Calling this an “infographic”…