Category: Uncategorized

The news that IAC’s Home Advisor is merging with Angie’s List to form a new public company is both surprising and not all that surprising. In InsiderPages’ early days, we considered Angie’s List one of our top competitors but we were always baffled why anyone would pay to get access to their members’ reviews, particularly when sites like ours and Yelp’s were giving the content away for free. Back then Angie had the last laugh, as InsiderPages got acquired by…

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 I will publish in greater depth when I have a second). Keep calm and Local SEO on!  

An auto dealer client’s GMB page was showing up in Google with a different domain (the car maker’s – Ford.com) attached to it only for certain queries. I started looking through all of the usual data suspects to see if the errant domain was connected to any of the dealer’s business listings and came up empty. Then I searched Google Mapmaker for the client’s business name to see if it had the domain perhaps on a dupe listing. It returned…

Sooner or later every SEO puts one of these on their site right? From StreetFight Summit 2014. Fun show. Thanks to Laura Rich and David Hirschman for having me and to Rene Reinsberg of GoDaddy, Jonathan Czaja of Facebook and Brendan King, especially Brendan King, of Vendasta for putting up with me. So hire me already. I must be some kind of expert about something.  

Noticed this doozy from Tony McCreath over at the Google + Local Search Forum this morning. Looks like Google is giving users a redirect notice when they click on the website link that you associate with your Google My Business page if you are using UTM tracking parameters to measure web traffic from GMB: What I find particularly irksome is that they give the redirect warning not only when there is no redirect happening, but for using tracking parameters for…

I have a client who had implemented schema incorrectly and received a notice from Google that they needed to fix it “if you would like it featured in Google search results”. Of course they didn’t provide any specifics and Schema.org documentation is often confusing: http://t.co/ltB6NKX0eX‘s real mission was to create a lot of confusing conversations about how to implement schema — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) June 19, 2014 Then I noticed this very helpful review of Wisconsin Health Insurance, because so…

Source: Why California’s Drought Isn’t Going Anywhere I am posting this page as a resource for Pleasanton residents seeking both information on the how the drought is affecting the area and resources for how we can all help the situation. On April 18th, the San Jose Mercury News quoted Daniel Smith, Pleasanton’s Operation Services Director, saying that the outlook for the drought is “very grim”. The key points of the article: Pleasanton gets 80 percent of its water from the state…

<eom> p.s. if anyone from Hubspot would like to respond that they did not just tell one of my clients that, I’d be happy to discuss. p.p.s. honestly I was surprised that you guys used the word “SEO”. Aren’t we all like “inbound” now? p.p.p.s rebranding tomorrow as “Local Inbound Guide” @rogermedia @HubSpot in fairness to Hubspot, that probably was the case, but couldn't hurt to help make sure that the guy gets the message — Andrew Shotland (@localseoguide) April…

A client recently asked for notes on their draft presentation for an upcoming conference. I have attended a number of conferences lately and, like the rest of you, have had to sit through some pretty poor presentations. While I don’t claim to be God’s gift to Powerpoint, or even Greg Gifford, I am at that point in life where if your presentation sucks, I am going to get up and walk out, or even worse, like everybody else, check Twitter.…