Earlier this year, TripAdvisor removed critical reviews and negative posts about health and safety problems, including sexual assault, at a number of Mexican resorts and hotels. These were first-person accounts designed to be warnings to other travelers. A USA Today-affiliated paper investigated and uncovered the questionable conduct on the part of TripAdvisor, which has offered […]
Local SEO drives customer actions for businesses of every size, from local mom-and-pop shops to large companies with multiple locations. Local SEO is the new storefront, as search is now consumers’ top choice for finding local businesses. Local is a strategic investment within your sales funnel; it impacts your organic search strategy, content marketing efforts
Driving customer actions for enterprise-level brands Read More »
BrightLocal is out with its latest local consumer survey about local business reviews. The survey was based on a sample of 1,031 US consumers and covers a wide range of issues. It affirms the general importance and influence of reviews on consumer decision-making. However, there are a number of nuances and findings I found especially
79 percent of consumers believe they’ve seen fake local reviews Read More »
Wait times for some local listings, such as restaurants, are Google’s latest addition to its local search results, appearing when people view those listings in web search. Eventually, this information will appear on Google Maps, as well. The new feature will appear near the popular times information, which currently shows users how busy a venue is at a particular
Google adds wait times to local results in search and maps Read More »
As reviews have become more important (to consumers and as a local ranking factor), multiple companies have emerged to monitor reviews, but also to help small business owners obtain them. Yelp is trying to stop many of those efforts. We were provided with the following, received by one of these reputation management companies: Yelp is,
Yelp increasingly cracking down on ‘review solicitation’ across the internet Read More »
SEO for local business has gone through a number of changes. First, local businesses had to figure out Google’s algorithm so that their websites would appear in search results. Next came local search ranking factors that emphasized location-based factors. Now, it seems Google updates will require a new look at vertical-specific ranking factors. This isn’t
SEO ranking factors for 4 business verticals and what they mean for local businesses Read More »
Android Police reports Google is now rolling out the ability to create and share lists of places on the desktop version of Google Maps. This feature originally launched on mobile in February and now seems to be rolling out to the desktop interface. It allows searchers to keep track of saved places and share lists
Google Maps enables creating & sharing lists on desktop version Read More »
Machine learning and AI have become buzzwords that are being overused. But they’re also real technologies that are having and will continue to have a meaningful impact on marketing over time. Yext is now bringing some of these capabilities to business listings and local data management. The company is adding three new features to its “Knowledge
Yext announces conversational ‘Knowledge Assistant’ for local data management Read More »
A few months ago, I teamed up with Ben Fisher from Steady Demand to test whether Google Posts have any influence on ranking in the local results (the “3-pack”). The methodology We picked two different businesses to test this on. One was a garage flooring company that had been struggling to rank for their main
Do Google Posts impact ranking? A case study Read More »
There are literally hundreds of companies, publishers and agencies trying to sell digital marketing and other services to US small businesses (SMBs), which represent more than 95 percent of all US businesses. But the market is mostly opaque to these small companies. There’s almost no place that SMBs can turn to get objective information about
Amazon gets top net-promoter score among SMB vendors according to survey Read More »
