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Chris designed his first website almost 25 years ago in the days of Macromedia Dreamweaver. Fast forward a dozen years later, Chris started his own “one-man” dental SEO agency, Prodentite, helping dentists with their online presence from custom dental websites and local SEO, to paid search. In 2012, Chris attended his first (of many) LocalU conference where he met Joy Hawkins and many other key contributors in the newly emerging world of local search.

How to Export Google Business Profile Data With NMX Dashboard Insights Report

By Chris Ratchford / January 22, 2023

[Ed. note: The following is a guest article written for Local U by Chris Ratchford of Sterling Sky] How To Export Google Business Profile Data One of the biggest challenges agencies face working with small businesses is reporting. Historically, the process required to export Google Business Profile data has been complicated, and hard to find.…

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Major Updates to Google Knowledge Panels for Colleges & Universities

By Chris Ratchford / January 7, 2022

In October 2021, I wrote an article for Local University on the two types of panels appearing for colleges & universities on Google. In this article, I detailed the difference between Main Entity Panels – which are a unique type of panel connected to Google’s Knowledge Graph – and the Expanded GMB Panel – which…

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Google Business Profiles Bugs and Fixes – December 2021

By Chris Ratchford / December 2, 2021

Google Business Profiles (GBP) are meant to help businesses make money and gain exposure. When GBP breaks, it can have costly effects on businesses. 5 major issues are plaguing GPB at the moment. You will either need to wait for Google the fix the issue while you slowly go out of business or take matters…

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A Tale of Two Panels: Knowledge Panels and Google My Business for Colleges & Universities

By Chris Ratchford / October 21, 2021

A branded search for colleges and universities on Google can bring up two unique types of panels. In this article, we will look at these panels, their unique features, and why Google chooses one over the other.  Type 1: Main Entity Panel The first type of panel is what I am calling the Main Entity…

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How to Unfilter your Missing Google Reviews

By Chris Ratchford / May 11, 2021

The Google My Business (GMB) Community Forum is seeing an increase in threads about missing or filtered reviews in the past few weeks. We see a lot of posts from reviewers or businesses about Google removing reviews for quality issues. Google will filter out reviews for using questionable words or for using too many special…

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GMB showing Staff and Attorneys in Knowledge Panel Results

By Chris Ratchford / February 11, 2021

Google has been rolling out a series of tests of late. I stumbled across this thread on the Local Search Community Forum today. As it turns out, the GMB listing for Mike Morse Injury Law Firm has sections for Attorney and Staff. Both of these sections can be clicked and expanded. The staff section is…

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Google Review Replies Disappearing

By Chris Ratchford / November 18, 2020

Nov 23, 2020 Update: The missing responses appear to all be back now. It’s another week and another round of Google review issues. On Wednesday, November 11th, there was a technical issue that prevented new Google from being published. This technical issue lasted two days. The team was able to identify the problem, and the…

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San Diego Personal Injury autocomplete

Google adds local listings to autocomplete

By Chris Ratchford / August 25, 2020

Google has rolled out an autocomplete feature to include local listings. Users can trigger autocomplete while performing a search directly on Google. Jason Brown tested this by typing San Diego Personal Injury lawyer and was presented with an option of a local listing. Google showed the full business name and address for the business in…

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Google My Business asks “Did you use this Business?”

By Chris Ratchford / August 13, 2020

Google has rolled out a new feature for Google My Business reviews. When a user clicks “Write a Review”, Google is presenting the user with an option to answer the following question, “Did you use this business?” If you select Yes, you are presented with a series of service attributes to select from. Google also…

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How to Identify Local SEO Keywords in Bulk

By Chris Ratchford / August 12, 2020

If you do local SEO you’ll need to decide what keywords to target. Not every keyword triggers the ‘localization’ of SERPs. You’ll need to figure out which keywords do, so you can target them, and track their performance. If you’re doing local SEO for a big company with lots of locations or types of businesses,…

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