Video: Last Week in Local – December 16, 2019

Mike Blumenthal

Mike: The ultimate and most macabre local market place – the dark web for contract murders

Mike: Amazon Logistics “more than doubled its share” of U.S. package volumes from about 20% a year ago and is now shipping at a rate of 2.5 billion per year. For comparison, Morgan Stanley estimates UPS and FedEx have U.S. shipping volumes of 4.7 billion and 3 billion packages per year, respectively.”

With Amazon focusing on denser urban and suburban areas they are projected to bypass UPS & FedEx package volumes in 2022

Mike: Across all study participants, 96% responded that they would like somewhere between a couple of sentences and a few paragraphs of content in emails they receive. Almost no recipients want no content or more than 4 paragraphs.

Overall, 60% of participants would prefer to tell companies exactly what kinds of email they’re interested in right when they provide their email address for the first time. An additional 24% of respondents said they’d be interested in a survey emailed to them soon after providing their address.

Mike: GMB created automatically a Google Post with the photos I uploaded

Mike: Now released for iOS

Mike: What at first seemed just a review carousel seems to be much much more. Stay tuned for our deep dive.

Mike: There are many stakeholders in the world of reviews, see what they thought and how they have changed and how that should impact your tactics and strategies going forward

Mike: The tools mentioned were interesting particularly the Market Finder which uncovers new opportunities to take your business global. It analyzes monthly searches, popular market trends, disposable income per capita and the number of internet users by country to help you prioritize where your products, services, and content will appeal most.

Carrie: They’re awfully cute and fancy – but require quite the spend to get. Google recently changed how much you have to spend – so it might be more reachable – but you still need 10+ locations and $1,000 spend/day over your whole account to get them.

Carrie: Tom Waddington pointed out a new change in the Google Business Listings – they were showing an “areas served” window that listed all the locations you put in your “service area.” This morning I wasn’t seeing it, then I did a bunch of searches and it showed up again. Very odd behavior but it’s likely a test, right?

Carrie: Mary shared this tool with me and it looks pretty cool I haven’t tried it out yet but it says it does GMB Posts, Tracks 3-pack rankings specifically and manages your GMB from one dashboard.

Carrie: Eric Shanfelt announced last week that the LMI is now FREE for everyone. This is a great resource for Local SEO & Search info.

Carrie: Bright Local’s Local Consumer Review Survey was published for 2019 last week. Some pretty interesting stuff in here:

**Only 53% of people would consider using a business with less than 4 stars

**The average consumer spends 13 minutes and 45 seconds reading reviews before making a decision

**Among consumers that read reviews, 97% read businesses’ responses to reviews

Carrie: Danny Sullivan announced that speakable markup is not only for Google News anymore.

I’ve been noodling over what this means for local – does it mean we need to mark up Location/products/services with speakable to make it eligible?