Video: Last Week in Local April 22, 2019

Mike: LocalU Advanced – September 19th in Denver at University of Denver, Craig Hall!  Early Bird Tickets Available Now!

Mike: Private Equity Pillage details the business model that allows private equity firms to bankrupt chains, throw workers out of jobs, stiff vendors and still make a profit, in the context of grocery stores.
Great thread, better article detailing specifics of how Private Equity firms have a playbook for extracting profits and leaving the business in tatters.

Mary; If you are already Google certified, you’re in. If not, Greg Sterling tells you how to get certiifed here.

Mary; @JoyanneHawkins shares her insight on GMB listings by Local Guides. The reality is, it’s very tough to get rid of fake listings, especially those with lots of fake reviews.

Mary: @mikeboland gives us a look into the internet of places and how we should be thinking about it.

Mike: Last August described a possible “retail flagship” space for Google in Chicago.

It appears that Google has now walked alway from a lease in Chicago’s Fulton Market district.

Mike: Mozcon is in Seattle July 15-17th, 3 days this year and a ticket can cost between $1700-1900.

GatherUp is offering one person a chance to win the ticket.

Mike: A range of simple but necessary SEO testing tools all in one place from robots.txt tester to seeing local search results any place

Mike: Emojis in email? Yes but….

Mike: Yoast claims to solve the schema “nesting” issue in WordPress.

Mike: Now on a very small % of locations.

The short name will allow for more transactional (in the very broad sense) capabilities down the road like g.page/barbaraoliverjewelry/review.

Name has to be at least 5 characters long, and can be changed 3 times a year.

Enforcement? Naming problems? Who knows if Google will provide adequate support.

Mike: A nifty new post type that suggests recent 4 and 5 star reviews to auto-include in your Google Posts.

Carrie: Andy Simpson shared this tool on Twitter. Enter a domain, crawls the site ang gives speed figures for all URLs, or enter a list of urls to get speed figures.

Carrie: Yet another “ugh” moment with Yelp. Bill is keeping this article updated as he finds “Yelp Verified” badges on businesses that are not in good standing license-wise with their state of operation.

Carrie: Featured snippets as direct answers as well as some different emerging trends are taking more “activity” away from content creators/owners and putting it in Google search. There are still “wins” it just looks a bit different.

Carrie: I did what we could call a local-search “201” webinar with Milestone Internet last week. A good look at the basics and hows/whys of why local search is so important and what facets of Local Search SMBs should be paying attention to.