Video: Last Week in Local 11/4/19

Mike Blumenthal

Mike: Every bit that’s fit to track… Interesting that Fitbit felt compelled to include their privacy stance in the PR release.

Mike: Back and forth on privacy issues, this project is now moving forward with the government owning and controlling all of the data.

Mike: The $15 minimum wage was supposed to hurt New York City restaurants — but both revenue and employment are up. This article explores why.

Mike: Describes how they perceive themselves as a hospitality company and how giving up delivery to GrubHub severs their ability to control their customer experience. The customer becomes GrubHub’s customer and not theirs.

Mike: A great place to start if you are looking for ADA compliance for your website.

Mike: Inspired by Carrie’s report from several weeks ago of a butcher selling meat via a refrigerated vending machine when they are closed, Miriam takes a deep dive into others offering something similar and lists other retail areas when these sorts of “always open” options make sense.

Mike: We are starting to see the beginnings of “Rich Messaging” in b2c communications from the GMB

Mary: For some businesses, online reviews make not make too much sense. Can you turn off reviews on a GMB listing? The short answer is “NO”.

Mary: @LilyRay’s survey shows over 1000  SEOs split right down the middle. A lot depends on what you might consider “buying a link” and what you simply see as effective local marketing.

Mary: I’ts officially illegal, but a few quick searches on Google will show you that Google still enables it organically and makes money from it with advertising!

Mary: Google explains when you can “rebrand” a multi-location business in GMB and when it’s considered an entirely new business.

Carrie: Brittney Mueller writes a fact sheet and some fun Q&A “choose your own adventure” with regards to featured snippets. Great information on getting some extended organic results. I’m seeing really nice real estate being taken up for solid queries by FAQ markup. Worth a look. Featured Snippets Cheat Sheet and Interactive Q&A.

Carrie: A tiny bit of blatant self-promotion – I do another podcast about brand and community building with my good friend Erin Jones. Last week we talked about asking your customer for reviews with some solid tactics. Worth a listen if you’re setting up a program, looking to make your review mgt program better, or struggling with the hows & whens of setting up your review program. This Friday we’re talking about how to respond to your reviews.

Carrie: Valentin Pletzer shared some screenshots of a new image carousel on local results and we’re seeing some new KP carousels (non-local) in the wild. I can’t recreate any of these yet but they look interesting – another format requiring a swipe instead of a scroll?

Carrie: Just in case you needed more convincing – Dana DiTomaso shared a use case for speeding up a website. Only change made to site was moving to a faster host, conversion rate increased 28%. Speed up your websites, people!

Carrie: Google rolling out new page speed reports into search console is just another reason why we need to pay attention to site speed. Interesting that faster pages are becoming a focus, as are images – but images traditionally slow down pages. Pay special attention as you beef up your on-site image optimization/inclusion.

Carrie: Whitespark added some new features to their Rank Tracker program that now includes a more robust ranking look-in along with screenshots. This is great from an agency perspective because showing graphic proof of improvement is always so useful!