Every week we bring you a brief 15 minute video and the links of the best articles in Local Search. OK. It’s not always 15 minutes but we are never off by more than 10 minutes or so.;
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Google Insights report in Google My Business gets subjective attributes – Search Engine Land
Source: searchengineland.com
Restaurants at least are seeing this now. It is not clear which categories beyond restaurants have them but it is reasonable to think that these influence search results.
“Trending” businesses now featured in Google Map snippets.
Source: plus.google.com
“Trending” businesses now featured in Google Map snippets. – Evan Oder – Google+.
Q&A: Lost Your Anonymous Google Reviews? The Scoop on Removal and Moving Forward – Moz
Source: moz.com
If you lost anonymous “A Google User” reviews since late May, you probably have a few questions about why they were removed. Miriam Ellis is here to share answers on how this affects your review strategy and local SEO as a whole.
Anonymous Google Reviews Are Officially a Thing of the Past – BrightLocal
Source: www.brightlocal.com
Brightlocal took an interesting approach to this story and showed annual frequency as well the fact that only 3% of all reviews were anonymous. Those mostly occurred prior to 2013.
Inside the 20-year decline of Toys R Us
Source: www.retaildive.com
A great look at the many factors that contributed to the decline of a retail icon.
Amazon wants you to start a business to deliver its packages
Source: money.cnn.com
Amazon has announced a new program to create small businesses that can deliver its packages in branded vans and uniforms.
Obviously thier Flex program, which relies on the likes of under utilized Uber drivers is NOT cutting it. And I think this is largely around branding and presence as well as reliability.
This “opportunity” is not for the faint of heart as you need 20 vehicles to make any kind of money and that’s assuming you believe Amazon’s math.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: New URL inspection tool & more in Search Console
Source: webmasters.googleblog.com
The URL Inspection tool provides detailed crawl, index, and serving information about your pages, directly from the Google index. As well as reporting pages with similar problems and whether Schema is found and working properly
Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up – TechCrunch
Source: techcrunch.com
“We have been working on trying to create what we hope is going to be the best map app in the world, taking it to the next step. That is building all of our own map data from the ground up.”
This is a change over that Google made in 2008, 4 years into their product. It’s a big step and requires massive investment on the part of Apple.
Google rolling out a major update to Google Maps mobile apps – MSPoweruser
Source: mspoweruser.com
3 new features. Personalized
The New Explore tab – You can also know what’s going on around you as Google will now list out the top events and activities happening in your area.
Your Match – Your Match is a new scoring mechanism which indicates how likely you are to enjoy a place based on your own preferences.
For you tab – The new “For you” tab will help you in knowing about everything happening in particular areas such as home, work, or a city you visit frequently. You can also follow a neighborhood to instantly see if there’s a hot new restaurant in the area, etc.
What Do SEOs Do When Google Removes Organic Search Traffic? – Whiteboard Friday – Moz
Source: moz.com
We rely pretty heavily on Google, but some of their moves lately have made doing SEO a lot harder. What organic opportunities have been taken away, and what are some potential solutions? Rand covers a rather unnerving trend in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
Obviously these are changes that Local has been dealing with for years.
Google’s Upcoming Speed Update Works On Gradual Scale; Small Improvements Matter
Source: www.seroundtable.com
Smart Campaigns will be the default campaign type for new advertisers in Google Ads. The campaigns are almost entirely automated, from ad creatives to delivery optimization, based on the product or service being advertised and the goal the advertiser sets. Campaign goals include phone calls, website visits and requests for directions.
As Google’s low end gets better with ever more learning and AI, it will become increasingly difficult for agencies to make money selling ads as a product.
Can’t Fix a Spammy Google Maps Name? Try a Partial Edit | LocalVisibilitySystem.com
Source: www.localvisibilitysystem.com
Frustrated by Google’s unwillingness to fix obvious name spam? Phil suggests using an old spammer technique, make small edits instead of changing everything. Small success is better than no success.
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