Video: Important Links from Last Week in Local August 6th, 2018

Mike Blumenthal

This update was a big one. It has strongly affected sites related to diet, nutrition and medical products but it might be affecting Local as well. Here Marie shares her thoughts on what is going on.

If you want to stay abreast of Local Service Ads, follow Tom.

Your garage door doesn’t open – or close. You go into a mild panic. Who wouldn’t?Maybe you can’t take your car out, or maybe you can’t get in….

Local SEO is constantly evolving— in 2018 alone there have been more than 50 major changes. To stay current and effective, you must constantly be revisiting your approaches.

An in-depth look at Apple’s efforts to improve Maps, the history of their difficulties and the issues they might still confront.

If you are a map geek, Mike Dobson is the person to follow.

The most significant partnership today is with Walmart, enabling grocery pickups that have been scheduled ahead of time. Later this week, a test pilot will offer members of the early rider program discounts on weekly groceries that are ordered online. While orders are being prepared at the store, Waymo vehicles will transport the rider to and from Walmart to collect their groceries.

This is a fascinating partnership that is a model for many off line/ on line efforts.

Ach! It’s schema everywhere….

There is nothing more local than events and Google has upgraded their event search results once again.

This time creating a landing page on Google instead of driving users to the original site.

Big surprise it isn’t but you will see more of this behavior from Google.

An interview with Craig Mount of ClassyBrain that is documenting many of the steps involved in starting a new agency,

“Google is controlling the entire local experience—discovery, presentation, and transaction—and there’s just nowhere for agencies to add value, or make any money from that value,” David Mihm tells Mike Blumenthal in their biweekly column.

We will see more and more CTAs in local that close the loop between the business and the customer. The question will be “how many will they monetize?”.

Rand Fishkin sees broadly what we have been seeing in Local search for a while; Google is capturing the user and keeping them at Google more and more. Now what?

An easy way to get localized SERPs at an exact location without any additional tools.

The fact that behaviour signals are on Google’s radar stresses the rising importance of user experience optimisation. Our job is to incentivise users to click, engage, convert, and keep coming back. This complex task requires a multidisciplinary mix, including technical, strategic, and creative skills.

A visual guide to link building with images, including tips on how to perform reverse image searches to find unattributed images and how to use industry event images and evergreen content to attract links.

An interesting idea was that you use image search to find who is using your images and contact them for the link.

A local car delaer reported that Waze Local ads alone resulted in a 57 percent increase in service leads in the first quarter. In real terms, this equals more than 120 additional repair orders per month, or 360 “direct navigations to the service bay” during the quarter.

Dani Owens takes a look at whether it is permissible under Google guidelines.

The answer? It depends on how you interpret the Guidelines as Google has not made a clear statement.

Her recommendation? Be conservative and don’t mark up 3rd party reviews.