Video: Last Week in Local 8/19/19

Mike Blumenthal

Mike: Ever wonder how neighborhood titles are created in Google? Have you’d stopped to think about how Maps can define our social reality?

This is a compelling story of a neighborhood in Buffalo fighting for its survival and how a misnamed neighborhood threatened that.

Mike: I guess Yelp has discovered that it is easier to harass a few brands with lots of locations than to harass many small businesses.

Mike: They don’t represent real boundaries, but rather routes. And they don’t represent how humans behave.

A fascinating insight into the history of and marketing misuse of Zip codes.

Mike: An infographic that drives home the trend in retail towards experiences, how much more they are worth and who is taking advantage of them.

Mike: Adam Steele does a very nice correlation study looking at the relationship of organic ranking and reviews on position in local search. Nothing new but it validates reviews and links as primary drivers of rank.

Mike: Adding FAQ Schema resulted in “uplifts in traffic to commercial pages ranging from 3% to 8%”

Mary: If this doesn’t get the anti trust wheels moving, nothing will: “We’ve passed a milestone in Google’s evolution from search engine to walled-garden.”

Mary: @rustybrick says: “So we have Google saying this is not against Google’s guidelines directly but it is becoming a problem and some seem to be abusing it. You can expect Google to not rank these pages as well, when Google can determine that these subdomains or subfolders are from third-party organizations.”

Mary: Toby Scammell explains why authentication is the key to combating fake reviews and it falls on big tech to figure it out.

@CaseyMeraz watches lawyer’s ads closely.  “Why are they so important? Instead of paying for each click, participants now only pay for leads.”

In this article, Kevin Indig from G2 shares his method for finding the right approach and strategy to optimize SEO for your business model.

Carrie: Kenneth Kinney did a GREAT podcast with Aaron Weiche of GatherUP on whether or not reviews increase sales. Of course they do! 😉 Highly recommend a listen no matter what level you are in local marketing.

Carrie: Latest found-bytes podcast with David Mihm and Will Scott – they talk about content that moves the needle. A topic I think Will will touch on during LocalU Advanced as well.

Carrie: Miriam Ellis at Moz explores some tips and tactics to get customers to edit their negative reviews. Super helpful tips to have at your fingertips when it’s appropriate to ask for an edit. Sometimes you just need to own the “suck” and learn from it.

Carrie: Google is showing images to match the query in your local results (scroll pack most visibly) – not just the image you upload as your logo or cover. So upload TONS of great photos that match the top queries for your brand- file names and descriptions are optional, apparently.

Carrie: Interesting take on how Walmart and other large retailers that are embracing online sales can compete with Amazon. Their next-day shipping covers nearly all of the US, while Amazon’s is more metro-focused. Walmart’s next day shipping is more affordable in my experience as well. Consumers are figuring out that you can get A LOT of stuff via WalMart that they don’t sell in stores – Calvin Klein, Lagerfeld, North Face, etc.

Carrie: Great set of statistics about reviews that includes “cards” with attribution for presentations, which is a clever content delivery tactic to remember!

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