Last week in Local 3/26/18
Join Local U for the latest public episode of Last Week in Local, a weekly conversation about the articles that attracted our attention during the past week ending March 26th. This week features Mary Bowling & Mike Blumenthal.
If you have a special topic you would like us to discuss for our other weekly feature, the Deep Dive in Local, or if you would like to be on one or the other of our segments, reach out and send us the topic and your availability. If you are interested in sponsoring this weekly show also please let us know.
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Survey Finds Few Consumers Using Voice-Assisted Devices to Browse, Make Purchases | Street Fight
How to Boost Bookings & Conversions with Google Posts – Moz
[Comparison] Which Companies Offer Google Posts as a Service? – Sterling Sky Inc
SteadyDemand at $99, PatientPop for Doctors are the top choices
Mary
Wayfair’s Android app now lets you shop for furniture using augmented reality
Wayfair now has an Android App that let’s you use augmented reality to “see” what furniture and accessories would look like in your own home.
Updated ‘Directions’ Heatmap in Google Insights Brings New Local SEO Opportunities – BrightLocal
Jamie Pittman of Bright Local breaks down the improvements Google’s recently made in it’s insights stats about where searchers are when asking for directions. He explains how you can use this knowledge” ads, links, social media, etc.
A Look at Customer Reviews on Local Services ads
Tom Waddington gives us his detailed observations about reviews and Local Services Ads. Google’s conflating GMB and LSA reviews somewhat and it’s pretty much mess. But the main negative problems are that owners can’t respond to LSA reviews and owners and searchers are being mislead that the reviews that appear with LSA ads have all been verified and they have not. This could continue to be a problem until Google gets enough verified ads to only show those, but in the meantime.
Local SEO in 2018: 12 Tips to Build Local Engagement
Dana DiTomaso – recap of her presentation on engagement for Local Businesses in Manilla at PeepCon: “The strongest signal is when someone picks you,” DiTomaso said. She provides tips for increasing and improving your engagement and the resulting signals that sends to Google.
Regarding the question about Steady Demand’s offering – they do four posts per month and they do the content creation as well. I pointed that out in the comparison table in the post.
Mike & Mary, I love your blog, which I discovered through the MOZ blog recently. Regarding the click to call tracking, I have a few questions. First, within AdWords, were you looking at all calls, even those under the minimum length set for conversions? And were you tracking website calls as well as calls directly from ads in both platforms? Also, I read somewhere that AdWords only starts tracking calls after you achieve a certain amount of activity each week (I wish I could find more details on this). This is all very interesting to me, because the vast majority of our conversions happen over the phone.
@Phil
When I focus mostly on organic and organic click to calls from around the web and from the website. So when I speak about click to calls its around tracking the reports in Google Insights and around tracking clicks on your website (using event tracking or call tracking) and from around the web.
To me call tracking in Adwords is a similar but separate issue.
Ah… sorry about that. I’ve been inundated with AdWords projects lately, which have caused me to automatically think AdWords when you mentioned Google. We don’t have event tracking set up in Analytics at this point. I look forward to reading the report you mentioned!