Last week in local 2/5/18
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 February 5th. 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.
Maybe Amazon and partners can do something the federal government has refused to do…. create a rational health care world. Bezos has always said “your margin is my opportunity” and if anything has “gross” margins it’s health insurance.
Starbucks Corporation – Starbucks Reports Record Q1 Fiscal 2018 Results
Interesting they only grew 2% with a 3%. More interesting was that Mobile Order and Pay representing 11% of U.S. company-operated transactions. That is real money.
Why Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs Really Wants to Transform Toronto
A nonprofit development corporation, not the city, made the arrangement with Google that sparked all the publicity—the city itself doesn’t appear to have known a deal with Google was in the works. Hmm. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.
A reintroduction to Google’s featured snippets
Danny Sullivan does a masterful job of summarizing the whats and wherefores of featured snippets.
Are you getting credit for all of your organic visits from GMB?
Greg Gifford reminds us, once again, to use campaign tracking on all of your Google My Business links. Does he really need to say this one more time? Yes.
Comparison of Local Review Sites: Which Platform is Growing the Fastest? – BrightLocal
Affirmation of what others are seeing in the review space; Google is dramatically growing their review base while others (including Yelp) are on a much, much slower track.
Restaurant owners can now edit menu listings in Google My Business
Restaurant owners who are managing their own Google My Business (GMB) listings can now access a new editor to create and edit the menus that may display in their listings in Google mobile search results.
How to take quality photos for your business listing
Advice from Google on how to take great GMB photos for your business using a smartphone and recommends using photo editing apps (Snap Seed) to improve your photos.
Do You Trust Google for SEO Advice? – Search Engine Journal
Roger Montti comments on whether we should trust SEO advice from Google. If you find yourself conflicted, it may be time to examine what you think you know and figure out if that has changed.
Whitespark’s Local Search Blog; Insights, Research & How To’s
Darren Shaw answers the question “Which page should your GMB listing link to?” But more interestingly, he shows us with server logs that when you change the URL for a GMB listing, Googlebot quickly crawls that page and then crawls the rest of the site from there. He says
“This is triggering – in my mind – a local crawl. This is a local specific crawl for gathering data about that page and associating that with your business entity at Google. It really shows you how important that page is. “
