Last Week in Local 6/05
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 May 22nd, 2017. This week featuring Mary Bowling and Mike Blumenthal.
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 June 5th, 2017. This week features David Mihm as well as regulars Mary Bowling and Mike Blumenthal.
This year we will be publishing our Last Week in Local video directly to the Local U blog. It will be published every Monday and will include discussions about the events in the last week — strategic and tactical — that affect Local SEO & marketing.
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.
Let us know what you think. Welcome to Last Week in Local!
Our weekly discussions are also now available as a podcast as well.
David’s Links
The Local Marketing Stack: A Roadmap for Small Business Marketing Decisions
What’s next? David Mihm unpacks the digital marketing journey from the basics to the advanced and lays out a roadmap that can be used by agencies and small businesses to understand what’s next.
SMB Index: Local Stocks Up 5.4% in May
Interesting view of the companies in local that publicly trade; the winners and losers in valuation over the past month…
LUMA’s State of Digital Media 2017
Mary’s Links
Pending Updates to Schema
“This release introduces pending types around Review, NewsArticle and Article that allow more fine-grained distinctions to be made. It adds a TouristAttraction type to the core, and a draft PublicToilet type as a pending proposal. It adds a HowTo vocabulary that generalizes Recipe-like structured instructions, and adds some useful properties to EmailMessage. It also adds a substantial vocabulary for describing Legislation to the pending section.” Of these, I see How-To markup as something that can be useful to many SMBs AND it may also be helpful in gaining featured snippets.
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/2989725331057581827?source=lsa-website
Upcoming webinar with Joy Hawkins: Recent Changes to Google My Business and What You Need to Know
Advice for SEO Specialists: Put On Your PR Hats
“Yes, we are there to advise our clients on SEO strategies—but you and I both know that SEO only works so far as there’s a stellar real-world business behind it. This is why you should help the client become the type of business that is most likely to draw attention in their local community and industry. Establishing the brand with this mindset first will then make marketing the business—and getting it to rank well—much easier!”
How to rank for ‘position 0’ in 3 simple steps: A featured snippets primer
Position 0 is where featured snippets appear and IMO featured snippets are currently one of the best opportunities for both small local businesses and big brands seeking to be found locally. Stephan provides a step-by-step guide for us at SearchEngineLand.
Mike’s Links
Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets: 10 Important Takeaways
Featured snippets steal clicks (getting about 9% less than a #1 result 16 v25 %)
But if your page ranks anywhere in the top 10 you can get an answer box.
Video Deep Dive: Sponsorships as an opportunity in Local Marketing – Local University
A great discussion with Megan Hannay of Zipsprout on the use of local sponsorships for marketing by both small business and
Understanding Facebook’s Place as a Small Business Marketing Vehicle
Google is getting more aggressive in the jobs market. This search should allow you to see their new jobs search engine.
Better Snippets for your Users
With DMOZ now closed, we’ve stopped using its listings for snippeting, so it’s a lot more important that webmasters provide good meta descriptions, if adding more content to the page is not an option.
Review Spam – Which Google Categories Are Worst? | Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Which categories of businesses on Google are most likely to buy reviews? You will find many of the usual suspects and a few surprises as well.
New Feature: Tag Testimonial Widgets
An upgrade to Getfivestars that allows business generated testimonials to be tagged with a product, service, staff or locale name and then automatically updated on the relevant pages of the website…
