One of the most fun parts of doing SEO is getting to play with a wide variety of cool tools that go deep on one particular aspect of SEO. Over the past few years, local grid rankings tools have been one of my favorite innovations. Local grid rank reports can be an effective way to show a client how variable their Local Pack rankings are as one moves about their service area. It’s also a great way to quickly determine…
I found something poetic about this email that just came in from one of our small business clients: hello Andrew et al, Just to let you know that about a week ago we started running a $50/day budget in G Ads PPC. In addition we got verified for Local Service Ads. Local Service Ads verification was quite an ordeal, requiring more documents than a DUNS application! With PPC, The GFG (girl from google) said 2 weeks for the algo to…
All sorts of websites allow users to add content. Perhaps the most common are review sites like Yelp or Trip Advisor and blogs that allow comments. A lot of the biggest sites in the world are so big precisely because they allow users to create most, if not all, of the content (think Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora, etc.). Although SEO is not their only marketing channel, these sites often rely on structuring the UGC to make it easier for search…
Earlier this week, Apple launched a Web version of Apple Maps. I published some thoughts on Localogy’s blog about how this might affect Local SEO. Mike Blumenthal asked perhaps the key question: Both Mike and Uberall’s Krystal Taing speculated that a Web version of Apple Maps could be laying the groundwork for apps/apis that require a Web presence. This could certainly be the case, but Apple Maps has had embeddable Web views available for five years via Mapkit JS. What would…
UPDATED 6/5/24: I added some more thoughts on how to apply this stuff to Local SEO on SearchEngineLand.com. UPDATED 5/29/24: I went through all of the data last night and found that 99% of this data is for map nerds. There is very little here to give us any clues about Local SEO. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing here. More like the limitations of using ChatGPT to summarize these docs. For example, https://hexdocs.pm/google_api_content_warehouse/0.4.0/GoogleApi.ContentWarehouse.V1.Model.GeostoreFeatureProto.html has a lot more info than shown…
Updated: Since I first published this post in 2021, the number of Apple Maps users, the number of iPhone users in the U.S. has grown by about 10 million or so. So based on our formulas from 2021, how many people use Apple Maps? We estimate between 82 million to 110 million people in the U.S. use Apple Maps in 2024. How many people use Apple Maps globally? If the same math applies (~66% of iPhone users use Apple Maps),…
In our Ultimate Guide to Store Locators, we talked about how adding a basic set of State > City > Location internal links to search-only store locators can improve SEO performance for the Location Pages.
Yesterday, my friend, Jon Henshaw, announced on LinkedIN that he had started a new job as VP of SEO at CNet. I was only being partially facetious when I commented on his post:
Local grid rankings reports have been a great local SEO tool for a while. They can give you a sense of how a business ranks across various areas of a city, county, etc. Here’s an example of BrightLocal’s grid rank report: We found these reports so useful, we built our own uglier version in Looker Studio so we could customize the data. One of the first things we did was set up competitor grid rankings. The idea was to see…
Hey Local SEOs! In 2014, LSG released N.A.P. Hunter, a free Chrome Extension that enabled you do to run several standard local business NAP (Name, Address, & Phone Number) queries at once, then export the Google results into a CSV. At its peak, N.A.P. Hunter had more than 4,000 regular users. It broke a few years ago and we finally got around to updating it.