We have been seeing a lot of mismatched locations in the local packs lately but this one takes the cake, er curry…: (Click to enlarge) You know you can’t beat Nayana Eye Care in Pradesh. They’re “recognized by the Food Corporation of India” and have “world-class sterility.”
When you have been practicing SEO for years, you sometimes take the basics for granted. Then they hit you smack dab in the face and it’s like a breath of fresh air. Above is this blog’s organic traffic graph from November 29th, 2014 to today. While it’s hard to see, organic traffic for the last two days is about 20% higher than any Tues/Wed during the period. While there could be some seasonality to the trend, I think the…
And you won’t believe what happens next… Google will lose market share in Local (trying not to repeat myself here so check out the link to Streetfight for more thoughts on GOOG, Facebook, Apple, etc.) Google will significantly change the layout of its local pack results at least twice, causing me to break out the Pigeon poop pic again Google will drastically update their GMB guidelines for the 3rd time in two years, causing a mad dash of changes and…
An auto dealer client’s GMB page was showing up in Google with a different domain (the car maker’s – Ford.com) attached to it only for certain queries. I started looking through all of the usual data suspects to see if the errant domain was connected to any of the dealer’s business listings and came up empty. Then I searched Google Mapmaker for the client’s business name to see if it had the domain perhaps on a dupe listing. It returned…
On my 10 Things I Learned About Local SEO in 2014 post on SearchEngineLand, I forgot to include #11: Social Sharing Stats Are Worthless. I use to obsess about social share numbers on each of my SEL posts. It drove me slightly crazy to see that Greg Gifford’s and Chris Silver Smith’s posts would always get way more shares than mine. Not that their posts didn’t deserve the shares, but were mine so much less worthy of a RT? I…
Last week, when we uncovered that Apple Maps had cut deals with at least ten new companies (e.g. Yext, Location3, Yodle, etc.) to provide business listings data, I got a few emails asking what the big deal was. Here’s what I see is going on: Apple has come to realize that organizing the world’s local business listings information is no small job Apple has come to realize that relying on big data aggregators is great for getting bulk but not…
It’s Apple Maps week over here. Just wanted to point you over to my latest post on AMM, Apple Maps Is Not Intended To Be A General Business Directory, my rant on why I think Apple Maps should allow home-based businesses to be listed. Kind of ironic given this from the U.S. Small Business Administration: “What do Apple Computer, Hershey’s, Mary Kay Cosmetics, and the Ford Motor Company have in common? These well-known corporations all started out as home-based businesses. In…
Just posted this on the Apple Maps Marketing blog, but it’s too big a deal to not put here as well: At the launch of Apple Maps Connect, we submitted an inquiry about submitting a client with a few hundred locations to Apple Maps. Today we received the following email: “Thank you for your recent inquiry and interest in publishing your business locations via our new Business Portal. At this time, we are only accepting bulk submissions from businesses with at…
Last week, Google started to switch out its local Carousel results for a new set of mobilish-type pack results that appear to rely heavily on its local Knowledge Panels, so let’s call it a Knowledge Pack, or “K-Pack”, for the purposes of this post. In his seminal post Some Thoughts On The New Pak Results From Google, Professor Blumenthal mused: “I would love to hear what happens to web traffic for the directory type sites that seemed to be doing…
Sooner or later every SEO puts one of these on their site right? From StreetFight Summit 2014. Fun show. Thanks to Laura Rich and David Hirschman for having me and to Rene Reinsberg of GoDaddy, Jonathan Czaja of Facebook and Brendan King, especially Brendan King, of Vendasta for putting up with me. So hire me already. I must be some kind of expert about something.