Author: andrewsho

Last week I posted some theories on why Google’s Pigeon update may have hurt the local rankings for some big local brands. While we have seen a lot of positive rankings improvements for our local clients, we have also heard of some large multi-location brands that got hit with 5-10% traffic losses. My take was that the combination of overweighting of Google’s brand algorithm and the narrowing of the radius for many local queries could have pushed some of these…

Just popped a post up on AppleMapsMarketing.com about the importance of remembering to update business data in Apple Maps. “Today a retailer client, let’s assume they are called “Bingo’s”, pinged me because they had sold one of their locations, let’s say to “Bozo’s”, and their brand was still appearing on the business’ Yelp profile. So when you searched “bingo pleasanton ca” in Google the Bingo’s Pleasanton Yelp profile showed up as the top result. “ So we fixed the Google…

David Mihm released the results of the 2014 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey today and per tradition, we will summarize the big headlines and then send you over to David’s post for the data. “THE USER IS THE NEW CENTROID” I think this quote from David says it all, but if you want something to cut and paste into a “custom” audit for clients, try these: Top 10 Local Search Ranking Factors* City, State in Landing Page Title Hi I’m from…

SearchEngineland just published my preview of the data I’ll be sharing at SMX East later this week in the Deconstructing Pigeon Panel. The post Real Client Data On How Google’s Pigeon Update Affected Real Estate SEO, shows what we saw across 24 local real estate agent websites immediately after Pigeon and in the month that followed. Here’s a shot of the aggregated Google impressions for these sites from the GWT Search Queries report: At SMX East I’ll also be sharing…

This week I was on Rich Brooks‘ “The Marketing Agents” podcast to discuss all things local search. I thought it was a great discussion so if you enjoy listening to me in your headphones, check it out: If you prefer iTunes, you can listen to it at http://www.themarketingagents.com/itunes Or at Stitcher Radio perhaps? http://www.themarketingagents.com/stitcher

A few weeks ago BrightEdge was nice enough to invite me to their Share14 conference where they announced the newest version of their “SEO and Content Marketing Management Platform” in front of approximately 1,000 customers and search pros. I was sufficiently impressed by both the conference and the new features that I thought it would be of interest to my readers. When it comes to industrial strength SEO tools I have historically been a bit of a luddite/skeptic. I learned SEO…

Stick under wobbly table legs Supplement for low carb diets 3. Bitcoin alternative 4. Keep kids occupied at restaurants Wrap dead fish http://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975  

Nyagoslav (think Cher, Michael, Brittany, etc.) gets all OCD on my recent post where I used our NAP Hunter extension to surface some bogus N.A.P. data issues. He really peels back the rotten onion: “The NPI registry is one of the most trustworthy data sources in the medical industry, so the chances that this was the initial source of the bad data are very high. What is of particular interest is the fact that the NPI record was last updated…

A couple of weeks ago Google announced that it would be using HTTPS URLs as a “lightweight ranking signal”. I have not switched any sites yet, but I thought it would be interesting to observe what has happened to client sites that were already using HTTPS URLs. I took out a few outliers – one site had a lot of publicity, another implemented some SEO upgrades – but the rest had not done anything out of the ordinary to make…

Seems like every day we stumble onto a new Google Pigeon test bucket.  Here’s a desktop SERP for “ft. lauderdale movers” that looks pretty mobilicious: When you click on the “More movers” link (which had disappeared in a lot of post-Pigeon SERPs), you get another mobile-looking ordered list: And of course it’s full of Pigeon Poop SPAM. We’re also seeing a service radius in the Knowledge Graph box for one of the listings. Don’t recall seeing that before:  (As Linda points…