I did not expect to open my inbox this morning to find that LSG has been voted the Top Local SEO Blog of 2020 on BrightLocal but 2020 has been throwing curve balls all year so why should today be any different? I’d like to thank the Academy, my family, and SEOTwitter, but most of all, I’d like to thank the amazing team we have here at LSG. Dan, Tess, Nick, Nik, Amber, Steven, Zoe, Heckler, Sam, Aimee, Wesley, Celia,…
LSG is hiring for a Senior Director of SEO position and I have had the opportunity to talk to a lot of great SEOs over the past week. Thanks to the growth of our industry over the past few years and COVID-19, it feels like there’s an ocean of highly skilled talent out there. But the pandemic has exposed an ugly side of the digital marketing industry – most agencies are happy to take SEO money while simultaneously not giving…
I am located in the U.S. yet yesterday afternoon when I searched for “Google My Business” in Google, the first result I got was the UK URL for GMB: https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/. It wasn’t like that yesterday morning. So what changed? A canonical tag. According to Archive.org, yesterday morning the canonical tag for the URL that usually ranks #1, https://www.google.com/business/, was https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/business/. But looking at the source of that URL now shows the canonical tag has changed to https://www.google.com/intl/en_ae/business/:
I have seen a lot of “It’s the best time to invest in SEO!” chatter on the socials. The Rt value of that message is definitely >1 in this industry, and it is certainly in my interest to believe it. But is it true or just the usual self-serving rap boast by a profession that thinks itself the most gangsta in all of digital marketing? Oh sorry, that’s the affiliate marketers… In 2008, at the height of the Vampire Squid…
Just stumbled on to this new feature in Apple Maps for healthcare providers to add COVID-19 testing locations: Businesses can submit locations by putting the info in Apple’s COVID-19-Locations-1.0 and emailing the sheet to covid-data@apple.com. This FAQ info is available here because the Apple team didn’t bother marking their version up with FAQPage schema :):
If you are a small business owner and were not awake late last night and early this morning endlessly refreshing your browser scouring Twitter for information, your hopefully peaceful night’s sleep may be the last you can enjoy for some time. I was fortunate enough to get a call from a financial advisor (not to mention fortunate enough to have a financial advisor) earlier this week telling me that his firm was encouraging all of their clients to apply for…
Investing in anything at the moment is not an easy decision. Now imagine you have to invest in something as perceptually flaky as SEO. Now imagine you have to convince someone else to invest in SEO. You’d better have your shit together. With that in mind, I’d like to offer you Local SEO Guide’s version of the RICE Model for SEO. The RICE Model provides a data-driven way to forecast potential results from SEO projects. While it’s by no means…
If you are in the SEO world, you know I really don’t have to say anything more than that. If you have received an unsolicited email from them trying to sell you SEO services and are researching who they are, get ready, because you will likely receive an endless amount of spam from them for the rest of your life, no matter what you do to try to get them to stop sending it. And while I generally favor turning…
Hey ecommerce sites – worried you are getting too many clicks on head term SERPs? If so, fear not, as yours truly stumbled into a Google test guaranteed to cure you of those annoying up-and-to-the-right trend lines. I invite you to feast your eyes on this “Content Results Page” aka the CRaP SERP:
We had a bad client call last week. The client is a sexy DTC start-up. They had asked us to put together an editorial strategy to improve their ability to target potential customers via SEO, but when we presented our recommendations which were primarily focused on high-intent-to-purchase queries, the CEO’s first question was “Why can’t we make sexy content like Goop, Away Travel, Food52 and Casper?” Instead of targeting things you would ask before you bought the product, he wanted…